A diverse group comprising archaeologists, a cancer specialist, an aerospace engineer, and a retired government official will gather in New Delhi on the Union Ministry of Culture’s invitation from September 11 to 13 to present their findings on attempts to decipher the Harappan script, which has puzzled historians ever since the remains of the long-lost civilization were discovered in Harappa and Mohenjo Daro in the early 1920s. To date, there has been no credible breakthrough in decoding the script.
According to the programme schedule of the international conference accessed by The Indian Express, Prime Minister Narendra Modi will attend the conference on September 12 and Union Home Minister Amit Shah will be present the following day. Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA) member secretary Sachchidanand Joshi confirmed the plans for the conference, and said details would be shared soon. The IGNCA is an autonomous institution under the Ministry of Culture.
The papers that are set to be presented have varied conclusions. While a few claim that the underlying language of the script is Sanskrit, some claim it to be a Dravidian language, and some link it to specific tribal languages such as Santali and Gondi.
Software engineer Bahata Mukhopadhyay, who has worked on the Harappan script for years and also published peer-reviewed papers on the subject, was guarded about the conclusions she will present at the conference. “No serious scholar can claim to have completely deciphered the script, but I believe I have made progress on it. My findings are that it is not a spelling-based script. Rather, it encodes rules and information regarding ancient taxation and commerce,” she told The Indian Express.
One of the participants is archaeologist Karuna Shankar Shukla, the preface of whose 2024 book reads, “A study of the Indus seals has revealed to me by the grace of Lord Ganesh that very few of the total seals were meant for stamping the bales of merchandise … even the 70 sealings found in the warehouse of Lothal’s port were meant for religious purposes; for a Rig Vedic mantra was inscribed in their original seal … Again, for the first time, I have been able to read the names of the Puranas on the Indus seals.” The book is available on the website of IGNCA, where he was a senior research fellow. However, according to historical research, the Puranas were composed way after the Harappan civilisation disappeared.
Retired engineer Prakash N Salame, who is from Nagpur, will present a paper titled “Decipherment of the Indus Script with the Help of Root Morphemes of the Proto-Dravidian Language Gondi”. “My late mentor Dr M C Kangali deciphered the Harappan script as early as 2002. I am carrying his work forward and have deciphered 90% of the symbols. It is basically the Gondi language,” he claimed. Salame will present his findings on September 13.
Prabhunath Hembrom, a former deputy commissioner of commercial taxes in the Jharkhand government, will present a paper titled “Decipherment of the Indus Script: A Step Forward in Santali”. “Research takes a long time, and I have been working on this for a long time. Based on the work of Indologist Asko Parpola, I have found that the Harappan script is related to the Santali language,” he said.
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Historian H P Ray, who taught at Jawaharlal Nehru University and also worked in archaeology, pointed out that the Harappan script was not easy to decipher and requires rigorous interdisciplinary research. “One, deciphering is easy when the script is found on a bilingual object. For example, Brahmi was first deciphered through a bilingual coin: with Greek on one side and Brahmi on the other. Second, the context is very important: where is the writing found? Writing on a pot is very different from writing on a manuscript. Thirdly, the civilisation covered a huge area running through Afghanistan, Sindh, Delhi, Rajasthan, and Gujarat. Even today, people speak different languages here. It also lasted a long time. Even today, languages don’t stay the same over centuries. So, to believe that it had one language and script may itself be a problem,” she said.
A politicised terrain
The quest to decipher the Harappan script is a deeply politicised one.
This January, Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M K Stalin announced an award of $1 million for anyone who could decipher the script. If any credible decipherment in the future supports the Dravidian-origin hypothesis, it will be politically a shot in the arm for the DMK. The Dravidian movement will then be able to lay claim to the legacy of the oldest Indian civilisation and say that civilisation did not solely originate in the north.
The Sangh Parivar itself has shown keen interest in the Harappan script over several decades, largely to debunk the Aryan migration theory. Late archaeologists close to the Sangh, such as B B Lal and S P Gupta, argued that the Harappan and Vedic people were perhaps the same. They pointed out that the largest number of Harappan sites were found in the Ghaggar-Hakra river system and that the Saraswati — which many scholars believe is a dried-up river identified with the Ghaggar-Hakra system — was mentioned the highest number of times in the Rig Veda. There is only one obstacle in proving this hypothesis: the inability to decipher the Harappan script. If this hypothesis is proved to be true, the language that the script represents will be Sanskrit.
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However, the coming conference will see the participation of several speakers who see the Harappan script as Dravidian or related to Adivasi languages, which stands in opposition to the position of the conventional position of Sangh-leaning scholars.
About 20 papers on the Harappan script will be presented at the conference over three days. While the one by “independent scholar” Bryan K Wells discusses the proto-Dravidian nature of the language the Harappan script represented, the research of cancer specialist Puneet Gupta, who describes himself as an “Indologist and spiritual biologist”, “decoded Harappan alphabets and art have been found to match vocabulary from Rigveda, Manu Smriti and other related Indian texts”, according to the academia.edu website.
Another participant, Shiv Shankar, will present a paper titled “Decipherment of Indus Script and Symbols in the Light of Tribal Culture of Bastar” and Melbourne-based aerospace engineer Farrukh Naqvi will present his research that claims the language of the Harappan script is Sanskrit.