What first propelled you to study the Indus script?
Early in the 1960s, I began working on the cave inscriptions of Tamil Nadu. They are the earliest records of not only Tamil but of any Dravidian language. So I spent several years visiting the caves, copying the inscriptions and published a number of papers. In between, I spent a dozen years in New Delhi, and became enchanted with the Indus script specimens I saw in the National Museum. Soon thereafter, I began working on it. In addition to the concordance* that I ultimately prepared in cooperation with computer scientists in Bombay, I have published a series of papers at three levels.
First, there are about half a dozen papers on the statistical analysis and such linguistic features as can be recognised without reading the language. Second, I began working on the meaning of some of the obvious ideograms. These are pictures of objects which can be recognised directly as representing a subject – like a man carrying a bow and arrow, who can be an archer. A human being with two horns may represent an important person or god, and so on. The other method is called 'rebus', that is, the transfer of sound from one picture which can be easily recognised to another word with the same sound but different meaning. The well-known example of this is the Dravidian min, which means fish, but also means star. So a fish can be drawn to indicate a star considered as a deity.
The concordance you created seems to have required a Herculean effort. Do you see any scope for further expansion?
The first concordance in the pre-computer age was made by Hunter, an Englishman in India who was in the Indian Educational Service. He aligned all the signs from their outward form and prepared the concordance. But subsequently more seals have been found at Mohenjodaro, Harappa and other new sites. [Finnish scholar] Asko Parpola and his colleagues have published a concordance; and in India, I, with the help of computer scientists at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, published our concordance. The first healthy sign is there is a lot of common ground between these three concordances. While more seals have been found, they only confirm what has been found earlier; the concordance shows that there is an underlying order. This order can come only from an underlying language.
I have gone further in my analysis, and I claim to have isolated two kinds of suffixes in the language – nominal suffixes at the end of names, and suffixes which indicate what are called 'cases'. We also know that the adjective appears before the noun it qualifies. Then, we know the numerals. Progress has also been made in discovering the direction of writing, which is mostly from right to left, with some exceptions. We can also segment words and phrases. Well, that is good progress. In my view, the Indian tradition, mythology, religion, history, folklore, art, etcetera form the Rosetta Stone for decipherment. We can apply what we know of the Indian tradition to the pictorial figures in the Indus seals and try to work out what they could have represented.