The Madras Indus scholar

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.