Darius' problem = the problem of Harappan signs

[Ashok Aklujkar]

Thanks to George Thompson for clarifying his reasons for making a reference
to the Darius story. Upon rereading, I do see that my post became a bit too
opaque in its last two paragraphs. I certainly did not have GT in mind in
writing either of them (thanks anyway for taking my teasing so well). The
point I should have explicitly made is that my opening quote from GT tells
us what the problem would be if we were to follow the way he was suggesting
for understanding the nature or role of Harappan signs. If those signs
contained narratives dependent on context, they would not occur the way
they have been reported to occur (their combinations, frequency etc.).
There will either be a fixity about them (even then how many times is the
same or a similar narrative is likely to be contained in archaeological
remains?) or we must give up hope of being able to make sense of them (or
of any of them) until we chance upon a narrative matching them (or a
sequence of them).

(Of course, I could not sleep last night, trying to imagine the form in
which the narrative would come to us. O God, let it be me!)

In short, what I wanted to convey was that GT himself had identified the
problem with the possibility he was suggesting.

I was going to change the subject heading of my post to "Darius' problem =
the problem of Harappan signs" but overlooked to do so.

The stories similar to the story about Darius that I summarized were meant
to establish that mute objects and silent actions are susceptible to
varied interpretations**, that crafty individuals have expoited their
ambiguity to different ends, that a type of stories in which crafty
individuals are seen so exploiting exists and that the story about Darius
is more likely to be a folktale than a historical account. Only the first
purpose was directly relevant to the opening quote.


** With such objects and actions, sometimes we get interpretations that
have no basis in fact in the sense that they are not at all intended and
sometimes we get interpretations that are totally incompatible with each
another. The narrative is embedded in the context, not the objects, and its
nature is determined by the vagaries of human thinking. An effort to
uncover such narratives is not likely to succeed unless we at least have
the frame narrative. Now, some scholars may give up access even to the
rarest of Tibetan manuscripts to have the frame story of IVC!

ashok aklujkar