An important advance in
Indian history - By A Jayaram
Publication : The Hindu
Date : January 16, 1997
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
programe
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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