[INDOLOGY] In memoriam Iravatham Mahadevan

[Artur Karp]

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requiescat in pace

Artur Karp (em.)
Katedra Azji Południowej
Uniwersytet Warszawski
Warszawa
Polska

pon., 26 lis 2018 o 20:32 Asko Parpola via INDOLOGY <
indology at list.indology.info> napisał(a):

>
> *In memoriam:  Iravatham Mahadevan (Manachanallur 30 January 1930
> [actually 18? October 1929, according to Mahadevan] - Chennai 25 November
> 2018)*
>
>  *By Asko Parpola*
>
>  On the 25 November 2018 Mahadevan's younger son Sridhar — Professor of
> Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Massachusetts and
> currently Director of Data Science Lab at Adobe Research — sent me and some
> other colleagues the following message, which I take the liberty of passing
> on to wider public, as it so aptly catches the essentials of Iravatham
> Mahadevan's character and life:
>
>  "It is with deep sadness that I inform you that Iravatham Mahadevan
> passed away today around 4 am. He was at peace at home, and till the end,
> lucid and clear in his thoughts.
>
> His final written words left us in no doubt as to what his own wishes
> were. He wrote around midnight:
>
> “I fear I am recovering. Shame!”
>
> He was not afraid of his impending demise, and I take some solace that he
> got his wish to depart at home after taking leave of his family, friends
> and colleagues.
>
> I had hoped that Appa would live longer, perhaps even to equal his long
> time mentor Professor Emeneau’s long and distinguished career at Berkeley.
> But, I am grateful that he lived a long rich life, as a beloved father,
> husband, skilled administrator, research scholar, newspaper editor, and not
> least of all, philanthropist.
>
> He gave away the vast portion of his fortune earned through the sale of
> his houses to set up a graduate medical research center at Shankar
> Nethralaya in Chennai, a renowned eye care institute. He also worked
> tirelessly raising scholarship funds for indigent students all over
> Tamilnadu. It was hard work each year to manage the educational trust, but
> be kept it going at great personal effort till very recently.
>
> Einstein once remarked about Mahatma Gandhi: “generations to come, it may
> scarcely be believed that such an individual lived on this Earth”. Given
> IM’s manifold contributions to many diverse fields, I find this tribute
> entirely appropriate for Appa as well.
>
> He deeply loved his professional interactions with all of you, and I
> believe this in no short measure kept him going more than two decades after
> his wife’s untimely demise.
>
> In accordance with his wishes, we will cremate him this afternoon and
> scatter his ashes in the sea, close to where his wife Gowri’s ashes were
> scattered 26 years ago. - Sridhar"
>
> In the course of numerous field trips between 1962 and 1996, Mahadevan
> visited all the 110 caves containing early Tamil Brahmi inscriptions. He
> also collected pottery graffiti, coins and seals containing this script,
> dated between the 2nd century BCE and the 6th century CE.  With the two
> early papers published in 1968 and 1971, he already established himself as
> the best expert in this field of epigraphy:
>
> - Mahadevan, Iravatham,  1968. Corpus of the Tamil-Brahmi inscriptions.
> Pp. 57-73 in: R. Nagaswamy (ed.), Seminar on inscriptions, 1966. Madras.
>
> - Mahadevan, Iravatham, 1971. Tamil-Brahmi inscriptions of the Sangam age.
> Pp. 73-106 in: R. E. Asher (ed.), Proceedings of the Second International
> Conference Seminar of Tamil Studies, Madras, India, January 1968, vol. I.
> Madras.
>
> Ceaseless study of the topic resulted in a superb monograph that appeared
> in 2003 and even in a revised and enlarged second edition in 2014:
>
> - Mahadevan, Iravatham, 2003. Early Tamil epigraphy: From the earliest
> times to the sixth century A. D. (Harvard Oriental Series 62.) Cambridge,
> Mass.: The Department of Sanskrit and Indian Studies, Harvard University,
> and Chennai: Cre-A. 29 cm, xxxix, 719 pp., incl. 54 pl.
>
> - Mahadevan, Iravatham, 2014. Early Tamil epigraphy, from the earliest
> times to the sixth century C.E. Revised and enlarged second edition. Volume
> 1: The Tamil-Brāhmī inscriptions. Chennai: Central Institute of Classical
> Tamil. 29 cm, xliv, 727 pp., ill. Hb INR 3500. ISBN 978-93-81744-14-7.
>
> In his review of the first edition published in Journal of the American
> Oriental Society 124 (3), 2004: 565-569, Richard Salomon, a leading expert
