More than 4000 years ago, a language of India died. This was before Vedic Sanskrit, which is the oldest known language of the sub-continent.
As questions rise as to who were the people of the Harappan Civilisation, so questions rise as what type of language they spoke.
Tantalising clues of the language are left behind in scripts, mostly on clay seals, potsherds and tablets excavated in over 100s of sites in India.
For us Indians, Sanskrit is the mother of languages – giving rise to some 16 languages and over 100 dialects to date. While some claim it to be a dead language, it is still the language of our religion and of our philosophy, and of our ancestors.
The beginning of Vedic Sanskrit goes back to 1500 BC, which is the accepted date of the Rig Veda, according to western scholars.
Vedic Sanskrit continued its output (the Samaveda, Yajurveda, Atharvaveda, Brahmanas and Upanishads) almost to the time of Christ where upon Indians’ great grammarian Panini put together his prescriptive Ashtdhyayi to start the Classical Sanskrit era.
If Sanskrit, now considered a “dead” language, was able to spawn a literary fest for almost 3000 years, what can be said of the language that preceded it? Recent archaeological evidence from one of the newer Harappan sites of Mehrgarh has established that it was part of a civilisation that extended in an unbroken sequence from the Neolithic (Stone Age) at the end of the eighth millennium BC, through the Chalcolithic (about 5000-3600 BC) and Early Harappan (about 3600-2600 BC) to the commencement of the Mature Harappan period in about 2550 BC.
That is at least 2500 years of unbroken post-Stone-Age civilisation, with an additional 2000 years of the Stone Age as the foundation of that civilisation.
For such a civilisation to exist a “high” language is required for its cohesion, its ability to trade and be involved in internal and external economic dealings and for it to be ruled with some semblance of a bureaucracy. There is evidence that trade was an essential element of the Harappan Civilisation.
Items of trade, including large vessels for holding liquids and other produce, bears seals that so far have been only deciphered as an intelligent measuring and marking and freighting system with a hint of it being something more than that.
Symbols on these seals are the only evidence so far of the language of these people and if there are other evidence of language (writings on palm leaves and animal skins) they are either long-gone or yet to be discovered. Of the spoken language of these people, there is nothing.
These short strings of symbols have earned the term Indus script (also Harappan script), in use during the Mature Harappan period, between the 26th and 20th centuries BC.
Some of these symbols continue to baffled and befuddle scholars particularly the recurring unicorn symbol. Other symbols and objects of bafflement are the ubiquitous fish, the three-headed animal, the “Soma” cylinder, the in-curved bowl, and several others with debatable names.
Soma, as you would know, was the drink of the gods, ambrosia par excellence that the god partook of before any major event, including war.
The sunken city of Dwarka, now an archaeological find named Bet Dwarka by the Indian Government, has revealed seals and earthen vessels with Mature Harrapan script – the same you would find in Mohenjo Daro, Harappa, Dhola Vira and Lothal.
Similarly, the Tamil Nadu Archaeological Department has found pots with arrow-head symbols during an excavation in Melaperumpallam near Poompuhar which bears a striking resemblance to seals unearthed in Mohenjo Daro in the 1920s. Other similar ancient inscriptions have been found in Sanur near Tindivanam in Tamil Nadu, Musiri in Kerala and Sulur near Coimbatore.
After 1900 BC, the systematic use of the symbols ended, after the final stage of the Mature Harappan civilization although a few Harappan signs have been claimed to appear until as late as around 1100 BC (the beginning of the Indian Iron Age). Please note that India had started working with iron in around 1800 BC which is mid-Bronze Age elsewhere.
The whole of the Indian sub continent had a civilisation of some note going back to at least 5000 BC. It was more than a million square kilometres in area, much larger than all the other ancient civilisations, except China, put together.
T
he Harappan civilisation began with some major developments like the introduction of writing and a surprisingly uniform culture over the whole of the sub-continent. Mayhap this is the Bharat that is talked of in our mythologies, and which we, the modern Indians, are only now beginning to grasp as a civilisation of note from scientific findings?
Note
There is a proposal to set up the sunken city of Dwarka (Bet Dwarka) as a museum. This involves laying a submarine acrylic tube through which visitors can view the ruins of the city. The State Government of Gujarat and the Travel & Tourism Department of Gujarat are working on this proposal. When completed, it will be the first museum to be built under the sea.
* Nalinesh Arun is a former Fiji journalist who lived in India for many years, and is now based in Christchurch