Vexing problem of South Asian protohistory

Rakhigarhi’s skeletal finds, and the promise of the 4,500-year-old woman giving up the secrets of the Indus people, have created renewed interest in the Indus Valley civilization. At the centre of the debate is the script associated with Indus sites from Mohenjodaro to Dholavira, Lothal and Rakhigarhi. What’s highlighted by the reporting on the DNA analysis of the Rakhigarhi skeletons is the issue of lack of scientific freedom. The headlines never match the content of the narratives, the government version never matches the scientific evidence, and the scientists provide cloudy statements bowing to political pressures. The 2019 paper by Vasant Shinde, et al, in the journal Cell, finally articulates a conclusion with the title “An ancient Harappan genome lacks ancestry from Steppe pastoralists or Iranian farmers.”

Over decades, European researchers, of whom Finnish Indologist Asko Parpola is pre-eminent, have made several attempts to decipher the Indus script based on the syntactic, semantic, phonetic and phonological properties of current Dravidian languages. There have also been several attempts, primarily by Indian researchers such as the late SR Rao, to link the Indus script to Sanskrit. However, neither group has provided an authoritative and comprehensive solution. Each group has attempted to decipher a small subset of the available specimens based on several assumptions. Extending their results outside this subset does not result in any intelligible decipherment. It can be safely said that to date, there is no accepted solution to the problem. It must also be said now that, based on the Rakhigarhi findings, there is very low likelihood for a Sanskrit-based decipherment of the Indus script.

A renewed effort is needed with innovative approaches to decipher the Indus script to provide an authoritative solution to the most vexing problem in South Asian protohistory. The difficulty in deciphering the Indus script is three-fold:

One, the specimens of the Indus script that survive are mainly seals with a small string of symbols, which probably represent isolated words. Hence the context of a sentence, which would aid/validate the deciphering process, is unavailable; two, there are no known translations of the script into other languages of the time; and three, there is no consensus on the language or even the family of languages to which the script belongs. This is tied, of course, to the lack of consensus on the protohistory of the region.

The method for solving the Indus puzzle will be a lot of data science and a little bit of serendipity. Today, there is too much of a socio-political-religious positioning on it even before the data has been tabulated. The government’s role should be to protect the Indus sites, document the Indus script, and make it easily and widely available to researchers. The decipherment of what they mean should be left to scientists who have the discipline of data science.

Shinde, et al, conclude that Iranian-related ancestry in South Asia split from Iranian plateau lineages over 12,000 years ago. Hence, there is a case for prioritising proto-Dravidian as a hypothesis for the language of the Indus valley and not allow unscientific distractions to slow down the potential decipherment. Proto-Dravidian culture, mythology and language should be studied to evaluate the Indus script hypothesis: Are they astronomical symbols or religious motifs or monetary units; does the majority of the script represent names of towns or names of gods, or those of kings? Do they describe a divine act or a royal edict?

Unfortunately, there is scant research and documentation of proto-Dravidian aspects of India. The stories that belong to the proto-Dravidian culture have been appropriated, absorbed, modified and made indistinguishable from a later mainstream culture. In the interest of scholarly work, there is a need to roll back and extract the essence of a proto-Dravidian culture to begin solving the Indus puzzle.

There is also a need to have clear metrics to evaluate the outcomes of the decipherment efforts. As some researchers have sagely pointed out, there is the initial rush to draw conclusions that is eventually replaced by the knowledge of the difficulty of cracking the Indus Script. As of today, the Indus script remains a known unknown.