Iravatham Mahadevan Interview

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… >

Q: Let’s talk about your thoughts on the unicorn sign. What do you think about the unicorn sign and what it could designate and what it could mean? A: You mean the unicorn featured on the large seals. We still do not know exactly what animal it is. There is no animal with a single horn like it of course. It still is very likely that it is o… >

Q: How do you conceive of the relationship between the Indus culture that existed five thousand years ago and contemporary Dravidian culture here in South India? Prof. Dani, for example, says that doesn't believe that the Indus language was Dravidian because there is just not enough cultural continuity between what is today in South India and what was then in … >

Q: The last thing I'd like to ask you is about your work in early Tamil paleography, and how this is connected if at all to the Indus script work. A: The two are very different fields. The Indus script is a logographic script, which means that each sign stands for a whole word or a whole syllable. The Tamil script, which is an offshoot of t… >

Q: When you do get back to the Indus script, what are you hoping to do? A: I have some unpublished, rather unfinished papers. One of the things I want to get back to is whether I can fix the phonetic values of some signs. I have some leads, particularly concerning the phonetic values of the terminal signs, which are very important. If at le… >

Q [uestion, by Omar Khan]: Where were you born and where did you grow up? A [nswer, Iravatham Mahadevan]: Welcome to Madras Mr. Omar Khan. I am Iravatham Mahadevan. I am a native of this place.I was born in a village about 200 kilometers South of Madras, on the banks of the River Kaveri. I was educated in the nearby town of Tiruchirapalli. … >

A wide-ranging interview with Iravatham Mahadevan [1930-2018] home on January 17, 1998 with Omar Khan. The interview, held at Mr. Mahadevan's home in Chennai lasted nearly two hours and covered the Brahmi script, the cult object, various signs, his response to Asko Parpola's work. A reflection on a decades-long pursuit of the key to Indus writing by the most important India… >

A: My early writings were a little premature, I now realize. I was over-enthusiastic. Like most other scholars in the field, I realized as time went on that it is an extraordinarily difficult problem. And to begin at the end, I may say that I realize that I have not deciphered the Indus script and if I may so, it is extremely unlikely that I may do so in the r… >

A: Apart from my concordance, the only other work of note I could mention to you is my proposal that the mysterious cult object that you find before the unicorn on the unicorn seals is a filter. I have said this after studying in original more than a thousand unicorn seals in the Indian collections. According to me, the cult object is made of three parts, an u… >