Great scholar and generous colleague

N.S. Rajaram

Gentle scholar

Dr. Natwar Jha, a great Vedic scholar and peerless paleographer best known for his epochal work on the Indus script died on May 5, 2006. He is survived by his wife Smt. Sarojini and sons Birendra Kumar and Hari Kumar.

His small but seminal work Vedic Glossary on Indus Seals appeared in 1996 and our joint work The Deciphered Indus Script in 2000. Though best known for his momentous reading of the Indus script, his work relating the Harappan and Vedic symbolism—linking Harappan archaeology to the Vedic literature—is equally important. His research has allowed attention to shift from a narrow focus on the technical aspects of the script to a more comprehensive view of the late Vedic civilization as a whole, placing Harappan archaeology and the Vedic literature in a unified literary and historical context. Taken together, Jha’s contribution to the understanding of Vedic and Harappan civilizations is not equaled by that of any other worker in the field.

No less significantly, discoveries in the field following Jha’s decipherment in 1996 and our subsequent work on the Vedic-Harappan symbolism are vindicated by findings in fields like natural history, genetics and marine archaeology. His research, which places the Rigveda before the Harappan period, making the latter contemporary with the Vedanta period, is supported by recent findings, while once popular theories like the Aryan invasion and Harappans as non-Vedic have been demolished by science. We now see the Vedic-Harappan sequence as part of a larger continuum beginning with rising sea levels at the end of the last Ice Age to the decline of the Sarasvati civilization that ended with its devolution as the Sarasvati River dried up. In an indirect sense, Jha’s work paved the way for linking natural history and recorded history— a line of investigation currently being pursued by several researchers (including this writer).

Jha was a simple man whose life was his work. He rarely spoke about his work, and even his family members knew little of the magnitude of his contribution. The few details of his life given here are based on the information provided by his son Birendra Kumar Jha, and what little I came across in the course of my extensive communication with this very reserved scholar.

It was my great good fortune to have known Jha since 1996 and collaborate with him on a book and several fundamental articles. Since our names are indelibly linked, readers may be surprised to learn that the two of us never met in person. We communicated through letters and occasionally by phone. I wrote mostly in English, with passages in Sanskrit relating to technical material; he wrote mostly in the Mythili dialect of Hindi and Sanskrit. Jha’s writing in any language was always clear and to the point, without any frills or flourishes. Clarity and depth were the hallmarks of his thinking and expression.

The present article is an account of Jha’s work from the perspective of his closest colleague in the last decade of his life against the background of discoveries in the decade following the publication of his decipherment. I will comment on its ramifications, and note also some reactions, both hostile and favorable. He has left some important material that he had been working on at the time of his death, which I am in the process of editing. They were sent to me by his son Dr. Birendra Kumar Jha. It continues his work on the Vedic-Harappan symbolism with important new advances. I begin with a brief summary of Jha’s life.

Natwar Jha was born in February 1939 into a Mythili Brahmin family with a tradition of Vedic learning. His father Pandit Bahadur Jha was a Sanskrit scholar of distinction. The son (Natwar) was exposed to Vedic tradition early and continued his Vedic studies under the renowned scholar Yogiraj Bhupendranath Sanyal at Shyama Charan Vidyapeeth near Bhagalpur. Yogiraj Bhupendra Nath was a noted commentator on Gita Kriya Yoga and a famous teacher at Shantiniketan. After completing his Vedic studies under the Yogiraj, Jha went on to obtain a Ph.D. degree in Sanskrit and philosophy from Bihar University. He seems to have had a precocious talent for mathematics but chose Sanskrit for his higher studies.

Jha was almost unique among modern scholars in having a sound traditional schooling in the Vedas as well as an advanced degree from a modern university. As a result he was equally at home in the traditional Indian ‘shastric’ approach as well as in modern (Western) Indology and linguistics. His broad education made him probably the best equipped scholar of his generation. So the depiction of him by some hostile critics that he was an old fashioned pundit who did not understand the work of ‘modern’ scholars is totally unfounded. In fact, it was often the case that these ‘modern’ scholars were intimidated by his breadth and erudition, and the ease with which he could move from one to another. To cover up their deficiency, some critics engaged in name calling and personal attacks, only to be exposed later. Jha never retaliated.

