Philosophy of Symbolic Forms inMeluhha Cipher by Dr S. Kalyanaraman (Herndon: Sarasvati Research Center, 2014).
Reviewed by Dr Shrinivas Tilak*
Introduction
For over a century, the Indus script has remained an enigma to scholars, academics, archaeologists, and historians. Claims of decipherment number in hundreds, though none has found consensus or acceptance among scholars. In 1996, Gregory L. Poesshl, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, surveyed over thirty extant claims and concluded that the script is likely to remain undeciphered. But Dr Srinivas Kalyanaraman does not share in Poesshl's pessimism. Back in 1822, Jean Francois Champollion had deciphered the Egyptian writing system (hieroglyphs) as a combination of phonetic and ideographic glyphs. Taking his cue from Champollion, Dr Kalyanaraman attempted to decipher the Indus script using the same approach and method to read phonetic hieroglyphs of ancient India in an earlier work: Indus Script Cipher: Hieroglyphs of Indian Linguistic Area (Chennai: Sarasvati Research Center, 2010).
In that work Dr Kalyanaraman (hereafter K) proceeded in the assumption that a solution to the Indus script puzzle lay in the trade and commercial activities of the people of the Sarasvati-Sindhu civilization. The people who produced the seals were mostly artisans of all sorts, from lapidaries (workers in gem stones), masons, miners, to smiths who worked on stones, ivory, shell, minerals, metals, and alloys of metals. They created the Indus writing system in order to record the details of their professional activities. They used a code and a code key (known as the rebus) to transform and transfer information and messages that were deliberately obscured so that the messages could not be read or understood even if they were intercepted. A cipher is a secret language invented to conceal the meaning of a message. Artisans and traders of the Indus area created the cipher and included it with the goods that were shipped (like including a font that you may have used to generate a file?). Their trade associates in other parts of the world who received the messages were able to securely decipher the text of the coded message by performing an inverse substitution using the code keys (rebus; see below and Tilak 2010 for more details).
K concluded that the set of glosses from the Indus linguistic area were crucial in the decipherment of the messages based on the repertoire of Indus artisans--lapidaries, miners, and smiths. The underlying language of the glosses which furnish the glyptic elements and concordant homonyms happened to be the Mleccha (also known as Meluhha)--the lingua franca of ancient India that had received inputs from other major language groups in India: Muņḑa, Sanskrit, and Dravidian. Mleccha was distinct only to the extent that it did not always employ the grammatically correct forms as speakers of Sanskrit (the language in which the Vedic canon and other sacred literature are preserved). The speakers of Mleccha are not generally described as belonging to one particular area or a social group, which suggests that they were spread all across the Indian cultural zone and constituted a substantial majority of the population of India. By profession they were traders, artisans, and metal workers. K also used evidence for the decipherment from coins and sculptural glyphs of the subsequent historical periods in India during which the glyphs of Indus script continued to be used (Kalyanaraman 2010: 40-41).
Philosophy of Symbolic Forms in Meluhha Cipher
In his latest book Philosophy of Symbolic Forms in Meluhha Cipher (2014) K shifts his focus from the Indus cipher to unravel (and decipher) the more comprehensive and wider Meluhha cipher with particular emphasis on the philosophy and hermeneutics of the signs and symbols employed in encoding the Meluhha cipher on the seals (p. 11). Following Ernst Cassirer (The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms); K proceeds on the hypothesis that a symbol is an object that represents, stands for, or suggests a particular idea, visual image, belief, action, or material entity. Symbols take the form of words, sounds, gestures, or visual images and are used to convey ideas and beliefs. For example, a red octagon is routinely employed as a symbol for ‘STOP.’ On a map, a picture of a tent might represent a campsite. A red rose symbolizes love. Hermeneutics is the science of discovering meanings and interpretations in ‘all those situations in which we encounter meanings that are not immediately understandable but require interpretive effort. This is because Homo sapiens are a symbol making as well as symbol using/misusing beings. A person (or a culture or a society) creates symbols as well as misunderstands them. K therefore is concerned with gathering evidence from the lexical repertoire of modern Indian languages that are cognate and continuous with the ancient Meluhha.
K’s attempt to ‘discover new meanings’ is ‘thus an ‘interpretive effort’ to identify meanings in the context of life-activities of Meluhha speakers of the Bronze Age and the cultural context of their lives (pp. 11-12). The result is a massive tome of over seven hundred pages cataloging densely packed information about the Meluhha--the people (alternatively referred to as Mleccha), their language Meluhha (alternatively referred to as Mleccha), and their life activities centered on production of stone and metal ware and trading it with the ancient Near East in the first three hundred pages. Eighteen lengthy appendices running well over four hundred pages provide additional materials on the topic.
Generally synchronic in approach, K’s approach concentrates on the phonology, morphology, and syntax of the modern representative languages of the Indic Sprachbund to find homonymic matches for symbols and signs occurring on the seals. Following Roman Jacobson, who first used the term Sprachbund in 1931, K describes ancient India as a ‘linguistic area’ in which languages belonging to more than one family show some traits in common. Reduplication (duplicating a morpheme or a word to coin new words or to produce semantic modification) is one such characteristic trait or feature of most languages that are part of the Indian Sprachbund. Reduplication may involve one or more of the following three different processes: echo formation, compounding, and word duplication. Following Murray B. Emeneau (1956) K suggests that reduplication may explain the presence of many homonyms in Mleccha/Meluhha language that enabled creation of symbolic forms of words significant in Meluhha hieroglyphs (pp. 272-273, 299-300).
