Tamil links with Indus Valley script

Karthik Madhavan

COIMBATORE: While Tamils were entitled to “some pride” for having preserved so well the linguistic heritage of the Indus Valley civilisation, Tamil was not alone in India in possessing a rich heritage, Asko Parpola, Professor-Emeritus of Indology, Institute of World Cultures, University of Helsinki, Finland, said on Wednesday. India was an exceptional country with so many languages having “old and remarkable literatures, both written and oral,” he added.

Receiving the Kalaignar M. Karunanidhi Classical Tamil Award from President Pratibha Patil at the inauguration of the World Classical Tamil Conference here, Professor Parpola said Sanskrit, with its 3,000-year-old tradition, had produced an unrivalled number of literary works. It went back to Proto-Indo-Aryan [which was] attested in a few names and words related to the Mitanni kingdom of Syria between 1500 and 1300 BCE, and earlier forms of Indo-Iranian, known only from a few loanwords in Finno-Ugric languages as spoken in central Russia around 2000 BCE.
“But, none of these very earliest few traces is older than the roots of Tamil. Tamil goes back to Proto-Dravidian, which, in my opinion, can be identified as the language of the thousands of short texts in the Indus script, written during 2600-1700 BCE. There are, of course, different opinions, but many critical scholars agree that even the Rigveda, collected in the Indus Valley about 1000 BCE, has at least half a dozen Dravidian loanwords,” he told a large gathering.
The people of north India too, “to a large extent” descended from the Harappan people, and they had also preserved cultural heritage of the same civilisation, Professor Parpola added.
Sivathamby's call

Calling upon Chief Minister M. Karunanidhi to take steps to publish a monogram highlighting the greatness of the Tamil language, culture and society, K. Sivathamby, Sri Lankan Tamil scholar and Chairman of the Academic Committee for the event, said that publication should be brought out in all the UNESCO-recognised languages. This should be done for the benefit of children, the Tamil diaspora and non-Tamils.

Tamil must also be updated so that it became a contemporary language. The Tamil equivalents of scientific terms must be formulated to address contemporary needs.

Terming Tamil as one of the old secular languages of India, he referred to a poem from Sangam literature to underscore his point. Tamil was also spoken in six to seven countries and enjoyed a constitutional position there.

Push for research
George L. Hart, Chair, Tamil Studies, University of California, Berkeley, said the conference would strengthen research in Tamil, which was a part of the Indian heritage. This old language had a great corpus of literature of excellent poetic quality and grandeur from the Tamil Nadu, parts of Kerala and the northern region of Sri Lanka. The literature, around 2,000 years old, portrayed the human experience in a rich fashion, he said and read out a verse each from Purananooru and Ainkurunooru.

V.C. Kulandaiswamy, vice president, International Association of Tamil Research, said the conference had united Tamils across countries as never before. He referred to the role of Professor Hart in the Central government granting classical language status to Tamil.
M. K. Stalin, Deputy Chief Minister, said the Chief Minister had convened the conference in order to promote Tamil vigorously. K. Anbazhagan, Finance Minister, and K.S. Sripathi, Chief Secretary, spoke.

Dravidian solution to Indus script

K Venkataramanan

COIMBATORE: Elucidating how he had identified the symbolic depiction of the Tamil deity, Murukan, in inscriptions and seals belonging to the Indus valley civilisation, Finnish Indologist Asko Parpola on Friday said an opening to the secrets of the Indus script had been achieved and that one now knew how the script functioned.

In a lecture that raised the global Classical Tamil meet here from humdrum levels to a scholarly plane, Parpola marshalled an impressive array of linguistic, religious and cultural markers to substantiate his path-breaking findings.

Delivering the Kalaignar Karunanidhi Classical Tamil Research Endowment Lecture, the academic from the University of Helsinki said Murukan, the principal native deity of the old Tamil pantheon, and his Vedic predecessors Skanda and Rudra, might have descended from a proto-Dravidian deity and it was possible that this god was mentioned in the Indus inscriptions. But how does one identify his name in Indus texts whose script none can read?

Unveiling his first clue from among Harappan seals, Parpola referred to a peculiar symbol sequence in which six vertical strokes are followed by a fish. As fish' was a symbol to depict a star too (the Tamil word miin' is common to both fish and star), the 6+fish' could refer to aru-miin', the Tamil term for the constellation Pleiades. He also cited old Tamil texts that describe Murukan as aru-miin kaatalan' (one beloved of the Pleiades).

Referring to another sign of two intersecting circles' in a Mohenjodaro seal, Parpola said if this was a reference to Murukan, whose name means youth or young man', it could be a pictogram depicting muruku' (ring, earring or bangle) and is also another name for Murukan. Noting that muruku' also meant bangle', he spoke about a bangle cult' in various parts of India. Bangles were given as votive offerings by women praying for a young boy (muruku).

The bangle is associated with pregnancy in many parts of India as it is a protective ring' for a pregnant woman (referred to in Tamil as valai kaapu') who was in danger of being set upon by demons. "Even today in Tamil Nadu, couples desiring a male child make a pilgrimage to a famous shrine of Murugan and, after the birth, name their son after the god," he said.

Another sign shows a squirrel in the Indus script. In Tamil, the striped palm squirrel is known as anil'or anil-pillai', the suffix denoting a child or a boy. Just as Tamils add an affectionate pillai' to refer to the squirrel, parrot and mongoose as anil-pillai, kili-pillai' and keeri-pillai', the word is suffixed to Murukan's name. Popular names among Jaffna Tamils still show this trend Murukapillai or Velupillai, for example.

"The readings are based on reasonable identification of the pictorial shapes," Parpola said. "I am confident that an opening to the secrets of the Indus scripts has been achieved: we know that the underlying language was proto-Dravidian and we know how the script functions," he added but asked scholars whose mother tongue was Tamil or any other Dravidian language to develop the research further. Laymen too could suggest possible meanings for the Indus signs.

Well-known epigraphist Iravatham Mahadevan, who has published an authentic collection of Indus texts, inscriptions and seals, said it was time for younger scholars to follow up on existing findings and find a comprehensive solution to the problems in deciphering the Indus script.

From Times of India, 26th June 2010