Not much is known about his personal life beyond the fact that he was a teacher of great distinction who retired as principal of Kendriya Vidyalaya in Farakka in West Bengal in 1997. Despite his heavy professional responsibilities as teacher and administrator, he maintained a program of research into history, yoga and philosophy. He was a lover of Mythili (Hindi dialect) and contributed to its literature. He published numerous articles and books on yoga, philosophy, and ancient scripts in Hindi, Sanskrit and English. I don’t feel qualified to comment on his work except on ancient scripts and the Vedic-Harappan relationship, in which I was his collaborator for ten years.

His son Birendra Kumar shared with me some details of his life that shed light on his personality. While working at Kendriya Vidyalaya, he received an offer from a Sanskrit University which he accepted but resigned his position within hours. Here is the account (my summary) as given by his son in a personal note to me:

With regard to my father, very little is known to the outside world… Understanding the level of his work on the Upanishads, a rare opportunity was given to him to join the faculty at Kameshwar Singh Sanskrit University… we were very happy and planning to shift to Darbhanga. …my father had taken lien of two years from Kendriya Vidyalaya [for the purpose]. He joined the faculty, and within five hours gave his resignation. The reason he cited: no academic environment for serious research. He preferred to return to Kendriya Vidyalaya.

…he was a silent worker. His master works are on the Upanishads— Pasupata Darshana, Sarasvati Nadi, Praceena Vedic Jeevana, and Vedic Somavalli, all yet to be published. I have seen a gold medal among his personal belongings, but he never told me what it was for. I learnt one day from my uncle that it was for memorizing the whole of the Rigveda when he was only thirteen years old. …Some two days before his death, he told my mother that his life energy was leaving him, but he was happy in his confidence that his work will be continued by others to whom he was able to transfer his knowledge.

I can supplement this account with an experience of my own. When he retired from Kendriya Vidyalaya and moved to Maunathbhanjan near Varanasi, I tried to get him to move to a place closer to Bangalore where I live. When a possibility opened up in Hyderabad, I invited him to consider moving. He did not want to move but didn’t want to hurt me by saying no. With gentle humor he said he would be happy to consider moving to Hyderabad if myself and/or David Frawley would be willing to join him. Incidentally, Jha had high regard for Frawley’s approach to the Rigveda.

It was typical of Jha. He never liked to make a negative statement, preferring to make the position so obvious that it became unnecessary to say ‘No’. Even when he had to criticize someone’s work as a scholar, he would generally preface it with a comment about how he had himself been guilty of a similar error in the past.

I can cite an example of his generosity towards a less accomplished colleague that I witnessed. When Egbert Richter-Ushnas’s book Indus Script and the Rigveda came out, purporting to have read the writing based on a Babylonian bilingual inscription, I pointed out to Jha that it was full of absurdities including copying errors. Jha simply said that he had met Richter-Ushnas, and that he was a nice young man though his work was nothing but guesswork. He asked me to soften my criticism.

This throws light on another of his traits. He never published half baked ideas or hunches. We discussed many possibilities and open problems, some of which might have been of interest to others, but he was not willing to go public with ideas that were could not be supported or had loose ends. He was a perfectionist but did not like to sit in judgment over others.

Work and controversy

Though greatly respected by those competent to understand his work, the ‘establishment’, steeped in imitation and ideological posturing took little notice of his profound investigations. It was not as if he labored in obscurity. He was invited to present his work on the Indus Script at the World Archaeology Congress held in Delhi in 1994. Unfortunately, it was turned into a political circus by some self-styled ‘secular’ academic clowns like R.S. Sharma protesting archaeological discoveries at the disputed site of Ayodhya. As a result, Jha’s epoch making contribution, which should have been the highlight of the Congress was obscured by political posturing and publicity stunts.

Prior to the Archaeological Congress, important articles on new findings in Harappan archaeology, authored by India’s foremost authority on the subject had been ignored by a leading daily, which chose to publish instead a long-winded polemic by a washed up Leftist academic pontificating about secular and communal history. Though the media ignored Jha’s work, several Indian and European scholars present at the Archaeology Congress came away deeply impressed by his work and findings.

Jha’s work came to wide notice with the publication of his monograph Vedic Glossary on Indus Seals in 1996. Though small, running to sixty pages, it was packed with highly technical information drawing upon archaeology, literature and paleography. In October 1996, I came across an excellent review of the book in The Hindu and was struck by Jha’s discovery of some formulas from the Sulbasutras (Vedic mathematical texts) on some Harappan seals. This immediately caught my attention, for, by following a totally different approach I too had concluded that the mathematics of the Sulbas was related to Harappan archaeology. I ordered several copies of the book from his publisher.