Where necessary, K extrapolates possible morphemic changes into the past in order to hypothesize phonetic variants of Mleccha words as they might have been in various periods from ca. 4th millennium BCE. Toward that objective he relies on a number of primary sources that include Siḿharāja’s Prakŗti Rupāvatāra: A Prākŗta grammar based on the Vālmikīstra, vol 1 edited by E. Hulztsch, 1909 (p. 67). He also has recourse to grammars of Marathi, Braj, Sindhi, Hindi, Tamil, and Gujarati. Supplementary works he has used include Hemacandra’s Desīnāmamālā and Prākŗt Grammar of Hemacandra edited by P. L. Vaidya. Pischel’s Comparative Grammar of Prakrt Languages (1957). M. A. Mehemdale’s Historical Grammar of Inscriptional Prakrts and Alfred C. Woolner’s Introduction to Prakrt (1928) serve him as a guide for a more attentive study of relevant Prakrit words and expressions occurring in Sanskrit plays, poetry, and prose—both literary and inscriptional (p. 68).
Admittedly, despite its comprehensive scope Philosophy of Symbolic Forms in Meluhha Cipher is not a last word in the decipherment of the Meluhha cipher. To start with, there is a problem with declaring the word and meaning of ‘Meluhha’ as a linguistic category. Evidently, scholars will need to scrutinize and weigh carefully the vast evidence collected by Dr Kalyanaraman given the tentativeness of some of the matches made by him between pictures/signs on the seals and words as well as his selection of homonyms. This is in part because K had to do with the evidence of glosses as it is available from extant Indian language dictionaries. He did NOT attempt to reconstruct older forms of any of these glosses because he had no way of knowing which gloss (for a given semantic cluster) out of the available languages is the older phonetic form. He therefore paired such available semantic forms, one conveying the image of the glyptic from the seal and the other conveying the crypt message from the repertoire of artisans, stone-workers, and lapidaries (based on personal communication from Dr Kalyanaraman received on Sept. 5, 2010). Keeping this caveat in mind, let us proceed with the review.
Emergence and formation of Meluhha world and cipher
K argues that the onset of Bronze Age in the Sarasvati/Sindhu basin gave rise to several new technologies that ranged from cire perduecasting technique to production of alloys (bronzes/brasses/pewter) complementing arsenical copper. This development, in turn, necessitated the invention and development of a writing system, that later came to be known as Meluhha cipher as evidenced in the now extant corpora of over seven thousand inscriptions (p. 12). As a result, Meluhha/Mleccha language, Muņḑa, and Indo-Aryan language families constituted themselves into an Indic Sprachbund covering the landmass of India. Furthermore, demand for the stoneware and metalware across a wide area extending from Rakhigarhi in the Punjab and Daimabad in Maharashtra to Haifa (Israel) and the Levant in the ancient Near East necessitated long-distance travel trade by sea-faring artisans and merchants, which K describes as the ‘Tin Road’ (p. 688). Meluhha cipher was developed to create hieroglyphs in order to identify traded goods and processes using rebus method of representing similar sounding words of Meluhha, the lingua franca of the artisans. Evidence for this is discernible in over two thousand rebus lexical glosses of Meluhha and over one thousand unambiguously written-down, engraved, incised, or sculpted hieroglyphs in the corpora. K argues that these written symbolic forms relate to, and are continuous with, most languages of Indic Sprachbund (p. 21).
Meluhha/Mleccha: the founding people of India (Bhāratam janam)
K argues that the term Mleccha occurs in the context of speech (bhāşā) and country/region (deśa). Mleccha constituted an integral and dominant part of the community that the Ŗgveda knows as Bhāratam janam (the people of the nation of Bhārata (3:53.12) (p. 85). The lands designated as Mleccha-deśa included not only areas in which non-Aryan languages were spoken but also those Indo-Aryan-speaking areas which were regarded as religiously unorthodox. This may explain why Magadha was known as Mleccha-deśa (whether the language of that area was a form of Indo-Aryan or not), whereas to the Buddhists the term meant primarily areas in which non-Aryan languages were spoken. Thus, there was a good deal of bilingualism and diglossia in ancient India (p. 63). Mleccha as a language evolved among casters of metal (bhāratiyo) many of whom lived in dvīpa(land between two rivers—Sindhu and Sarasvati—or islands on Gulf of Kutch, Gulf of Khambat, Makran coast and along the Persian Gulf region of Meluhha)(p. 9).
