No Harappan Kalidas in sight

Illustration/Devdutt Pattanaik

We confuse literacy with wisdom. This is because when subjects like history and archaeology and linguistics were being invented in the 19th century, colonial scholars declared civilisation begins with writing.

This posed a problem for India.

The earliest writing was found on Ashokan edicts, which are 2,300 years old. Vedic people, who lived 3,000 years ago in the Ganga river basin, chose to transmit knowledge orally. A thousand years before that, in the Indus river basin, the Harappans used symbols to communicate, that is mostly likely not a script like the cuneiform of ancient Mesopotamia, or the hieroglyphic or ancient Egypt, that could be used to compose prose and poetry.

There was panic in India's intellectual circles. Surely India had a history? Surely Hindus gave civilisation to the world? No one asked - why did colonial scholars privilege "writing", and make "the written word" an indicator of civilisation? Why do they get to make the rules that clearly benefit them?

European colonists were Christians, though they insisted they were scientific, secular, objective humanists. God of Christians, hence of Jews and Muslims, always gave his commandments, via a prophet, in writing, as a book.

We do not live in the 19th century. We are not beholden to our erstwhile colonial masters. We are aware of their sinister motives behind their scholarship. We do not carry the burden of impressing anyone. We are not even that gullible society that once accepted the Brahmin claim that Vedic chants, transmitted by Brahmins themselves for 3,000 years, are timeless cosmic vibrations, divine revelations not of human origin, which (rather conveniently) declare Brahmins to be the head of human society. So, while we are striving to solve the mystery of the Indus script, we must not be defensive with suggestions that maybe it is not a script at all. Maybe just a fiscal system.

We can argue that these symbols were once used to write prose and poetry on cloth and bark and other perishable materials. But that is like Biblical enthusiasts insisting that the Exodus is a historical event whose evidence was washed away by Nile floods. So "absence of evidence" must not be taken as "evidence of absence". Such glib statements also give fodder to those who believe in alien invasions.

There are nearly 500 symbols, of which 50 are most commonly used. They usually occur in sets of 5-10. Statistical evidence has shown that they are clearly written in sequence. They are not random images. Some believe these were used to communicate sound, like alphabets. But the now increasingly popular idea is that they were used to communicate ideas, like mathematical symbols.

The symbols that we have today were clearly used in a mercantile context. They were never found in homes or graves, always at workshops and gates. They were mostly used to regulate logistics, the supply of special goods like red carnelian beads, or lapis lazuli much sought in Mesopotamia. They were perhaps also used to regulate distribution of food, or payment of taxes, or tithe to religious authorities. It was like a tax stamp or licence document, with information on issuing authority, commodity, tax rate, payment method, status of payment. This was the work of bankers more than poets. This thought perhaps upsets intellectuals most. Perhaps because they were looking for a Kalidas in Harappa or Dholavira.

The author writes and lectures on the relevance of mythology in modern times. Reach him at devdutt.pattanaik@ mid-day.com