As there have been innumerable claims of decipherment, going back at least to Father Heras in the 1930s, I approached Jha’s decipherment with caution and skepticism. But it did not take me long to see that Jha’s work was at a different level from earlier attempts. Leaving aside his formidable scholarship, what struck the reader was his method— of first establishing a historical context for the Harappans and then presenting a methodology. His historical context was the late Vedic – Vedantic period, particularly the Sutra period, which was my conclusion also though following a completely different approach. This immediately yields Vedic Sanskrit of the post Rigveda era as the language of the seals. This had been my finding also though I had no methodology to read the script beyond noting its similarity to the later Brahmi script.

His methodology for decipherment embodied two major insights: first, the similarity of many Harappan signs to Brahmi; next, the dependence of the vocabulary of the texts on the Vedic Glossary known as Nighantu, and its commentary Nirukta. This, Jha discovered with the help of references in the Mahabharata, which explicitly state that the ancient etymologist Yaska who compiled the Nirukta was familiar with the images on the seals and their relationship to Vedic symbolism. Others like the late Lakshman Swarup had noted the same references but had dismissed it as fanciful. Jha however used it to limit his search to words found in the Nighantu. Once he made the breakthrough, he was able to read messages that went beyond it. It was a stunning insight: Jha was now able to read the script without the need for any bilingual inscription.

Soon after I read his monograph, I approached him through his publisher in Varanasi, suggesting that we collaborate on a comprehensive book on the decipherment, providing both the necessary historical and the literary background. I also pointed out to him that though he had made the key breakthrough, there were several open questions which I offered to clear up. I also sent him examples of my own readings that were independent of Jha’s but fitted into his decipherment scheme. To my utter amazement, he sent me a large hand-written manuscript containing hundreds of inscriptions along with deciphered readings and explanations. I have never come across such generosity and trust from a scholar of his stature, especially when so much was at stake. He didn’t care who got the credit as long as the world got the benefit of his knowledge and labor.

Even after becoming widely known, with reports and articles in publications all over India and also in Europe, Australia and the U.S., including a major report in Le Figaro, Jha shunned publicity. When Michael Witzel and Steve Farmer mounted their intemperate attack charging Jha (and me) with fraud, Jha chose to ignore it. It was with the greatest difficulty that I could persuade him to agree to a joint press statement refuting their charges. His view was that tactics like negative criticism and personal attacks have no lasting value and only work with real merit will stand the test of time. Time has proved him right.

When our work became too well-known to ignore, establishment scholars—the Indian Marxist School and some Western Indologists—with a heavy stake in the Aryan invasion model of history with Harappans as non-Vedic people became alarmed. Predictably, the first attacks came in the Left controlled media, beginning with the Communist mouthpiece Frontline. Soon after my presentation of Jha’s decipherment in Bangalore in 1997, one Parvathi Menon, writing for Frontline but otherwise unknown to the scholarly world, attacked it as the work of a ‘schoolmaster.’ This is about as scholarly as describing the great mathematician Ramanujan as a shipping clerk or Einstein as a clerk in the Swiss Patent Office. She gave further evidence of her illiteracy by referring Yaska’s work Nirukta (Vedic etymology) as a book of ritual.

Despite such efforts our work continued to gain support both in scholarly circles and with the public and the media. I made numerous presentations in India, U.K. and the U.S. and was enthusiastically received. Our book The Deciphered Indus Script: methodology, readings, interpretations came out in April 2000 (Aditya Prakashan, New Delhi). For the first time it treated the Harappan script not just as a technical topic but as part of a historical and cultural phenomenon relating to the late Vedic Age. It included as an Appendix my decipherment of a pre-Harappan example showing it as a less developed form of writing, closer to the Rigveda rather than to the post-Rigvedic themes that prevail in Harappan iconography and messages.

This cut the ground from under the feet of many Indology scholars entrenched in Indian and Western academia. There was now a frenzied buzz of activity in academic circles regarding how to counter what was seen as a threat not just to their positions and reputations, but the very survival of their discipline. The attack on our book came in the form of a personal charge that we had somehow fabricated the image of a horse on one of the seals, which they claimed (wrongly) was unknown in India until the invading Aryans brought it. This was a diversionary tactic meant to draw attention away from our main findings: in a book running to nearly 300 large pages there are only two partial footnotes mentioning the horse. The decipherment and the Vedic-Harappan link, which our book was devoted to, have nothing to do with the horse image.