Amarkośa defines Mleccha as the forest people and in other texts people known as Abhira, Kirāta, Śabara, Pulinda, Āndhra, Pundhra, Drāviḑa, Lāţa, Barbara, Pallava, Śaka, Yavana, and Siḿhala are designated as Mleccha, Milakkha, or Milakkhu. The Mahābhārata refers to them collectively as nānāmlecchagaņa (1:165.35-37) (p. 43). According to Matysa Purāņa (10:7), King Veņa was the ancestor of the Mlecchas and according to the Mahābhārata (12:59.101-103), Veņa was a progenitor of the Nişāda dwelling in the Vindhya mountains. Nirukta (3:8) includes Nişāda among the five peoples mentioned in the Ŗgveda (10:53.4), citing Aupamanyava; the five peoples are Brāhmaņa, Kśatriya, Vaiśya, Ṡūdra, and Nişāda. Pāņini mentions Nişāda gotra in the Gaņapāţha (Aşţādhāyyī 4:1.100) (pp. 14-15).
Meluhha/Mleccha language: lingua franca of ancient India
A narrative account from the Ṡatapathabrāhmaņa (3:2.1.22-28) provides evidence for existence of a proto-Indian language which had dialectical variants in the usage by the Asuras and Devas (i.e. those who do not perform yajnaand those who do using speech (vāc). Subsequently, this variation is discernible in the division of the Mleccha vācas and Ārya vācas proposed by Manu (10:45) who declared Coda, Drāviḑa, Pallava people as former Kśatriyas that had sunk to the level of Ṡūdra, whether they spoke the language of the Mleccha or the language of Ārya. Thus, Mleccha speakers and Indo-Aryan speakers belong to the same language group but with a tendency to deploy dialectical phonetic variations. Pāņini semantically associates Mleccha with indistinct speech (7:2.18)(38-40) and comments on its imprecise nature (mlecche avyakte śabde1:205)(p. 84). Patanjali elaborates Pāņini’s distinction between lingua franca and literary version of the language with reference to (1) grammatically correct literary language and (2) ungrammatical, colloquial speech (deśῑ) which Pāņini had identified as Samskŗta and Prākṛta (p. 45). He then adds the following characteristics of Meluhha speech: use of ungrammatical forms of words (mlecchah ha vai eşah yat apaśabdaḩ); dialectical variants or unrefined sounds in words (mlecchitavai na apabhaşitavai). He concludes with an advice to learn rules of (Sanskrit) grammar in order to avoid descending to the level of Mleccha (mlecchitam viśpaşţena iti eva anyatra; mlecchaḩ mā bhūma iti adhyeyam vyākaraņam (pp. 35-36).
Rebus: principle and method
K employs the rebus method that had already been employed with Egyptian hieroglyphs using existing symbols, such as pictograms, for their sounds regardless of their meaning, to represent new words. In rebus method, it is common to find the use of the numeral 8 to stand for the verbal form ‘ate’ or a syllable with that sound; 4 for ‘for;’ and 2 for ‘to or too.’ So, we can have: gr + 8 = great; 4 + T = fort; 2 + L = tool. To this extent, the ancient rebus method has some common ground with the contemporary texting language known as txt or txtspk. Many ancient writing systems used the rebus principle to represent abstract words, which otherwise would be hard to be represented by pictures (pictograms). Rebus also uses words pronounced alike (homophones) but having different meanings: the word ‘club’ for instance, which may have the meaning of a weapon or a group depending upon the context.
K argues that almost every single glyph or glyphic element of the Meluhha script may be read rebus using the repertoire of artisans (lapidaries working with precious shell, ivory, stones, and terracotta, mine workers, metal smiths working with a variety of minerals, furnaces, and other tools) who created the inscribed objects and used many of them to authenticate their trade transactions. Many of the inscribed objects were used as calling cards of the professional artisans, listing their professional skills and repertoire and/or repertoire of kani, supercargo for a boat shipment (p. 86).
Contribution to Indology
K posits that use of the rebus method enabled Meluhhans to encode on the stamp seals three orders of information: (1) inscription—describing the bill of lading of a stone-ware or metal-ware consignment; (2) animalistic icon such as a unicorn (realistic or imaginary)—identifying the particular turner’s or brazier’s workshop that produced the consignment; and (3) a standard device (that looks like a lathe or a furnace)--specifying the technical details of the method employed in the production. The Indus hieroglyphic writing system played a significant role in advancing ancient India’s cultural interactions with the Ancient Near east. K reviews the development of glyphic art, adaptation of metallurgical practices, trade in minerals and metals by seafaring merchants traversing an expansive cultural area from Sarasvati river basin to the Levant in the ancient Near East. With painstaking details he narrates how trade loads were conveyed to agents across a vast area extending from Rakhigarhi in the Punjab to Daimabad in what is now Maharashtra via areas that are now part of the state of Gujarat to Altyn-tepe and Susa in the Middle East. He also discusses how hieroglyphs of writing system were improvised and sets of hieroglyphic ligatures were created to communicate messages involving multiple transaction types (pp. 185-186). In the process of giving a comprehensive account of the ancient Meluhhas and their life activities K’s latest monograph reveals several insights that will have bearing on the various fields of Indology—from linguistics to culture, sociology, and economics. In what follows I discuss some of them:
Meluhha cipher and sphoţa
It is to K’s credit that he has brought to the forefront the ancient indigenous doctrine of sphoţa in proposing a philosophy and hermeneutics of the symbolic forms in Meluhha cipher. V.S. Apte’s Sanskrit lexicon defines sphoţa as (1) breaking forth, bursting or disclosure; and (2) an idea that bursts out or flashes on the mind when a sound is uttered. Sphoţa is a meaning unit from which meaning bursts forth and is expressed (Pāņini 6:1.123) through two simultaneous linguistic symbolic forms: ‘heard sound’ and ‘seen/perceived image’ (p. 572). Meluhha as speech is recognized in two symbolic forms: (1) glosses of Meluhha; and (2) image-able glosses of Meluhha. Thus, when sphoţa‘bursts forth’ in consciousness; a young bull is imaged as a kondh. Simultaneously, the gloss kőnda‘engraver, lapidary setting or infixing gems’ (Marathi) and/or kūdār‘turner’ (Bengali) flashes forth as sound utterance related to a specific life activity of the artisan guild involved--kol. Writing is born when this ‘image’ is represented in two- or three dimensional frame of a seal, a tablet, or a three dimensional frieze on a wall (p. 575). K then proceeds to present evidence of such flashes of the mind expressed as Meluhha hieroglyph symbolic forms (p. 130).
