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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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