New Delhi: What is there in an old Indus Valley Script, you ask? For starters, there is a prize money of $1 million up for the grabs to anyone who deciphers the scripts of the Indus Valley Civilisation! Then there is scholarly pleasure too, which comes associated with such a feat because the Indus Scripts (dating back to 3300 BC), have remained undecipherable for this long. The reason why the IVC scripts have remained untouched is because there is no known language to link it to. There is a lack of bilingual inscriptions (like the Rosetta Stone) that make it nearly impossible to decode. Add to this the brevity of the language (longest text contains only 26 characters) which makes it cumbersome to understand the grammar and structure of the writing system.

It’s a tough nut to crack, we agree. But why are the scripts back in discourse now? It’s because Tamil Nadu’s chief minister, MK Stalin is in a pursuit to get the IVC decoded and a possible connect between the civilization and that of his Dravidian ideology being established once and for all. His hot chase not only underscores a desire to assert regional and cultural supremacy but also highlights the ongoing political and ideological contest over India’s ancient heritage.

It is true that even before Stalin raked up the issue, the political side of the relationship between Dravidian ideology and that of the Indus Valley Civilization had been the talking point in many platforms. Ever since its discovery, via an article published in 1924 by the then director-general John Marshall, the IVC scripts have held importance for historians, archaeologists and linguistic scholars who have been debating over the Dravidian hypothesis and a supposed........

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