Put differently, as a hieroglyph, sphoţa reveals two things simultaneously: it manifests word-sound (śabda) and simultaneously, it reveals the word-meaning. The underlying assumption is that when the writer writes down an epigraph or inscribes features on an image, he signifies his mental image (symbolic form of recorded sound sequence or recorded image) in two- or three-dimensional forms. According to K, such a recorded image (in human neural networks) is likely to be a rebus representation of Meluhha words used in the cultural context; and this context enables modern reader in his/her cultural context to recollect related Meluhha words and ‘meaningful’ sentences. Because the hypothesized cipher is rebus, there should be at least two Meluhha words which should match: Meluhha word signifying an image; Meluhha language word signifying uttered or heard sound in the cultural context of the Meluhha environment related to Meluhha life-activities (pp. 269-270).
While the word is the integral sphoţa, its meaning is vikalpa--a mental construct that comes along with the knowledge of the word. This meaning (vŗtti) is of three kinds: primary significative power (śakti), secondary meaning (lakşaņā), and suggestion (vyańjana). The identity and the superimposition of word and meaning are in the mind. Strictly speaking, the existence of the meaning, as well as that of the word, is only in the mind.
Thus, by definition, sphoţa is rebus, i.e. a cipher, a means by which word knowledge is manifested and communicated in ordinary vocal conversations. Since hieroglyphs are picture-forms, the conversations can also occur in writing (p.196). Since rebus uses two words with the same form but different senses, words in such a pair are homonyms and therefore become ideal candidates for building up rebus as a cipher (p. 197). The cipher rebus readings of Meluhha hieroglyphs would therefore demonstrate the possibility of describing what is on the phonetic rectoseparately from describing what is on the conceptual verso. Meluhha hieroglyph of elephant, for instance, makes it possible to describe the shape of the animal—phonetic ibba–evoking description of the sphoţa which links the conceptual verso—truth of ibbo‘merchant.’ Thus, the image of written-down value of sound and thought of trade get intertwined in the neural network. One who has been taught which words mean what can perceive the rectoas verso—sound with sense (p. 558).
In order to understand what a knight ‘means’ in chess one needs to know its role in the game. To be sure, one can still distinguish between the wooden or ivory knight and a corresponding concept (the concept of a ‘chess knight.’ For K this is the crux of the argument providing the cipher for Meluhha hieroglyphs. The concept of a Meluhha ‘elephant’ connects in the writer’s and the reader’s mind the known language gloss: ibba‘elephant’ with the homonyms ibbo‘merchant’ and ib‘iron.’ Thus there is a mental operation, a thought process in the mind which links the image ‘elephant’ with a similar sounding word (a homonym) meaning iron merchant. Thus, thought and language are intertwined in the Meluhha artisan trade transactions recorded in writing. To ask what the ‘elephant’ means on a Meluhha epigraph is to ask for an elucidation of the life-activity of the Meluhha writer and reading it hermeneutically as trading in iron. It is this indivisibility which is consistent with the Saussurean doctrine of identifying the signal (significant) and signification (signifiė). It is therefore impossible to separate the sound ib‘iron’ or ibbo‘merchant’ from the thought ibha‘elephant’ which flashes in the brain of both writer and reader Meluhhan as sphoţa (p. 558).
Reawakening to Indic Sprachbund
K laments that the Indic Sprachbund, which came into being circa 6500 years ago and continues to the present day, has largely gone unnoticed by scholars and Indian alike; like the postman in the story ‘The Innocence of Father Brown’ by G.K. Chesterton (pp. 82, 95). He therefore proposes an alternative--Bronze Age Linguistic Doctrine--to the Aryan Invasion Linguistic Doctrine that would also explain the essential semantic unity of ancient Indian languages that subsequently evolved. He lists numerous cognate metallurgical terms invented or coined during the Bronze Age that were adopted within the Indic Sprachbund cutting across Muņḑa, Dravidian, and Indo-Aryan language families (p. 689). K next energetically rebuts the claim made by Steve Farmer, Richard Sproat, and Michael Witzel in Electronic Journal of Vedic Studies that Harappans were illiterate (2004: 19-57). Drawing upon Massimo Vidale (2007) he faults Witzel et al for assuming that the ‘signs’ of the Indus script have to be syllabic or alphabetic. He chides them for ignoring the possibility that Indus seals could bear logographs bearing the images of crocodile, tiger, buffalo etc which could have been read rebus as Meluhha hieroglyphs (p. 666).
