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An American Vedic scholar, Dr. David Frawley, and his Indian
associate, Dr. Navaratna S. Rajaram, have hailed the decipherment
of the Indus seal by a West Bengal-based scholar, Dr. N. Jha, as
the most important advance in the study of India of the ancient
after the discovery of the Harappan Civilisation.
Dr. Jha who is the Principal of the Kendriya Vidyalaya at Farakka
in West Bengal, has come out with his book "Vedic Glossary on Indus
Seals" holding that the script and the language of he Harappan
seals are part and parcel of the Vedic world. He has disproved the
dominant view in circulation in the country ever since John
Marshall discovered Harappan in the then undivided Punjab in the
second decade of the Century the Harappan civilisation was
pre-Vedic.
Dr. Jha's success has, unfortunately, not evoked interest among
scholars in the country unlike the claim made by a Finnish scholar,
Dr. Ashok Parpola in the early Seventies that the Indus seals were
pro-Dravidian.
Dr. Frawley, who has co-authored the treaties "Vedic Aryans and the
Origins of Civilisation" with Dr. Rajaram was recently in the city.
Dr. Rajaram spoke on "Indus Script and its Decipherment" at the
Mythic Society here last week. A grandson of the late Navaratna
Rama Rao, who was Director of Industries in princely Mysore, noted
writer, classmate and close friend of C. Rajagopalachari. Dr.
Rajaram is a mathematician, linguist and a historian of science who
shuttles between Oklahoma City in the U.S. and Bangalore. He is
also the author of "Dead Sea Scrolls and the Crisis of
Christianity; An Eastern View of a Western Crisis."
In a joint statement, the two scholars have said that the
decipherment of the Indus script by Dr. Jha, a Vedic scholar and
paleographer represented a significant breakthrough. It shows that
the Indus Valley Civilisation (or Harappan Civilisation of circa
3100-1900 B.C.) was part of the Vedic world. It overlapped with
what is known as the Sutra period that came towards the end of the
Vedic Age. "It puts at rest two long standing theories, that there
was no Aryan invasion and that the Aryan-Dravidian divide is a
modern myth that receives no support from archaeology or any other
science or literature as found on the seals". They have said that
besides demolishing the Aryan invasion theory, it also ends the
Marxist dogma of the non-Indian origin of the Vedic civilisation.
Though Dr. Jha might be little known to mainstream historians, it
should be acknowledged that he is a profound scholar in the Vedas
who has devoted more than 20 years to the study of the Indus
corpus. He had displayed a willingness to disregard long held
beliefs and look at the problem with a fresh mind.
It is of interest that a national seminar on the "Aryan Invasion"
had been held under the auspices of the Mythic Society here three
years ago at which the scholars dismissed it as a myth.
Dr. Frawley and Dr. Rajaram have noted that they too had put
forward their finding (in their book) that the Harappan
Civilisation overlapped largely with the Vedic Age. Unknown to
them, at that time, a similar conclusion had been reached by the
historian Prof. K. D. Sethna, "Many scholars in Europe and America
no longer accept the Aryan invasion theory. By and large at is only
in India that the Aryan invasion is treated as a historical fact
though here too it is on its way out. The Indus script decipherment
must, therefore, be see as part of this changing picture and not
viewed in isolation.
They have said that Dr. Jha's book had made all previous works on
the Indus script redundant and offered the solution to the greatest
technical problem of ancient Indian history. Analysing Dr. Jha's
work, the two scholars have noted that Indus writing was phonetic,
but not a fully developed alphabet. For the most part it was a
consonantal system in which the user has to supply the vowel
values. Such a system is properly called a syllabary, rather than
an alphabet. Some modern languages like Hebrew and Arabic are still
written without vowels, Dr. Jha had shown that the script of
Aramaic, which is a Semitic language is based on the Indus script.
He had shown that the Indus alphabet was not a true alphabet but a
hybrid. "All in all, Indus writing represents an intermediate stage
between a primitive consonantal system and a highly scientific
phonetic alphabet like Brahmi from which nearly all Indian scripts
are derived.
Dr. Jha had shown the pictorial symbols were also there in the
Indus seals, which was apparently more in common in the early
stages of writing. They represented complex sounds. A bird is used
to represented "Shak" (for Shakuni) and a scorpion represents
"Vrish" (from Vrishchika), a dotted square or dice represents
"Ksha" (from Aksha). In some cases, one can actually traces the
evolution of the alphabet from the pictorial symbol. Parallel wavy
lines which must have represented a river (Sanskrit 'Nadi') became
the alphabetical symbol for the letter "N", Late a single wavy line
came to be used.
About the language of the seals, there can be no doubt that it was
Sanskrit of the kind found in the port-Vedic literature of the
Brahmanas and the Sutras. Dr. Jha's findings showed that the seals
were very much part of the later Vedic Age. Many of the seals
contain words and expressions found in the Vedic glossary,
"Nighantu" compiled by Yaska. Dr. Jha had pointed out that the
Shantiparva of the Mahabharata contained an account of the Yaska's
compilation of the Vedic glossary from earlier works buried in the
soil.
In fact, the connection with the Nighantu seems to he they key to
his decipherment. The two scholars draw a parallel with French
Egyptologist. Jean-Francois Champollion, who in the 1820s
deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphics or pictorial script after finding
a "Rosetta Stone" which had bilingual inscription written in Greek
and Egyptian.
Dr. Frawley and Dr. Rajaram have called for undertaking a
comprehensive research programme for the study of more than 3000
seals belonging to the Indus corpus. Vedic scholars are needed to
take it up. Jha's finding had even made it necessary to revise
ancient Indian history.
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