topDr. Madhusudan Mishra
top
Dr. Madhusudan Mishra
|
ABOUT THE
AUTHOR |
Long before the excavations started on the Indus basin in 1921,it had been propagated by the beat of drum, on the basis of the similarity of Sanskrit with the modern and ancient Iranian & European languages, that Sanskrit had come from outside and pushed the native language to the south. Naturally, the ancestor of the south Indian languages was supposed to inhabit this region in the prehistoric period. The term Dravida really means 'the country of the hot sun' and refers to the region as far west as Maharashtra & Gujarat, but it has come to have a racial connotation, being restricted to south India alone, and ultimately the south Indian people and languages have been called Dravidian. Some words of controversial meanings played havoc in distorting the history; e.g. mRdhra-vAk (the speakers of the rough village dialects), dasyu (poor and outlawed villagers of the countryside) , anAs (ignorant and unwise) were taken in their fabricated sense ,suiting the modern ethnological ideas. When the short and illegible inscriptions were unearthed, they were straightway said to belong to the Dravidian language without any valid proof for it. It was reacted by the native Indian scholars who considered it to be a primitive form of Sanskrit. The poet Jaya Shankar Prasad emphatically
said : These two views have often come to bitter clashes in words & phrases. We are likely to go astray if we proceed with preconceived notions and fall into a ditch if we close our eyes against the right path. The graphic form of the Indus texts says that it is none of the historical languages. It has only syllables as words, and all syllables end with vowels. It has practically no grammar. It is a language of the isolating type, the first stage in the development of a language. But two or three consonants making constant pairs show that by the time of the introduction of writing, it had moved towards the agglutinative stage. However, the inflexional stage is not imaginable from here. Therefore, it cannot be any form of Sanskrit. Because we do not know any earlier form of the modern agglutinative Dravidian, we cannot also say that it is some proto-Dravidian. For two years, I remained gazing at the Indus texts. It was very annoying. Gradually, the behaviour of the language of the Indus texts began to reflect in the Sanskrit grammar of Panini, and the multiplicity too of the script began to be automatically sorted out. The language of the Indus texts appeared to be the sprouting form of what later came to be called Sanskrit. It was the grandmother of the Sanskrit language, the Sanskrit language at the isolating stage. Only these reflections are the clues to decipherment. My Sanskrit teachers, even the most learned and enlightened among them, used to scold me when I asked for some clarification on some sutras of Panini. For them Panini was unquestionable on any point. But the behaviour of the language of the Indus texts became my real teacher. Then, I could see the Sanskrit language as a child of a few months, just without clothes on the body and with only babbling on the lips. Let us start with the Clues to Decipherment. |
 BOOKS ON DECIPHERMENT |
| Copyright:
INDUS SCRIPT 2001-02 Site Concept By Sumit Mishra |
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