Agreeing with Vidale K insists that it is a cop out on the part of Witzel et al to assume that ‘signs’ as distinct from ‘pictorial motifs’ have to be either alphabets or syllables resulting in inscriptions longer than five signs’ (p. 666). He argues that as a device based on the power of allusion; rebus uses pictures to represent words or parts of words. As a cipher, the rebus method consists of at least two vocables (a sememe or a word that is capable of being spoken and recognized meaningfully): one vocable denoting the picture and the other similar sounding vocable denoting the solution to the puzzle, that is, the cipher. Meluhha hieroglyphs therefore constitute a rebus (p. 661). A cultural context which created a cipher of logographs read rebus in Meluhha language should accordingly be deemed literate (pp. 661-662). We have ‘lost’ Meluhha hieroglyph laments K, because we call them ‘undeciphered,’ i.e. the admission that the significance of the hieroglyphs is no longer understood (p. 655).
K’s claim that the present day Indian linguistic area is continuous with the ancient Indic Sprachbund and Sarasvati Sindhu civilization finds some support in the postulation of an Indian linguistic zone by a number of scholars including F. B. J. Kuiper (1967); Murray B. Emeneau (1956), and F. C. Southworth (2005) who too hypothesize that the ancient versions of Indian languages constitute the root of the Indian linguistic zone (Sprachbund) as it exists today. This means that at least some of present-day languages likely retain memories of the glosses of pictographs and signs employed in the Indus writing system (p. 214). With this hypothesis as his starting point, K delineated the language/s that the artisans were likely to be familiar with using the pool of words drawn from a work that he had published earlier: The Indian Lexicon(Kalyanaraman 1992). This move enabled him to provide the glosses for matching words with Indus script's glyphic elements by identifying homonyms which clarified and confirmed the message content of inscriptions. To K's surprise, the semantic clusters that emerged as well as the sets of homophones matching the pictures and signs used in the Indus script, principally related to the work of artisans--working with precious stones and those working with minerals, metals, alloys, smithy, smelters, furnace types and forges (p. 218).
Friezes depicting the dream of Queen Māyā
K hypothesizes that Meluhha hieroglyphs dating from the Sarasvati-Sindhu civilization of the Bronze Age are continuous with art forms and the historical narratives of subsequent centuries. Harappan craftsmen produced figurines such as the famous dancing girl using the process and technique known as cire perdue: an initial model was made of wax, then quickly coated with clay; once fired (which caused the wax to melt away), the clay hardened into a mold, into which molten bronze was later poured. A wide variety ornaments were thus produced: pendants, bangles, beads, rings, or necklace parts which we find duly reproduced in various art forms since then (p. 162).
The dream of Queen Māyā, mother of prince Siddhārtha (the future Buddha), is preserved both in ancient sacred texts and sculptures. K’s contribution lies in his reading rebus some of the hieroglyphs employed in such sculptures and texts which tend to be ignored in most standard accounts of the dream. In her dream Māyā saw an elephant entering her womb from the right side. King Śuddhodana and the court Brahmins interpreted the dream and announced that a son would be born to her who would either become a world ruler or a great spiritual teacher. K points out that the presence of many hieroglyphs in the friezes and sculptures depicting Māyā’s dream are a continuum from the ancient Meluhha culture and tradition (p. 483).
In one such frieze from Nagarjunkonda (2ndcentury CE, National Museum, New Delhi) depicting Queen Māyā’s dream K detects four hieroglyphs that for him suggest continuity to the writing systems from the days of Meluhha culture. These are: stack of straw, a scribe, a bull ligatured to a crocodile (makara), and two antelopes ligatured back-to-back. The engraver/scribe is shown holding a wedge. K relates the phrase tanama mleccha to (1) tah’nai, ‘engraver’ Mleccha; or (2) tana,‘of (Mleccha lineage) and reads rebus the young ligatured bull as (1) khőņḑa (Telugu) = ‘young bull calf’ and (2) Kὁnda (Marathi) ‘engraver, lapidary setting or infixing gems.’ He reads rebus the crocodile ligatured to the bull (kāru) as khar (blacksmith) (Kashmiri). Alternatively, the bull is ḑangar which K reads rebus as ḑangar= blacksmith (Hindi). The two antelopes joined back-to-back suggest pusht‘back’ which K reads rebus as pusht = ancestor. The antelope (or ram) could also denote tagara (Tamil) which K reads rebus as ţagara = tin. A pair in Kashmiri is dula which K reads rebus as dul = cast metal (Muņḑa). Thus the pair of antelopes on the top register of the frieze denotes ‘tin smith artisan’ (dulţagara; pp. 483-486).
