Bahata Ansumali and the $1 million race to decipher Indus script

When Bahata Ansumali Mukhopadhyay first saw images of the ruins of Harappa and Mohenjodaro in history textbooks while studying in Kolkata, her teacher told her that deciphering the signs and symbols on seals found at Indus Valley Civilisation sites would unveil grand secrets. That was more than three decades ago — when she was studying at Sister Nivedita Girls School, founded by Swami Vivekananda’s Irish disciple Margaret E. Noble, at Bagbazar in northern Kolkata.

The script that intrigued her curiosity in school days later turned into a passion for the software engineer in 2014, inspiring her to decipher the ‘secret code’ of the ancient civilisation. Today she is one of those rare experts who has partly decoded the mystery signs and symbols.

“Yes, I have partly deciphered the Indus script. I have decoded its main mechanism of conveying meanings, and have narrowed down its meaning-scope to taxation, licensing, and commercial administration. Some of the decoding has already been published in peer-reviewed high impact journals, including those in Nature group, and presented in various international seminars,” she says.

One such seminar was held on January 3-5 in Chennai where MK Stalin, the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu and the leader of Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), a party that promotes the revival of Dravidian ideology, said, “We have not been able to clearly understand the writing system of the once flourishing Indus Valley…The efforts of the state government are to ensure the right place for Tamil Nadu in the country’s history,” the CM had said during the three-day seminar.

“The riddle hasn’t been answered for the past 100 years despite several efforts by archaeologists and experts. I announce a cash prize of $1 million to individuals or organisations that decipher the script to the satisfaction of archaeological experts,” Stalin added.

The grand prize is not just meant to honour an academic achievement, but it has opened up a cultural battlefront between Hindu nationalists, led by the BJP, ruling at the Centre versus DMK, a regional satrap, dominant in southern India. The former claim they are the descendants of the “original Indian people”, the so-called Aryans. The latter contend the Dravidians of southern India are the country’s indigenous people with strong links to the people of the 9000-year-old Indus Valley Civilisation. And Aryans are merely ‘invaders’ or ‘outsiders’. Decoding the Indus script, political pundits on both sides believe, might help settle the debate.

Despite over a century of excavations at more than 2,000 sites across modern-day India, Pakistan and Afghanistan, and unearthing of huge caches of artefacts, no one has been able to crack the mystery of signs and symbols discovered in the ruins of the sprawling urban civilisation. The codes inscribed on numerous clay tablets and metallic seals found in the ruins of Indus valley as well as in the ruins of contemporary Mesopotamia — ancient inhabitants in the West are believed to have trade relations with the Indus people — have eluded experts.

While some experts have argued that the script has links with the Brahmi script, a writing system used in India around 3rd century BCE, some other scholars argue that the codes have a link with ancient Dravidian language.

Mukhopadhyay, who was invited to present her findings on decoding the script in Chennai, happens to be one of the front-runners likely to win the grand prize. But unlike other contenders in the race — such as, pioneering Indian epigraphist Iravatham Mahadevan, Bryan K. Wells, an independent archaeologist, and Finnish Indologist Asko Parpola — is not among conventional experts supposed to crack the mystery of the ancient code. Neither she had any background in ancient linguistic forms of Tamil, Sanskrit or Brahmi.

“My mind was like a blank slate when I forayed into the research of Indus script. It’s been a challenging task of self-schooling myself in epigraphy (study of ancient inscriptions), linguistics, archaeology, archaeogenetics, and prehistory.” As she had no initial bias or any preference for any preconceived notion or theory, she was totally “guided by the script, its internal rules, and external evidences like the contexts in which the signs were used.” In other words, her beginning of research from scratch, on her own, helped her to arrive at an ‘unbiased conclusion’.

But she had to surmount several hurdles to reach the conclusion. She resigned from her software engineer's job – “thereby losing about a crore of rupees” – and took a year off to delve deep into the cryptic script. In addition, she has been raising a teenage son as a single mother, looking after aging parents and performing daily chores of cooking, cleaning and washing clothes. “I used the sabbatical to explore several books on the subject and understand how ancient scripts such as Linear B were deciphered.”

How did she get into the decoding research? In 2014, she met Ronojoy Adhikari, University of Cambridge mathematician, who was working on computational epigraphy of ancient scripts, at a dinner at a university of Bangalore. She had also got acquainted with the late epigraphist Iravatham Mahadevan who had been working on decoding the Indus script.

Their work intrigued her, but she approached decoding surmising that each sign of the Indus script holds a specific meaning. “Experts had been looking for religious symbols and mythological clues to interpret the inscriptions, ignoring the internal rules of the epigraphs, largely used in commercial contexts.” In other words, the script was largely non-linguistic and the script does not represent alphabets or syllables – unlike most other ancient scripts. “However, in certain cases, such as the fish-like Indus script signs, an ancient Dravidian symbolism (“mīn” based words used for various glittering things”) has been possibly used, to signify shiny glittering commodities such as gemstones, glazed ceramics, and polished metals” – says Mukhopadhyay.

Each sign of the script, although used for mercantile purposes by the inhabitants of the Indus valley, has a rich and complex story expressed through symbols. They had trade relations with people in contemporary civilisations in Egypt, Mesopotamia, or China. “The economy in the Indus valley became so complex that a section of artisans and merchants’ guilds and certain settlement-based rulers or governing bodies came together to standardize taxation, commercial licensing and measurement systems.” Small clay tags stamped by inscribed seals were issued when traders had paid their taxes or cleared dues. Specific symbols were used for commercial transactions. For instance, the symbol of ratti, gunja or kunri mani seed (Abrus precatorius) denoted the gold measuring unit. The symbol of a blow-pipe and crucible was used to denote gold or precious metal. Ratti or kunri mani is still used to denote a unit for measurement of gold and precious stones in many Indian languages.

In another significant research paper published in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, a Nature group journal, Mukhopadhyay claimed that Indus Valley people spoke ancestral Dravidian language. Drawing parallels between, among other things, the word used in Mesopotamia for ‘elephant’ and ‘ivory’ and that used by the Indus people, her research suggests an ancient form of today’s Dravidian languages were the lingua franca of a significant population of Indus civilization. In ancient Mesopotamian languages (Sumerian, Akkadian, Amorite and Aramaic), the word for ‘elephant’ is believed to be ‘piru’ or ‘piri’ which perhaps originated from Proto-Dravidian word ‘pilu’, providing evidence of trade links between the ancient Indus Valley and Mesopotamia, where elephants were not native animals.

Her research in Social Science Research Network indicates that many Proto-Dravidian words (pil, pal, pilu etc) were used by a large section of Indus people suggesting a strong Dravidian link of Indus Valley civilisation.

Recently in an interview Mukhopadhyay said that proper use of tools of Artificial Intelligence may help crack the mystery of the script. She says, “We can train AI properly to decipher the text or scripts.” At the moment, the software engineer is engrossed in mastering the basics of AI. That makes 42-year- old Bahata Ansumali Mukhopadhyay the top candidate in the race to decipher the ancient script and may be bag the $1 million award announced by the Tamil Nadu Chief Minister MK Stalin.