Q: What do you think the relationship is between the Indus script and the Brahmi script, since you know both of them? A: Several scholars have said that there is a relationship between the two, that the Indus script survived and slowly became linear and ultimately lead to the Brahmi script. I do not at all believe in this theory. The Indus … >

Q: Do you believe that the Indus script represented a single language or could it have represented a multiple number of languages? A: This is a very interesting question. I will give you the parallel of the Chinese language. The Chinese have only one script but they have many mutually unintelligible dialects. Such a situation might have exi… >

Q: To have the same language over such a wide area and time, what does this imply about the political or social organization of the culture? A: To me one conclusion is irresistible. It is not a migrant civilization, it is not that a handful of settlers came and settled on the sea coast. This is a large, native, indigenous civilization. It i… >

Q: Don't you think they may have written on other objects, like palm leaves or cloth? A: This has been suggested by Parpola and others, that they probably wrote on cloth or on leaves like birch leaves. I do not know about the palm leaves, palm trees were there of course, but if they had written on palm leaves and they had used a bronze styl… >

Q: Lets come to the specific signs. What do you believe may be some of the best interpretations offered of certain signs? A: Like all Dravidian scholars, I too began with Father Heras. Father Heras was a Spanish Jesuit priest who worked in India and was a celebrated Professor of History in Bombay. It was his brilliant idea that the fish sig… >

A: As regards the other signs, the position is even weaker. There is the famous terminal sign, the most frequent sign, which occupies ten to twelve percent of all Harappan writing. This sign, popularly called the jar sign, is as popular as the letter "e" is in the English language. Q: What are your thoughts about the terminal sign of the In… >

A: Similarly the twin sign of this jar sign is what is called the arrow sign, or the lance sign. It is a twin functional in the sense that both these signs occur at the end, almost always after other signs which may represent names, so therefore it is another type of grammatical suffix. But one view is, like the one presently held by Parpola, that one is genit… >

Q: What about the signs where you have some very convincing thoughts, the trader and so forth. The logical basis that traders would have to be represented in some way on seals which were meant for trade makes sense. [See Mahadevan's "Indus Script Dictionary" for his speculations] A: It is a moot question whether the Harappans had castes lik… >

Q: What are your thoughts on Asko Parpola's work, its importance and where you disagree with him in general. A: Parpola's work is without doubt the most valuable contribution to date in the field of the Indus script. As I have mentioned in my latest paper, his work transcends linguistic boundaries. His contribution in publishing the first c… >