New findings raise an old question: Do South Indians belong to the Indus Valley Civilisation?
Around two kilometres away from the famous Vittala Temple in Hampi, Karnataka, [a]round 10 years ago, KM Metry, a Kannada University professor of Tribal Studies who was researching instances of human-bear conflict in the area and visiting sites in search of stone tools used by tribals of the olden days, was walking alone on this dirt road when he saw what he thought was a light scribble on a rock in the distance.
The Indus Valley Civilisation has puzzled archaeologists and researchers ever since it was first discovered in the early twentieth century. Who were these ancient people who lived along the Indus River between 3,300 and 1,300 BCE? What could have happened to the builders of perhaps one of the greatest ancient civilisations? Could they have been wiped out by a flood or a superior military force, as some researchers argue? Or did they abandon the northwest part of the subcontinent because the river they depended upon dried up, or changed course, to migrate to other parts like South India, as Metry suggests?
Most researchers have turned to the tiny symbols and inscriptions on the seals and tablets found at Indus Valley sites for answers to these questions. And therein lies the perplexity. So far, despite several attempts to study the 417 identified Indus Valley symbols that have been found on over 4,000 objects, no one has come close to deciphering the script. Objects bearing it have been found all over, from the Indus Valley sites of Mohenjo-daro and Harappa to far-off places in West Asia. Each object typically has five or six symbols, and these occur in various sequences. Some researchers have even claimed that the symbols do not represent a language at all, and are merely pictograms of political or religious icons.
The likes of Metry and Kangale claim that the ability to decipher the script has proven elusive because no one has attempted to study the script using Gondi symbols and language. They point out how many of the symbols in the script resemble those found in Ghotuls, the traditional learning centres for unmarried Gond youngsters found in some of their villages. They claim that the famous Pashupati seal with the figure of a man with horns echoes the old Gondi practice of wearing a crown of horns for religious occasions. “When you start looking at the script keeping in mind Gondi symbols, then everything becomes clear,” Kangale says. […]
The TIFR group under Vahia has also discovered two structures used for astronomy in the Indus Valley, proving for the first time that the civilisation was far from primitive in this field of exploration. The two circular structures, located exactly on the Tropic of Cancer, at Dholavira in Gujarat’s Kutch district, were initially thought to be servant’s quarters. “It is implausible that an advanced civilisation like the Indus Valley did not have any knowledge of astronomy,” Vahia says, seated in his office at TIFR, surrounded by shelves packed with books on the subject. “Yet, no one had ever discovered any evidence of it. These structures we discovered were probably useful to understand the time of the day and night, seasons, years, and perhaps even longer periods.” […]
Yadav says, “Gradually, we are learning to understand the structure of the Indus script. We don’t know what it means. We probably will never know what the symbols are telling us until we discover something like the Rosetta Stone [the stone with a decree inscribed in three scripts, ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, Demotic script, and ancient Greek, the discovery of which helped researchers translate Egyptian hieroglyphs]. But we are learning its structure, its patterns and sequences. We hope to, with our work, be able to help future attempts to interpret the language.” […]
Source: “The Eternal Harappan Script Tease” by Lhendup G Bhutia, OPEN Magazine, Archaeology, 28 November 2014
Address: https://openthemagazine.com/features/india/the-eternal-harappan-script-tease/#all
Date Visited: 19 February 2022
The tribes and castes in India are communities apart. Those who belong to castes belong to no tribes, and those who belong to tribes are outside the caste pyramid. What brings them together is probably their love for songs.
Ganesh Devy in What unites Indians is a love for songs >>
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