The centenary of the discovery of the Indus Valley Civilisation and Dravidian links

It was on September 20, 100 years ago, that archaeologist John Marshall announced the discovery of the Indus Valley Civilisation through excavations at Harappa and Mohenjo-daro. Many years later, scholars Iravatham Mahadevan and Asko Parpola studied the antiquity of Tamil language and its link with the Indus Valley Civilisation

The centenary of the publication of an article by archaeologist John Marshall on the discovery of the Indus Valley Civilisation was last month remembered by lovers of history. On September 20, the day the article was published 100 years ago, Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M.K. Stalin said his government planned to hold an international conference and install a life-size statue of Marshall. Quoting the archaeologist, he and Minister for Archaeology Thangam Thennarasu recalled how the Indus Valley Civilisation was “pre-Aryan” and the Indus language or languages “must have been pre-Aryan too”. This civilisation spanned 2,000 sites across 1.5 million square kilometres in the territories of India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan during the Bronze Age (3000-1500 BCE).

In his article, Marshall, who held the post of Director-General of the Archaeological Survey of India when it was published, spoke of the work of two of his colleagues, Daya Ram Sahni, who excavated Harappa in the early 1920s, and Rakhal Das Banerji, who worked on Mohenjo-daro.

Years later, scholars Iravatham Mahadevan (1930-2018) and Asko Parpola studied the antiquity of Tamil language and the link between the language and the Indus Valley Civilisation.

Short texts in the Indus script

In June 2010, accepting the first Kalaignar M. Karunanidhi Classical Tamil Award during the World Classical Tamil Conference in Coimbatore, Professor Parpola, a Finnish Indologist, said: “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 in 2600-1700 BCE.” This statement was preceded by another: “Sanskrit goes back to Proto-Indo-Aryan attested in a few names and words related to the Mitanni kingdom of Syria between 1500 and 1300 BCE, and to 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.”

In an interview to S. Theodore Baskaran for The Hindu published on March 4, 2008, the Indologist said: “As far as the Aryan-Dravidian dichotomy is concerned, it must be remembered that ‘Aryan’ and ‘Dravidian’ are linguistic and not racial terms. There is no pure race, and Aryan and Dravidian speakers have been in contact with each other in South Asia from the start of their encounter.” In the interview, he regretted that “the past is politicised and used for other than scholarly purposes”.

After a controversy broke out over the contention by a couple of Western historians in 2004 that the Indus script could not be regarded as a writing system, Iravatham Mahadevan, the civil servant-turned-epigraphist, in a piece published in this newspaper on May 3, 2009, dismissed the argument and emphasised that “there is solid archaeological and linguistic evidence to show that the Indus script is a writing system encoding the language of the region (most probably Dravidian)”.

He ruled out what he called the Aryan authorship of the civilisation, but said this did not automatically make it Dravidian. “However, there is substantial linguistic evidence favouring the Dravidian theory: the survival of Brahui, a Dravidian language in the Indus region; the presence of Dravidian loanwords in the Rigveda; the substratum influence of Dravidian on the Prakrit dialects; and computer analysis of the Indus texts revealing that the language had only suffixes (like Dravidian), and no prefixes (as in Indo-Aryan) or infixes (as in Munda),” he wrote.

During a talk at the Roja Muthiah Research Library in Chennai in November 2014, Iravatham Mahadevan, who made a presentation on his paper, ‘Dravidian Proof of the Indus Script via The Rig Veda: A Case Study’, said: “The Indus language has been correctly identified as an early form of the Dravidian script.” Referring to two divergent streams arising from the Indus Valley Civilisation, he said: “The earliest Old Tamil, which has retained the Dravidian roots of the Indus phrase, is firmly interlinked, but with modified meanings.” He added that after the collapse of the civilisation, a section of the population had migrated to South India and the “Indus Dravidian influenced the South Dravidian languages”. The earliest traces of such migratory influence were found in the “Old Tamil”.

‘Names of languages and not of races’

As for the terms “Aryan” and “Dravidian”, the epigraphist, in another article carried by The Hindu on February 4, 2007, held the position similar to that of Professor Parpola. He mentioned, “Let me state with all the emphasis that I can command that ‘Aryan’ and ‘Dravidian’ are names of languages and not of races. Speakers of one language can, and frequently did, switch over from one language to another. We should not allow research into the Indus civilisation and language to be vitiated by false notions of racial or ethnic identities.” Indira Parthasarathy, a veteran Tamil literary figure who had taught Tamil abroad, says Max Mueller, too, endorses the view that the words “Aryan” and “Dravidian” are not ethnic-related but only linguistic references.

Three years ago, a report in The Hindu quoted a paper written by Bahata Ansumali Mukhopadhyay, titled ‘Ancestral Dravidian Languages in Indus Civilization: Ultraconserved Dravidian Tooth-word Reveals Deep Linguistic Ancestry and Supports Genetics’. The paper said ancestral Dravidian languages were possibly spoken by a significant population in the Indus Valley Civilisation. The researcher, however, made an important disclaimer: it would be wrong to assume that only a single language or language-group was spoken across the one-million square kilometre area of the Indus Valley Civilisation. The centenary celebration, being planned by the government, is expected to trigger more studies, throwing more light on the Indus Valley Civilisation and the Tamil language.

Published - October 04, 2024 12:10 am IST