The lead was taken by the well-known Indian Marxist Romila Thapar in a special issue of Frontline— a Communist magazine, not a scholarly publication. But lacking the self-confidence to question our findings because of her ignorance of Sanskrit, Thapar brought in the Harvard linguist Michael Witzel, known for his tenacious attachment to Aryan theories to challenge our findings. Witzel was assisted by an itinerant academic, one Steve Farmer whose scholarship is comparable to Parvathi Menon’s— the one who had derided Jha as a schoolmaster. Theirs was not an attempt at refutation of our findings but a personal attack charging us with fabricating a horse image on a seal largely irrelevant to our findings as already noted. (It may be noted that horse remains and fossils have been known in India going back to before the earliest phases of the Harappan civilization.)

It is unnecessary to dwell on this sordid episode beyond noting that after some initial publicity following the ‘propaganda blitz’ (as Witzel called it) both scholars and the public saw through their charade and Witzel in particular was discredited in the ensuing debate. His standing was further undermined by his ill advised meddling in the history curriculum revision in California schools that landed both him and the California Education Department in civil rights law suits. (He is now busy fending off charges that he fabricated correspondence with non-existent individuals.)

What was interesting was Jha’s serene attitude in the midst of all this turmoil around our work. He was convinced that all this noise would fade away and what merit there was in the work would be recognized. Whereas I published articles refuting Witzel’s claims and charges, joined by others, Jha refused to join the debate, other than the one press statement that he agreed to put his name to. He did not even participate in the press conferences I held in Delhi, Bangalore and other places. Apparently he had other things to do.

Approach and methodology

Jha was steeped in Vedic learning, but his approach was scientific rather than theological. He never appealed to faith and I never learnt what his religious beliefs were. In his work on the Indus script, he used his Vedic background to locate sources, references and origins of ideas, but his solutions to technical problems like identifying the influence of grammar rules on Indus writing could be understood by anyone willing to study them. As a result, a secular, western educated researcher like myself had little difficulty working with him. In addition, he was patient with my repeated queries about his attributions and conclusions drawn from his insights. He was particularly happy when I made independent technical discoveries, notably the identification of the generic vowel sign and the recognition that at one time doubled consonants indicated vowel beginnings. The latter led to my deciphering a pre-Harappan example that has been called the world’s oldest writing. This pleased him enormously.

Since we were close colleagues but quite dissimilar in background and education, it may not be out of place to mention a few facts about my own background. I come from what might be called a ‘Westernized’ Hindu family, but was educated in my mother tongue (Kannada) rather than in English. I am a mathematical scientist and engineer by education, and my career has been almost entirely in the U.S. Though I know Sanskrit, my knowledge is not on the same level as Jha’s or of my other close colleague David Frawley. I am not mystically inclined but know the ancient literature well enough to communicate with Vedic scholars like Jha and Frawley and learn from them. Just as they understand my scientific ideas when properly explained, I feel that I too can follow Vedic and other religious thought when explained. In this I am helped by my linguistic knowledge and the Hindu upbringing though it was not particularly religious. So ours was a collaboration of unlikes.

Script and its decipherment

The Indus or the Harappan script is one of the more complex writing systems devised by the human mind. It represents the transition stage from the complex pictorial-cum-phonetic writing characteristic of early civilizations to the phonetically based Brahmi alphabet, which is the source of all Indian and Southeast Asian writing. Jha has made a plausible case that even West Asiatic scripts like Aramaic and Phoenician derive ultimately from the Indus or at least have borrowed ideas from it.

The human species has evolved basically four different modes for expressing language in written form. These are pictograms, word-signs (or logograms), syllabic signs and the alphabet. This classification is not watertight, and it is possible for a complex writing system like the Indus to incorporate features of several of these. In fact, every alphabet must accommodate syllabic signs to represents sounds.

The first of these, the pictogram, need not be tied to any particular language. Pictures are used to represent objects, and conventions are adopted to express relationships. A circle may be used to represent the sun. The best known example of pictograms is probably the Maya glyphic writing of Central America. To understand how such a system works it is helpful to think of them as engineering drawings. A trained engineer will have no difficulty interpreting such a drawing—like a blueprint or a circuit diagram—even though it may not contain any words. Traffic signs also work on the same principle. (It is not necessary for us to understand how this idea gave rise to the so-called 'rebus principle'.)

A major advance took place when humans decided to extend the concept to expressing syllables or sounds (often via the rebus principle). Now each pictorial sign represented not an object but a syllable in the language. The result is what is called a word-sign or ideogram. We see the process in some of the Indus symbols. A bird is used to represent the sound 'shak', from the Sanskrit word shakuni (bird). Similarly a pipul leaf (Sanskrit ashvattha) became the symbol for the sound 'shva'. Similarly dice (aksha) are used to represent ‘ksha’.

