CM Stalin announces $1 million prize for decoding Indus valley script

The Indus civilsation, one of the earliest, is reputed for its urban culture and its script has not been decrypted yet. The fading away of such a civilisation, and its context, also remains a riddle.

With the script used by the inhabitants of the Indus Valley Civilisation (IVC) still remaining an unsolved riddle even 100 years after its discovery, Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M K Stalin on Sunday announced a prize of $1 million to those who decipher it.

Inaugurating a three-day conference to commemorate the discovery of IVC by English archaeologist Sir John Marshall, Stalin also declared that his government would allot Rs 2 crore to establish a research chair in the name of renowned epigraphist and civil servant Iravatham Mahadevan and present annual awards to two scholars to encourage research in archaeology.

Stalin also released a book on the study by the Tamil Nadu State Department of Archaeology that found 60 per cent of the signs and 90 percent of the graffiti marks unearthed from excavation sites in Tamil Nadu have parallels with those found in the IVC.

“We have not been able to clearly understand the writing system of the once-flourishing Indus Valley. The riddle hasn’t been answered for the past 100 years despite several efforts to archaeologists, and experts. I announce a cash prize of $1 million to individuals or organisations that decipher the script to the satisfaction of archaeological experts,” Stalin said.

Marshall, who announced the discovery in a weekly newspaper Illustrated London on September 20, 1924, said IVC was pre-Aryan, and that the Indus language or languages must have been pre-Aryan. Possibly, one or other of them (if, as seems likely, there was more than one) was Dravidic.

This findings led many archaeologists and expert to posit a Dravidian link to the IVC with ASI chief K N Dikshit writing in 1939 that he believed that a “thorough investigation” in Tirunelveli district and the neighbouring regions will one day lead to the discovery of some site which “would be contemporary with or even little later than the Indus civilisation.”

Stalin, whose government has taken upon itself to scientifically prove that the history of the Indian subcontinent should be rewritten from the Tamil landscape, said the conference was part of the efforts to secure the due space for Tamil Nadu in history.

The Chief Minister said the discovery by John Marshall was a turning point in India’s history which completely changed people’s understanding of the past as the English archaeologist argued that the language spoken by the inhabitants of IVC could be Dravidian.

“There were bulls in the Indus Valley. Bulls are Dravidian symbols. Bulls are spread from Indus Valley to Alanganallur (a village near Madurai famous for Jallikattu). Ancient Tamil literature has rich references to bull-taming sport and one of the IVC seals have impressions of a man trying to tame a bull,” Stalin said.

Carbon dating of artefacts from Sivakalai and Keeladi that threw up dates such as 1115 BCE and 580 BCE (3,200 and 2,600 years ago) encouraged the Tamil Nadu government to launch excavations in several locations across the state.

The fresh dates, experts in Tamil Nadu believe, has brought down the “temporal gap” between IVC and Tamil antiquities but they maintain that more evidence must be forthcoming. However, these assertions are challenged by experts outside the state who say there is no connection between IVC and Tamil antiquities.