Did Harappans speak Tamil ??

 It was a fine morning in Harappa in 2398 BCE. Sun was shining brightly when a joyous procession of people proceeded towards a local temple. A lean man appeared out of the temple and people shouted ‘Muruga.. Muruga’. A man and woman wearing ceremonial dress moved towards the lean man standing in front of the crowd. The lean man performed a religious rite and asked the woman to look northwards. She said ‘ Vada Meen Pol Naan Iruppen’ (I shall remain as firm as the northern pole-star).

If the Dravidian hypothesis of Indus script as proposed by Professor Asko Parpola of Helsinki University were to be true, the above scene could have happened in Harappa and Mohenjadaro. 
Archaeological surveys have found that the Indus Valley civilization dates back to 3300 BCE and it flourished between 2500 and 1900 BCE. The Indus writing system is one of the oldest and yet-to-be deciphered script systems. Various archaeological excavations have discovered piles of Indus seals and pots that contain text written using the Indus script. Many attempts have been made in interpreting the Indus script. The hypothesis proposed by Asko Parpola has been one of the most logical and holistic attempt at deciphering the script. Recognising his research initiatives the Government of Tamilnadu has chosen him for the prestigious Kalaignar M.Karunanidhi Classical Tamil Award to be awarded in the upcoming World Conference on Classical Tamil 2010. Parpola is also the author of the standard text book on Indus script system titled ‘Deciphering the Indus Script’.

According to Prof.Parpola the Indus script is a logo-syllabic script where a symbol can denote the thing it represents or (as a rebus) denote a thing which has a phonetic sound similar to it. The rebus is the basis of phonetisation of early writing systems and it operated using homophony ( phonetic similarity between two words). A very common example is ‘Q’. ‘Q’ can denote the English alphabet ‘Q’ or the English word ‘Queue’ which is pronounced as ‘Q’. This is a simple illustration of a rebus. In our daily lives we use several such rebuses. For instances while typing SMS many of us have the habit of coding the English words ‘to’ as ‘2’, ‘for’ as ‘4’ and names like ‘Kesavan’ as ‘K7’.  An example of pictorial rebus representation that Parpola presents is,  ‘to be or not to be’ can be written with pictures as ‘2 bee oar knot 2 bee’.

The Indus script has several symbols/logos which are common things like a fish, fig tree, crab, bangles etc. The sequences of such symbols found on seals don’t seem to make any sense when one tries to explain the literal meaning of the symbols. So only the rebuses of the symbols could make any sense. To explore this option one should know the underlying phonetic language and pronunciation of the symbols. It is here the genius of Prof. Parpola and his team should be appreciated. They experimented with many different language systems that existed at the time of creation of Indus script. The earliest texts in Sanskrit appear at about 1000 BCE while Indus valley seals later than 1600 BCE were almost entirely absent. Further the Rig Veda doesn’t mention anything about the Indus valley civilization. For these reasons Prof. Parpola rejected Sanskrit to be the underlying language.

Antiquity of Tamil is very well known. Though the oldest surviving text of Tamil is dated around 300 BCE (much later than the decline of Indus valley civilization), there are sufficient evidences pointing to the existence of Tamil language to much earlier periods. The most interesting revelation in the exploration of Dravidian hypothesis is that when one tried to interpret Indus script with Tamil as the underlying language, suddenly the script made a lot of sense. For instance fish symbol is one of the most common Indus script symbols. The tamil word for fish is மீன் (pronounced as mean). At the same time this tamil word also denotes a star (celestial body). A fish symbol found on a seal cannot always take a trivial meaning of fish. But it can mean a star (an astrological idea).

The fish symbol of often accompanied by six vertical strokes or seven vertical strokes.

6 strokes + Fish = Pleiades (the Taurus star cluster which has 6 stars)

7 strokes + Fish = Ursa Major (the star cluster with seven stars)

Such representations could have had some special meaning in Indus language. Another frequent sequence is “fig tree + fish”. Assuming that fish symbol points to star, as earlier, we move on to find what a fig tree could represent. The fig tree (also called a banyan tree) is a very common tree in Indian subcontinent. The air-roots which look like ropes are characteristic of these trees. In classical Tamil the banyan tree was called வட மரம் (pronounced as vada-maram) which can be literally translated as rope-tree. The first part of the name, வட (pronounced as vada) also means north in classical tamil. Thus homonymy connects a banyan fig with north(direction). Now the sequence of fig + fish can mean North Star. In Indian mythology the North Star is called the Arundhathi star and is seen as a symbol of marital fidelity. Pointing to the North Star to a newly married bride is a ritual that is followed till date in many Vedic marriages in India.

Parpola’s team proposed that the famous Hindu war-god Murugan or Skanda could have been worshipped by Harappans. They identified seals with symbols that can point towards this hypothesis. Lord Murugan’s association with Pleiades (6 stars) can be used as key in this respect. According to Hindu mythology, Lord Murugan was raised by six foster-mothers who are believed to be the six stars in the Taurus star cluster.

In one of the Indus seals the ‘6 strokes + fish’ symbols are followed by two intersecting rings and two long vertical strokes. Here again the Dravidian hypothesis provides some clue. In ancient Tamil a ring is called முருகு (pronounced as mu-ru-gu). The word also could mean ‘a young man’ or ‘a baby boy’. The name of the war-lord is Murugan which means young and handsome. Even today married women pray towards Lord Murugan for boy babies. As this sequence (of 2 intersecting circles) is very frequently found on seals whose obverse side depicts a sitting god, Prof. Parpola speculates that Harappans worshipped Lord Murugan.

The above examples are some of the popular interpretations of Prof. Parpola. One point needs to be clarified here. Whenever the term ‘dravidian’ or ‘aryan’ is used in this context, it is not used in racial sense but a linguistic sense. To be frank there are no Aryans or Dravidians in India now, as today’s people have undergone millennia of racial intermixture.

Can the Indus script be decisively deciphered? Have the Harappans left behind any ‘Rosetta Stone’? These are the questions that many scholars of Indus Valley civilization ask. Undoubtedly Prof. Asko Parpola’s contribution to the field of Indus script decipherment has been the most complete and successful till date. But still deciphering Indus script would need finding more seals with longer Indus script or Indus’ Rosetta Stone (a bilingual stone containing Indus script with some other deciphered script). More research into the archaeological findings can help us in deciphering the ancient Indus script and throw light on our ancient history. Prof. Parpola's research is indeed a confidence booster in this field of inquiry.