Harappan Deciphered?!

[Koenraad Elst]

Dr. Farmer et al.,

Aditya Prakashan publishers usually send their books through Biblia Impex,
to my experience 100% reliable book exporters (unlike a few other Indian
book traders who still owe me).  It has happened, though, that the Indian
postal services sent books stamped for air mail by surface mail, so I keep
hoping you belatedly still get what is yours.  One place in the US which
should have stocked the Jha/Rajaram book is the bookshop attached to the
Arsha Vidya Gurukulam in Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania.  Also, at the annual
South Asia conference in Madison, a few years ago (and I suppose even now)
there used to be a book stand which had the pro-OIT publications included in
the Hindu nationalist section; I am sure some list members could identify
the bookseller.

About the contents of the book.  It opens with a chapter which is sure to
put most of you off, giving once more the whole argument about the
colonial-missionary-racist-political uses of the AIT, generally valid as a
historical point, but quite unpleasant when read as implying that today's
Western academics are guided by such motives.  Should be read against the
background of the nasty politicized atmosphere in India's history
departments (vide e.g. the attack on Prof. B.B. Lal's integrity by Prof.
D.N. Jha posted here recently).  Given that Prof. Rajaram had already
written two books about the politics of history and specifically AIT
politics, I think this chapter should have been left out.  Not being members
of this list or similar forums, the authors (at the time of writing, 1999)
seem to be unaware that even in the prejudiced West, the debate has moved on
from the stage of name-calling and attributing motives.

Coming to the decipherment, first of all some lessons are drawn from the
failure of the initially acclaimed (Sanskritic) decipherment by S.R. Rao.
Rao has published a list of Indian, Israeli and Western experts in Sanskrit
or in decoding who have "accepted" his decipherment.  But in most cases it
seems his correspondents were just being polite, or were unfamiliar with the
Indus script.  At any rate, Rajaram who had co-authored a paper with Rao in
defence of Rao's decipherment, has defected from the Rao camp.  One
immediately visible mistake of Rao's is the lack of rigour in attributing
sound values to signs, e.g. by treating different signs as variants of a
single sign/sound, even when these "variants" show up together on the same
seal.  All the same, Jha and Rajaram still agree with Rao in treating the
Indus script as a kind of proto-Brahmi, retaining a number of logographs but
mostly already representing sounds rather than objects (kind of like
Japanese).  As a Bengali writer has called it, "the calligraphic version of
Brahmi".

More later today.

Yours sincerely,
Koenraad Elst