Hunting For Keys To Crack Indus Valley Code

About two decades ago, the conference rooms of Delhi institutions like the Sahitya Akademi and India International Centre were often haunted by a tall, thin and unfailingly polite gentleman with a briefcase who sat at the back. There, he carried on a private conference with his neighbours that began with these momentous words: "I have it!"

- PRATIK KANJILAL

The nature of 'it' was revealed when he shyly—but proudly—opened the briefcase and took out sheaves of paper thickly inscribed with the Indus Valley script and copious notes. "This is the fish symbol, meena," he said. "And this is the horse symbol." What did the horse represent? Enemies, if you believe the now-tattered Aryan invasion theory. But some of his conclusions were not completely outrageous. For comparison, ripples did represent water in Egyptian hieroglyphs, and the Roman capital letter A is a rotated representation of the head of a ram—aries in Latin.

The trouble was that this gentleman gave the more inscrutable symbols the quick-and-dirty treatment. You asked, "What's this?" He replied, "A phallic symbol." You persisted: "And that one?" Again, "A phallic symbol." This, too, was not wholly incredible: an extraordinary number of Roman artifacts in that category have been uncovered. But they communicated only one message: they discouraged malevolent spirits from trespassing.

Sign systems and scripts, on the other hand, communicate much more. Road signs are not scripts, but the meaning they transmit keeps millions of motorists alive every day. Scripts are even deeper, because they express languages. In the absence of parallel texts like the Rosetta stone, they can be impossible for the human mind to decipher.