> in Indian epigraphy, notes that "throughout, the documentation is thorough,
> precise, and exhaustive ... The inscriptions are analyzed in complete
> detail  ... with regard to their linguistic, paleographic, cultural, and
> historical significance ... there can be no question that Early Tamil
> Epigraphy is a masterwork that will stand the test of time as one of the
> landmarks of Indian epigraphic studies..."
>
>  But Mahadevan was not satisfied with the challenge of early Tamil
> epigraphy. I first met him in 1970 at an international conference of Tamil
> studies held in Paris, where he read a summary of the following extensive
> paper:
>
> - Mahadevan, Iravatham, 1970. Dravidian parallels in Proto-Indian script.
> Journal of Tamil Studies 2 (1): 157-276.
>
> I had published in 1969-1970 the first papers of an attempt at a partial
> decipherment of the Indus script based on the hypothesis that the language
> underlying the script is Dravidian.  We had a lot to talk about while we
> were strolling in the Luxenbourg Garden, and not only on the Indus script:
> Mahadevan even recited hymns of the Rigveda.
>
>  In 1971 in Madras, my family including two small daughters spent time
> together with Mahadevan's hospitable family that included two young sons.
> Tragically, Mahadevan's elder son Vidyasagar later lost his life in a
> kerosine accident. On his later visit to Finland, Mahadevan met our elder
> daughter in wheelchair, crippled by MS disease, which eventually led to her
> premature death. This shared misfortune fortified our mutual friendship.
> But our time together in Madras in 1971 was very happy, and decisively
> influenced my wife Marjatta's decision to reorient her studies to Indian
> culture. Later in the 1970s, on two occasions Mahadevan and his family were
> my hosts when I studied the Indus inscriptions housed in the Delhi museums,
> in preparation for the multivolume Corpus of Indus Seals and Inscriptions
> (CISI), which started appearing in 1987.
>
>  In the meantime, our Finnish team had published the first
> computer-generated concordance to the Indus texts (1973). Mahadevan,
> assisted by an Indian team of computer experts, much improved upon it in
> his truly magnificent and most useful volume:
>
> - Mahadevan, Iravatham, 1977.  The Indus script:  Texts, concordance and
> tables. (Memoirs of the Archaeological Survey of India, 77.) New Delhi:
> Archaeological Survey of India. viii, 829 pp., 7 pl.
>
>  Over the years, Mahadevan has published a large number of articles on
> the interpretation/decipherment of the Indus script, most of which can be
> downloaded from the website (rmrl.in/?page_id=1044) of the Roja Muthiah
> Research Library in Chennai, where Mahadevan about ten years ago
> established an Indus Research Centre. Here I shall mention only two paper
> that impressed me:
>
> - Mahadevan, Iravatham, 1986. Towards a grammar of the Indus texts:
> 'Intelligible to the eye, if not to the ears'. Tamil Civilization 4 (3-4):
> 15-30.
>
> - Mahadevan, Iravatham, 1988. What do we know about the Indus script? Neti
> neti  ('Not this nor that'). Presidential address, Section V, Indian
> History Congress, Fortyninth Session, Dharwar, 2-4 November 1988. Madras.
>
> The following paper remained Mahadevan's last on the Indus script; it is
> remarkable that he continued this work to the last:
>
> - Mahadevan, Iravatham, & M. V. Bhaskar, 2018. Toponyms, directions and
> tribal names in the Indus script. Pp. 357-374 in: Dennys Frenez, Gregg
> Jamison, Randall Law, Massimo Vidale and Richard H. Meadow (eds.), Walking
> with the Unicorn: Social organization and material culture in ancient South
> Asia. Jonathan Mark Kenoyer Felicitation Volume. Oxford: Archaeopress.
>
> As far as the details of interpretation/decipherment are concerned,
> Mahadevan and I did not much agree, but this did not prevent us from
> appreciating and encouraging each other's efforts. This applies especially
> to Mahadevan, who published many praising reviews of my work, and always
> communicated to me information relating to Indus texts that he thought
> might otherwise escape my attention and inclusion in the CISI.
>
> I gratefully remember Mahadevan as a lovable person, whom I had the good
> fortune to have as a dear friend, and as a great scholar, who shared with
> me enthusiasm for India's glorious past.
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