Traces of pictorial origin can sometimes be found even in the later alphabetical stage. In the Indus script, parallel wavy lines are used to represent the nasal letter 'na'. It is not hard to see that this symbol—parallel wavy lines—must at one time have been the pictorial symbol for the word 'nadi' which means river in Sanskrit. This later became a single wavy line for the letter 'na'. This symbol seems to have been borrowed by West Asiatic scripts like Phoenician and Aramaic. (Similarly the Indus sign for the hard ‘g’—an inverted ‘V’ or ‘U’ is found in several scripts in India and West Asia.)

The difference between the word-sign and symbols in a syllabic script is not always clear-cut, especially in a complex script like the Indus. Basically a syllabic script is one in which each symbol represents a particular sound syllable. This is the main feature of most ancient scripts from India to Greece. What distinguishes ancient methods of writing—from the Indus to the Mesopotamian Cuneiform to Egyptian hieroglyphs to Linear B of Mycenian Greece—is the use of symbols to represent syllables. Some of them like the Egyptian, and also the Indus to a lesser degree, retained pictorial features; but the basic unit of writing is no longer the word but the syllable. Even pictorial signs came to be used for syllables rather than words.

The next stage in the development of the alphabet was the introduction of vowels. Here the paths taken by the Greeks and the Indians as they moved from syllabic writing to full-fledged alphabets diverged. The Indians, as witnessed in the Brahmi, indicated vowel values with the help of strokes attached to consonants; traces of this can be found in the Indus writing itself where a rudimentary stroke system makes its appearance. The Greeks (and the Romans) on the other hand indicated vowels with separate letters. They essentially borrowed Phoenician letters, which includes syllabic signs that Greek does not need. The Greeks began to use these surplus letters as vowels.

These two paths gave rise to the two major systems of alphabetical writing in the world today—the Graeco-Roman used in Europe and America, and the Indic used in India and Southeast Asia. Alphabetical writing is one of the major achievements of mankind— one that took several thousand years. And despite fundamental differences, both the Graeco-Roman and the Indic methods have the same basic goal: denoting different ways in which a particular sound (called 'consonant') is to be pronounced. This is accomplished by the Graeco-Roman and the Indic scripts in different ways. We may next take a brief look at the principles of these two methods.

All of us know that modern alphabets basically have two classes of letters called consonants and vowels. (We can ignore semi-vowels— an artifice that most languages can do without.) Consonants represent the sounds or the phonetics, while vowels give shape to the sounds. In English, a vowel always follows the consonant, which is modified by the vowel. For example, 'put', 'pet' and 'pit' are pronounced differently because the vowels, 'u', 'e' and 'i' give different values to the consonant 'p'.

Indian scripts follow a different principle. Vowel additions to the consonants are indicated not by inserting letters as in English, but by adding strokes to the consonants being modified— somewhat like diacritical marks. Different kinds of strokes are added to the consonant in question for denoting different vowel modifications. This means that each vowel carries with it a stroke or a diacritical mark that is to be used in conjunctions with consonants. For example the long a (aa) in modern Hindi carries the vertical line (|) as its associated mark. In Hindi kaa written ‘k|’ though there is a separate letter for the long a. This means, as a rule vowels never appear in the middle of a word.

This is how writing is done in modern alphabetical systems. But the Indus script, like most ancient scripts was syllabic and deficient in vowels.

Both the Indic and the Graeco-Roman are developed alphabets with a full complement of vowels needed by the language. But this was not true of ancient writing. Pre-alphabetical (syllabic) systems were written without the help of vowels. This was true of the Indus script also, though its scribes had evolved a rudimentary way of writing vowels as we shall see later. As a result, there is some latitude in reading passages written in such scripts.

In syllabic writing, each word is represented by a string of consonants or syllabic signs. (I have oversimplified somewhat, for a syllable, strictly speaking consists of a phoneme and a vowel, but we need not concern ourselves with these technicalities.) It is up to the reader to supply the necessary vowels. In English for example, using consonants only, we would write 'bk' for 'book', 'lmp' for 'lamp', 'txtbk' for 'textbook' and so forth.