Armed with this data and analysis, K posits that Queen Māyā was the daughter of King Anjana of the Koliyas, a community working in iron (kol = working in iron, Tamil) (P. 484-485). She was married to King Ṡuddhodana who ruled over the Sakyas, a warrior tribe living next to the Koliyas (494). The signifier of Māyā’s dream is an elephant (ibha in Meluhha and in Sanskrit). Rebus reading provides the signified: ib = iron. This is a kernel of the life-activities of Māyā’s clan--Koliya (Koles) who are iron workers of yore from several generations. Māyā’s unconscious thought was conditioned by the life of iron workers and smelters who were associated with her lineage and identified as such by the product of their labor, ib = iron (P. 673).
Processions and fairs
Utsava bera refers to the old tradition of taking divine images in a procession, which is prevalent in most parts of India even today. Archaeological context of Meluhha hieroglyphs provides many such instances of animals and scepters held aloft in processions. K speculates that these processions were trade-fairs, advertising and celebrating artisanal competence displayed by artifacts signified by the images or symbolic forms on scepters or flag posts. One such celebration is called Konḑahabba of Lingavants (Lingayats), a community venerating linga in contemporary Karnataka, which K notes is attested in Sarasvati-Sindhu civilization as a celebration of the life-activities of the lapidaries/smiths (p. 398). In tablets showing such processions as a festival ceremony, we come across two hieroglyphs carried as standards: one-horned bull + the standard device (lathe) (pp. 398-399). K reads the two related words rebus as kőda sāgāḑῑ = metals turner-joiner (forge); worker on the lathe—associates (guild). Etyma from Meluhha point to khoņḑas a square (Santali). K speculates that this khoņḑ‘square’ could have been used to celebrate Koņḑahabba (lit. festival held in a khoņḑ = square). Devotees walk on a bed of burning embers in fulfilment of their vows. Such a bed of burning embers might have been laid on the square linking two pillars shaped like a śivalingathat have been found at Dholavira. The significance attached to the word khoņḑ may explain the local name of Dholavira today--Kotḑa. K therefore concludes that the religious practices of the people of civilization of Mohenjodaro, Harappa, Kalibangan (where a terracotta śivalinga has been found) and Dholavira are represented by the continuum of Koņḑahabba celebrates by Lingavants (Lingayats) today (p. 399). This explanation of Koņḑahabba festival is intriguing and I wonder if there is any link with the folk deity known as Khandoba with its center of worship at Jejuri in Maharashtra?
K notes in passing that for Meluhhans a smithy was a temple which is evident in the lexeme kole.l of Kota language which means both smithy and temple and that such a gestalt may explain why Hindu Āgamas (manuals of worship) prescribe specific procedures for invoking divinities that come adorned with metallic weapons in their multiple hands (p. 399). This is a remarkable observation that needs to be further investigated and studied.
Meluhha subalterneity
K’s monograph makes it clear that while there were rich and prosperous Meluhha traders and merchants the vast majority of Bhāratam janam were simple stone masons, metal workers, and others that worked as members of different guilds (śreņis). They had to occupy a lower ritual and social status for abandoning norms of Dharma and for engaging in ungrammatical or colloquial speech. This Meluhha social ethos is somewhat akin to ‘subaltern ethos,’ a contemporary expression loosely derived from the writings of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci for whom the term subaltern designated nonelite or subordinated social groups. A group of modern Indian scholars (led by Ranjit Guha) uses it similarly (Guha 1982). They also routinely invoke the idiom of recent European theories of interpretation to conceptualize the problem of subalterneity as well as solutions to it. The major thrust of their argument is that in colonial India there were two entrenched elite groups: (i) the European elites, mostly British capitalists, industrialists, plantation managers, financiers, merchants, the civil service, and missionaries; and (ii) their junior Indic counterparts in these fields. All others, according to Ranjit Guha (and Partha Chatterji, Gyan Pande, and Gail Omvedt), could legitimately be identified as subalterns.
Although the goals and ambition of the Subaltern Studies group have been relatively better articulated, it is still without a clearly defined philosophical or hermeneutical foundation. Most of its insights have come from (i) postulating a dichotomy between the élites and subordinates in terms of class hegemony and the struggle for status, power, and wealth; and (ii) assuming an eternal conflict for supremacy between the two antagonists. The use of Subaltern Studies as a distinct methodology for studying Indic history is, however, problematic given the fact that this scholarship is an unwieldy mixture of Marxist, Structuralist, Post-Structuralist, Anthropological, and linguistic approaches that generates the old problem of the self-referential paradox: using the instruments of rational Western scholarship based on Westernbourgeois thought. Their analysis depends upon the very paradigm they are attacking leading them into a cul-de-sac intellectually. Scholars therefore must look for a genuinely critical reflection on subaltern conditions, which is more likely to be found in Indic sources (this discussion is based on Tilak 2007: 241ff). Given this record of Subaltern Studies group in India, K’s endeavor to reveal and analyze the cultural and economic dimensions of the Meluhha/Mleccha subaltern ethos using relevant indigenous material in available Indic inscriptional, archaeological, and textual sources is commendable and needs to be closely examined.
