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… >

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… >