Since syllabic writing lacks vowels it is often possible to come up with more than one 'correct' reading for the same string of symbols by superimposing different vowels. This is a feature not only of the ancient Indus script, but also the Linear B script used for the Mycaenean Greek a thousand years later, and even modern languages like Hebrew and Arabic. As a result, knowledge of the context has an important bearing on the interpretation of the signs. For illustration, the examples given below have at least two different 'correct' readings depending on the vowels we choose. This is how the Indus script has to be read. The choice of one over the other is governed by the context. (I have given the English transcription for the Sanskrit letters in question).

Letter string Possible readings

s-m saama, soma or suma

bh-r-t bharata or bhaarati

p-r-v purva or paurava

d-sh-h-m dashahema or dashahoma

We saw earlier that scripts can be classified into pictorial, logo-graphic, syllabic and alphabetical. But the Indus is a primordial script that defies classification. It is a mix of at least three of these four methods. It consists of pictorial symbols, phonetic symbols making up a syllabary, as well as a rudimentary form of alphabetical writing. And we find that characteristically Indian feature— the composite letter. They combine to make the Indus script one of the most complex writing systems ever created.

In an article such as this, it is not possible to go into the details of Indus writing beyond what has been given so far. It is suffices to know that the Indus script, like most ancient scripts was syllabic. But what distinguishes it from other syllabic systems is that it used a U-shaped generic vowel symbol for words that began in a vowel. It also included a rudimentary stroke system for indicating vowel endings. (This feature is not discussed in the present article.)

This single vowel symbol later came to be expanded to eleven vowel symbols used in modern Indian scripts. The rudimentary stroke system also was perfected making the Indic phonetically the most scientific system in the world. We can therefore say that the Indus script was not as developed as modern scripts, but was more developed than its contemporaries.

To understand the importance of this generic vowel symbol we need to recognize that many languages of West Asia like Aramaic and Phoenician in ancient times, as well as Hebrew and Arabic today, never had a pressing need for vowels. (These are examples of what are called 'Semitic languages'.) This is because words in Semitic languages never began in a vowel. It is still the case that Arabic and Hebrew newspapers are printed without vowels. This apparently presents no problems to its readers.

Sanskrit however is different. It is full of words that begin in vowels— words like agni, ishvara, uma, om and many more. To meet this need the Indus scribes had evolved an ingenious device. They indicated vowel beginnings with a U-shaped symbol. This symbol, however, is used only at the beginning of a word, and for all vowels; in the remainder of the word the reader has to fill in the necessary vowels as we already saw. With this innovation, it becomes possible to write words with vowel beginnings also. The word 'agni' is written Ugn. Similarly, 'ishvara' becomes Ushvr, 'indra' Undr, 'arkagni' Urkgn and so on. Someone familiar with the language experiences little difficulty in reading it, but the reader must know both the language and the literary context.

What this means is that the Indus alphabet is not a true alphabet but a hybrid proto-alphabet: it is a syllabic system enhanced with a generic vowel symbol for words beginning in a vowel.

Recognizing this fact—that it is a syllabic script with a generic vowel symbol—holds one of the keys to Jha's decipherment. In addition, composite letters—a striking feature of all Indian scripts—appear also in the Indus. All in all Indus writing may be seen as an intermediate stage in the transition from a primitive syllabic system to a scientific phonetic alphabet like Brahmi from which nearly all Indian scripts are derived.

Reactions and criticism

Jha published his decipherment in 1996, while our book giving a comprehensive treatment of the methodology along with the changed historical context and hundreds of readings with interpretations appeared in 2000. It is obviously too early to be definitive about its impact or judge the reactions. Our work is still controversial, but less so now than in the immediate aftermath of Witzel’s attack on it seven years ago which for a brief period diverted attention from the script to extraneous issues. Nonetheless, it is unrealistic to expect the present generation of scholars to accept it fully. (There are still scholars who don’t accept Michael Ventris’s decipherment of Linear B done more than 50 years ago.)

Before we discuss reactions, it is useful to know that there is no discipline devoted to decipherment no matter what experts may claim. Weighty tomes on writing and decipherments are mainly post mortem analyses of scripts deciphered in the past. Authors of such books and academics (including paleographers) have no experience of decipherment for the simple reason that there are precious few unknown scripts to be deciphered. The number of scripts that have been deciphered in the past century and half can be counted on the fingers of one hand.

Since no one can learn in school how to read unknown scripts even if they can be found, it is not surprising that with rare exceptions, decipherers of ancient scripts have been outsiders rather than academics. This was true of Henry Rawlison (Cuneiform) who was an army officer, and of James Prinsep (Ashokan Brahmi), a civil servant employed by the Calcutta Mint. It was true also of Michael Ventris (Linear B), a practicing architect. Each script is unique and the study of previous successful decipherments may or may not be of any help; it may in fact be inhibiting by making one follow false leads due to preconceptions. (This is based on personal experience.)

