What the seals say
Rafia Zakaria —
IN the 1870s, Sir Alexander Cunningham, who founded the
Archaeological Survey of India, published some findings excavated at
Harappa. Among them was a curious object, a one inch by one inch piece
of smooth inscribed clay, buried in the ruins. The piece was not
polished and seemed to show the figure of a bull. Cunningham initially
thought that the seal was a foreign object.
In the years
to follow, however, a vast number of such seals were found; some were
believed to be attached to grain stores, showing what was in them;
others were engraved with fabric inscription patterns. All of them are
believed to belong to the Indus Valley Civilisation, whose beginnings
are dated to 8,000 years ago by some.
In recent days,
two controversies have brought the Indus Valley seals, forgotten and
neglected for sometime by all but archaeologists, back into the public
discourse. First, the entrenchment of Hindutva in India, and its
sometimes fanciful and politically expeditious reconstruction of Indian
history, has redefined the role of the seals. Adherents of Hindutva are
eager to claim the seals as precursors of Vedic/Sanskrit, allowing them
to situate themselves, and not the Dravidan/Tamil peoples, as true
Indians.
The politics of Hindutva are not the only brand of politics implicated by the Indus seals.
One recent iteration of this squabble took place a few weeks
ago, when Tamil nationalists clashed with police over the ban on the
sport of jallikattu. Hindutva supporters have argued that one of the
seals shows a man and a bull and establishes bullfighting (which was
banned by the Indian Supreme Court in 2014) as a Hindu sport. For their
part, rioting Tamil nationalists argue that it shows several men and a
bull and establishes the sport as Tamil. To bolster their claim, they
point to the supposed depiction of the sport in rock paintings in the
region that date back 3,000 years.
The intellectual
debate, which expectedly is influenced by the politics surrounding the
Indus seals, focuses on whether the script on them constitutes a lost
and as yet undeciphered language. With the advent of computers, complex
statistical techniques and algorithms are being used to search for
patterns in the pictorial depictions on the seals.
Two
researchers, Nisha Yadav at the Tata Institute in India and Rajesh Rao
at the University of Washington, have run different models that look for
just these patterns. In 2009, Rao published his findings, which
revealed that the arrangements of the symbols is not incidental but
intentional, suggesting that the symbols may constitute a script, one of
the last lost languages.
Rao then moved on to map the
position of certain symbols on the seals to create a predictive model.
Yadav used a similar technique, which she likens to the suggested
searches within search engines like Google. The results revealed that
certain symbols recurred in the same places, suggesting the existence of
a particular syntax. They also found that the script varied based on
the location where it was found, with seals found in the Mesopotamian
region differing from those found in the subcontinent. This, they
suggested, might imply that the same script (like alphabet) was being
used to write a different language.
Other researchers,
notably non-Indian, have been reticent to accept the claims that the
inscriptions on the Indus seals constitute an actual language, implying
that it may well be the current Indian political climate rather than
data that is pushing Rao and Yadav’s findings.
As
Melanie Locklear points out in an exhaustive article on the subject,
comparative historian Steve Farmer, computational theorist Richard
Sproat and philologist Michael Witzel have all argued that the script
does not constitute a language at all. As early as 2004, before Indian
historians were scrambling to establish that the seals made up a
language, the trio had even taken the unusual step of offering a reward
of $10,000 to anyone who would find a lengthy inscription beyond the two
or three grouped symbols. They never had to pay up. Locklear’s article
quotes Farmer as holding to that position “to view the Indus symbols as
part of an ‘undeciphered script’ isn’t a view anyone outside the highly
politicised world of India believes”.
The politics of
Hindutva are not the only brand of politics implicated by the seals.
With a good number of the around 3,500 seals found in Pakistan, the
frayed relationship between the two countries has played a role in the
estimation of the seals and of whether they constitute a script. It is
notable that the published volumes depicting the seals are separated
into two, not owing to what they say or any characteristic that is
peculiar to them, but rather based on whether they were found in
Pakistan or India. There is great irony in this, the hatreds of the
present determining the flavour and meaning of a very remote past.
Wishful
historians, or even just those curious about the character of the
country that is now Pakistan, cannot help but hope that Pakistan too
would spearhead inquiry into the meaning of the seals. With the story of
Pakistan as rife with squabbles and contestation as the battle over
jallikattu and the Indus scripts next door, this wish is unlikely to be
granted anytime soon. As for the Indus Valley Civilisation, it went into
decline around 1,900 BC. Likely starved by the disappearance of the
monsoon for almost two centuries, the population moved elsewhere,
diseases proliferated, natural catastrophes eliminated. The people gave
up, abandoned the cities and their seals — and what they had sought to
say was lost forever.
The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.
Published in Dawn, February 8th, 2017