Samudramanthan: a metaphor for trade across the oceans
The core story of samudramanthana as found in the Purāņas is that Devas and Asuras churned the cosmic ocean (kşīrasāgara) with the Meruparvata as the churning rod and Vāsuki, the cosmic snake, as the rope in order to obtain the pitcher full of nectar (amṛtakuḿbha). For K, Ṡankarācārya’s commentary on Bṛhadārņyakaupanişad (1:3.1) provides a more useful and practical insight into the identity of Devas and Asuras and the nature of relationship between them by considering the two as organs of speech. They become divine (Deva like) when they shine under the influence of thoughts and actions as taught by the scriptures. Those very organs become demonic (Asura like) when they come under the influence of their natural thoughts and actions, based only on perception and inference, and directed merely towards the attainment of worldly ends (p. 216).
In the process of churning the cosmic ocean, fourteen gems (ratnas) emerged out of the ocean which the Devas managed to appropriate for themselves. Elsewhere I have argued that the ‘gems’ are a metaphor for new ideas and items that Indians obtained through trade and commerce with other peoples and nations mostly because Asuras were excellent astronomers, sea-farers, builders, and skilled in warfare. Maya’s Sūryasiddhānta (a text on astronomy dating from fifth century) states that while Indians (Devas) inhabit the northern hemisphere, numerous diasporic Indians (Asuras; also known as Daityas) inhabit the southern hemisphere. If Devas (Suras) were Indians who followed Dharma, Asuras were those Indians who had forsaken Dharma or had neglected to observe its key elements out of greed or hubris. Asuras (with their leader Maya) either voluntarily (like Maya) or involuntarily (like Bali) left (or were forced to leave) India and settled in lands outside India from where they continued to engage in trade and cultural exchanges with their Indian homeland (see Tilak 2009).
K alludes to the Puranic theme of samudramanthan only on passant noting that it stands for working with resources to create wealth as did seafaring merchants who engaged in trade on the across seas. Referring to a frieze in Kanchi Kailāsanātha temple showing Dhanvantari carrying the jar of nectar from the churned ocean, K believes that it stands for an accomplishment of Asura/Deva joint mission to gather the resources from across the oceans. He reads rebus Dhanvantari’s jar as rim-of-jar motif and hieroglyph (karņī) as supercargo (pp. 632-634).
Tin Road
From his study K deduces that Meluhha speakers produced quality artifacts that had significant exchange value and which as such could be traded across with regions of ancient Near East and Fertile Crescent (p. 560). In support, he refers to a passage in Tantravārttika where Kumārila, a Mīmāḿsā philosopher, refers to the Mlecchas who engaged in empirical transactions (dŗşţārthavyavahāra) in the domains of culture, astronomy, or drama (p. 297). Referring to the road that stretched from Meluhha to ancient Near East and beyond upto Haifa (Levant of Fertile Crescent) Elam, Susa, Persian Gulf, Ashur to Kanesh/Nesh (Anatolia or modern Turkey), K suggests that it was ‘Tin Road.’ Beginning in the mid-third millennium BCE, ancient Sumerian and Akkadian cuneiform sources frequently mention two foreign lands: Makkan and Meluhha, Makkan is the southern shore of the Persian Gulf denoting Arabia and Meluhha denoting modern Iran and India (p. 78). Avasyaka Chūrņī, a Jaina text, notes that ivory trade was managed by Mleccha merchants who traveled from Uttaravaha to Dakşiņapatha. Guţţila Jātaka, too, makes reference to itinerant ivory workers/traders journeying from Varanasi to Ujjain (p. 222).
For this reason I find K’s re-interpretation of samudramanthan worthy of further study. Hopefully he will write a monograph on samudramanthanas a metaphor for trade and cultural diffusion as well as cultural infusion through maritime activities between India and the world. A few years ago I came across a news report from Kolkata to the effect that an award named “Samudra Manthan” has been instituted to recognize excellence in export/import by Indian manufacturing and commercial firms. Gateway Terminals India (GTI), the youngest container terminal of Jawaharlal Nehru port, said the report, received “Container Terminal of the Year” award at India International Maritime & Logistics Expo ’09 held in Mumbai on April 18, 2009. “Samudra Manthan” award was presented to GTI for its excellence in performance; innovation, operational efficiency, and the world class infrastructure (see Tilak 2009).
Tradition of science and technology
Archaeologists, anthropologists, and historians of Indian religions and civilization have tended to concentrate on the mysterious and religious dimensions of the Indus Valley Civilization. Their methodology is predicated upon the colonial and orientalist discourse which was framed within the category of difference: We versus them, European versus Indian. The Indian was not simply different from the European, but his exact inverse. The Indian is magical, mystical, and mythical; whereas the European is rational, scientific, and ethical. Indologists of today therefore hesitate to visualize or to consider the possibility that a highly developed component of science and technology in the ancient civilization of India, such as Dr Kalyanaraman's work suggests, could have existed in ancient India. It should also be remembered in this context that Queen Māyā came from the Koliya community (discussed above).