A widespread misconception is that a script cannot be deciphered without a bilingual inscription. This is a hangover from the Jean-Francois Champollion’s decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics using the famous Rosetta Stone. This episode, somewhat romanticized by ignoring all the hard work that went on earlier by Champollion—and by others like Layard and Young—has made some scholars claim that the Indus script would never be read because there are no bilingual inscriptions. (How do they know that more than one language is not used when they cannot read the script anyway?) This view is fallacious since Brahmi and others have been deciphered without any bilingual samples.

The basic is to reduce the number of unknowns. To begin with, there are two unknowns, the language and the script: reading an inscription in an unknown language written in an unknown script is a mathematical impossibility. Historical theories for over a century assumed, without evidence and even against evidence, that Sanskrit was unknown in India before 1500 BC, i.e. before the Aryans invaded India. Scholars held that the Harappan language had to be non-Sanskritic. They further claimed that the language had to be a language related to South Indian languages like Tamil, Kannada (my mother tongue) are something unrelated to Sanskrit. Since oldest of these is only about 2000 thousand years old, it calls for resurrecting its hypothetical ancestor going back a further 2000 years without any intervening examples.

The key in the case of the Indus script was recognizing the language and the historical context. The major obstacle to successful decipherment was the prevailing scholarly opinion that held the Harappan civilization was pre-Vedic and non-Vedic and therefore its language could not be Sanskrit or anything related to it. This, as just noted was the fallout of the Aryan invasion theory which held that Sanskrit was unknown in India until the invading Aryans introduced it. Though discredited now, there are a significant number of scholars in Indian and Western academia whose careers and reputations are at stake. Aryan theories are also important for an academic field known as Indo-European Studies. Objections to Jha’s decipherment have come mainly from these quarters, though not all have been as intemperate as Michael Witzel’s. But the compulsions are the same.

There were other obstacles of a technical nature based on widespread misconceptions. One of these was with regard to the direction of writing— that it had to be from right-to-left. Unfortunately, even experienced scholars were guilty of a basic error: they failed to note whether what they were looking at was the writing itself (on the seals) or its impression on soft material like clay, which of course reverses the direction (as with rubber stamps). For example, I. Mahadevan’s widely used compilation commonly known as Corpus of Indus Script consists almost entirely of seal impressions, but this fact is rarely if ever noted by scholars (including Mahadevan).

The sum total of all this is that most reactions in the immediate aftermath of a major new departure from the accepted opinion tend to be uninformed and often little more than objections for being in conflict with the ‘consensus’. Nonetheless, we were by and large encouraged by the reactions of the public as well as of the scholarly world. Leaving aside extreme cases like Witzel, which cannot be justified on scholarly grounds, and the ideologically driven positions of historians like Romila Thapar, the reactions have ranged from the cautious to the enthusiastic. Scholarly publications like the two-volume Early Harappans and the Indus-Sarasvati Civilization, sponsored by the National Museum in Delhi have published our decipherment of the Harappan script as well as our identification of the Harappan civilization as Vedic.

Subsequent work

The title of the book Early Harappans and the Indus-Sarasvati Civilization may be seen as a tacit acceptance of our position that Vedic and the Harappan civilizations were one: Harappan archaeology represents the material remains of the civilization found represented in the Vedic literature. The now defunct academic position of separating Harappan archaeology from the Vedic literature even though the two flourished in the same geographical region and used similar motifs and symbols is no longer held by many scholars. It is also recognized that flora and fauna represented in Harappan imagery and iconography are the same as that described in the Vedic literature including the Rigveda.

The use of the term Indus-Sarasvati may be seen as recognition of this Vedic-Harappan convergence and rejection of the dichotomy between Vedic literature and Harappan archaeology. This goes beyond the fact that a majority of the so-called Indus (or Harappan) sites are found along the now dry Sarasvati rather than the Indus. In fact it recognizes the basic fact that the river Sarasvati was the symbol of the Vedic civilization. (So was the Harappan civilization, but the Harappan Sarasvati was in effect a mutation of the Rigvedic Sarasvati brought about by the gradual westward migration of the river’s course. See the author’s Sarasvati River and the Vedic Civilization for details.)

Following the publication of our book in 2000, Jha and I began work towards two other works, one a magnum opus consisting of readings of all available inscriptions and another on the interpretation of Harappan iconography against the background of Vedic thought. The first would be a technical exposition of the writing, the fundamentals of which we had already presented in our book, while the second would be a completely new investigation synthesizing the Vedic and Harappan symbolism and thought.