In 1986 the late George Dales of the University of California at Berkeley established the Harappan Archaeological Project (HARP). This multidisciplinary study effort consists of archaeologists, linguists, historians, and physical anthropologists and is led by Jonathan Mark, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where he teaches archaeology and ancient technologies. Kenoyer, who serves as co-director of the project, was born and raised in Shillong, India, and went on to receive his advanced degrees from the University of California at Berkeley. He has recreated many of the craft technologies used by the people of Harappa, including an ancient process of creating faience ceramics, which is very complex and technical requiring the grinding and partial melting of quartz using a consistently high temperature of 940 Celsius. The result was similar to that of the artifacts recovered from Harappa (see Tarini Carr 2010).
Recent excavations show that iron was produced in India possibly as early as in 1800 BCE with its use becoming widespread from about 1000 BCE. While late Vedic texts mention a ‘dark metal’ (kṛşņāyas), earlier texts (such as the Ŗgveda) spoke of āyas, which, it is now accepted, referred to copper or bronze (p. 162). Loha(literally red) is used as a general term where the individual application is not always sharply differentiated. This comprehensiveness is evident from the classification of loha as jātilohan (natural metal), vijātilohan (produced metal), kiţţimalohan(artificial i.e. alloyed metal), and piśāca (metal from the Piśāca district (p. 157). Iron-smelting thus was an ancient craft in which many communities participated including the Kols, the Āgaria (whose name is derived from āg = fire), and loharswho worked on iron and smelting it. ‘Iron earth’ was obtained either from the surface or by digging and smelted in workshops. In the Rajmahal hills and Santal Parganas there were larger forges indicating organized, large-scale, and long-term smelting of iron. In Odisha, Patuas and Juangs created iron of the best quality (pp. 422-423). This leads K to conclude that while the Sarasvati-Sindhu civilization belonged to the Bronze Age, its successor, the Ganga civilization, which emerged in the first millennium BCE, belonged to the Iron Age.
In Philosophy of Symbolic Forms in Meluhha Cipher K expresses the hope that further researches in language studies will unravel the structure, form, and evolution of the Meluhha/Mleccha parole that will also sustain the claim of the existence of a unified cultural framework of India from ancient times (p. 60). Hopefully, experts in the field of language studies will extend a helpful hand to Dr S. Kalyanaraman in this worthwhile endeavor.
References
Carr, Tarini J. 2010. “The Harappan Civilization.” Archaeology on Line. Accessed on August 28, 2010.
Guha, Ranajit. 1982. “On Some Apects of the Historiography of Colonial India.” Subaltern Studies.“(1982): 1–8.
Emeneau, Murray B. 1956. India as a linguistic area. Languagevol. 32 (1956): 3-16.
Kalyanaraman, S. 1992. The Indian Lexicon. .
Kalyanaraman, S. 2010. Indus Script Cipher. Chennai: Sarasvati Research Centre.
Kenoyer, Jonathan. 1998. Ancient Cities of the Indus Valley Civilization. Oxford, New York. Oxford University Press.
Kenoyer, Jonathan. 2003. Uncovering the keys to lost Indus cities. Scientific American (July 2003): 67
Kuiper, F. B. J. 1967. “The genesis of a linguistic area.” Indo Iranian Journal vol 10 (1967): 81-102.
Possehl, Gregory L. 1996. The Indus Age: The Writing System. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Southworth, F. C. 2005. Linguistic archaeology of South Asia. London: Routeledge-Curzon. http://www.Harappa.com
Tilak Shrinivas. 2007. Understanding karma in the light of Paul Ricoeur’s philosophical anthropology and hermeneutics. Charleston, NC: BookSurge.
Tilak, Shrinivas. 2009. “India and South America: Maritime and Cultural Contacts in Ancient Times.” Paper presented at the seminar organized by the International Centre for Cultural Studies, Nagpur and held in Mumbai on November 17, 2009.
Tilak Shrinivas. 2010. “Solving the Indus Script Puzzle: Review of Indus Script Cipher by Dr S. Kalyanaraman.
http://tilak.sulekha.com/blog/post/2010/09/solving-the-indus-script-puzzle.htm
http://tilak.sulekha.com/blog/post/2010/09/solving-the-indus-script-puzzle.htm
Vidale, Massimo. 2007. “The collapse melts down: A reply to Farmer, Sproat and Witzel.” East and West (57): 333–366.
Witzel, Michael et al. “The collapse of the Indus script thesis: the myth of a literate Harappan civilization.” Electronic Journal of Vedic Studies (EJVS), 11,2, 2004: 19-57.
*Dr Shrinivas Tilak (PhD History of religions, McGill University, Montreal, Canada) is an independent researcher based in Montreal, Canada. His publications include The Myth of Sarvodaya: A study in Vinoba's concept (New Delhi: Breakthrough Communications 1984); Religion and Aging in the Indian Tradition (Albany, N. Y.: State University of New York Press, 1989), Understanding karma in light of Paul Ricoeur's philosophical anthropology and hermeneutics (Charleston, SC: BookSurge, revised, paperback edition, 2007), and Reawakening to a secular Hindu nation: M. S. Golwalkar’s vision of a dharmasāpekşa Hindurāşţra (Charleston, SC: BookSurge, 2009).