After a couple of years, by 2003 or so, it became clear to both of us that a magnum opus would shed little new light on the writing: not only the principles of the writing but also a substantial body of the vocabulary had already been explored and presented in our book. Many of the new readings were often little more than repetitions and different permutations and combinations of readings we had already presented. To be really meaningful, the research has to look beyond the Harappan script and trace the course of its influence on Indian, West Asian and Southeast Asian writing. This can only be a program for the future.

The second part of our program, investigating the Vedic and possibly other symbolism in Harappan archaeology requires going beyond the writing to iconography and explore its connections to symbolism in the whole gamut of Vedic literature— from the Rigveda to the Upanishads and beyond. A beginning was made in our book and Jha had carried it further, to some extent beyond the borders of India to West Asia and the Levant. The American Vedic scholar David Frawley has been pursuing an independent investigation of the Vedic-Harappan symbolism. Jha’s untimely death prevented what would have surely have been a fruitful collaboration. But the program is currently being carried forward by Frawley and this writer.

Conclusions

Natwar Jha contributed in a fundamental way to two important branches of knowledge— paleography and ancient civilization and culture. It would be doing less than full justice to his achievement to recognize him simply for his technical contribution, as the decipherer of an ancient script though that was the task in which I was closely associated with him. With the benefit of hindsight and from my singular vantage position, I would say that what made the hitherto silent Harappans yield their secret was the weight of Jha’s scholarship. Unlike in the case of the mathematical genius Ramanujan, there were no inexplicable flights of genius but much hard work by a scholar of vast knowledge and unbending perseverance laboring over a period of two decades.

The one flash of insight— his recognition that Harappan iconography was known to Yaska, the compiler of the Nirukta, was the result of his thoroughness and openness to unconventional ideas. If there was a flash of genius it manifested in this insight. But this too rested on a solid foundation of Vedic scholarship and owed nothing to luck. The same Mahabharata passage, like the examples of Vedic symbolism on Harappan artifacts, was there for all to see, but was dismissed by others before him as a fantasy. (In Lakhsman Swarup’s defense it must be said that Harappan iconography was not easily available when he brought out his edition of Yaska’s work. But other scholars in the past 50 years and more have no such excuse.) Jha, however, seized it and the rest is history.

With the death of Natwar Jha at the comparatively early age of 67 the world has lost a major scholar at the height of his powers. His legacy continues.

References

- Jha, N. 1996. Vedic Glossary on Indus Seals. Varanasi: Ganga-Kaveri Publishing House.
- Jha, N. 1997. ‘New Approach to the Study of the Indus Script and Language’, edited and translated with notes and comments   
  by N.S. Rajaram. Quarterly Journal of the Mythic Society LXXXVIII. 1 (January – March).
- Jha, N. and N.S. Rajaram. 2000. The Deciphered Indus Script: Methodology, readings, interpretation. New Delhi: Aditya 
  Prakashan.
- Rajaram, N.S. 1996. Jha’s Decipherment of the Indus Script. Quarterly Journal of the Mythic Society LXXXVII. 1 (October -  
  December).
- Rajaram, N.S. 1997. Decipherment of the Indus Script: A personal account. PRAJNA, Vol. 1, No. 3, July – September 1997.
- Rajaram, N.S. 2005. Connections between the Harappan seals and the Vedic literature,
- in In Search of the Vedic-Harappan Relationships, Ashwini Agarwal, editor.
- New Delhi: Aryan Books International, pages 135 – 41.
- Rajaram, N.S. 2006. Sarasvati River and the Vedic Civilization: History, science and politics. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan.
- Rajaram, N.S. 2006. Harappan language and script, in Early Harappans and Indus-
- Sarasvati Civilization, Volume II, edited by D.P. Sharma and Madhuri
- Sharma. New Delhi: Kaveri Books, pages, 473 – 493.
- Rajaram, N.S. and N. Jha. 1999. Harappan and pre-Harappan writing. Quarterly Journal Of the Mythic Society, Vo. XC, No. 3  
  (July – September 1999), pages 59 – 78.
- Rajaram, N.S. and N. Jha. 2006. Vedic Harappans and the horse symbolism, in Early Harappans and Indus-Sarasvati  
  Civilization, Volume II, edited by D.P. Sharma and Madhuri Sharma. New Delhi: Kaveri Books, pages, 494 – 507.