Bahata’s tryst with Indus Valley script Premium

Bahata Ansumali Mukhopadhyay, a software engineer who has for many years now been researching on Indus Valley script and symbols, believes that the inscribed stamp-seals were primarily used for enforcing certain rules involving taxation, trade or access control.

Bahata Ansumali Mukhopadhyay likens the Internet to the Room of Requirements in Harry Potter’s Hogwarts. “If you ask for something, it will give it to you… People underestimate the effect that social media and Google have on our knowledge systems,” says the software engineer and independent researcher, who has been working on decoding the script of the Indus Valley Civilisation since 2014. According to her, being a non-specialist, unencumbered by any preconceived ideas and notions, helped her approach the script with an open mind, reading widely about and around it, assisted by the internet. 

She would often come up with a question, turn to Google for answers and discover books or papers that helped her on her journey, from tomes about ancient Mesopotamia to Egyptian documents and even the Chanakya’s Arthashastra. “Whether the question took me to archaeology and zooarchaeology or ancient Iranian languages, I went with it,“ says Bahata, who recently released a paper titled  Semantic scope of Indus inscriptions comprising taxation, trade and craft licensing, commodity control and access control: archaeological and script-internal evidence, in HSSCOMMS (Humanities & Social Sciences Communications), a Nature Publishing Group journal. “I just asked the right questions,” she says.

This is her third paper published in this journal, all focused on various aspects of this lost  Bronze Age society that flourished in South Asia’s north-western regions between 3300 and 1300 BCE. While her first one, published in 2019, focused on the structural aspects of the Indus script, her second indicated that “a significant population of IVC spoke certain ancestral Dravidian languages.”

Building on her 2019 paper, which argues that the undeciphered inscriptions on Indus seals and tablets were semasiographic (communicating using symbols, for example, road signs) and/or logographic (when a symbol represents an entire word, like @ or % on your keyboard), this one, “analyses the combinatorial patterns of Indus script signs and the geographical distribution of the inscriptions, to establish that the inscriptions did not encode any proper noun.”

In the same paper, she also writes that “the inscribed stamp-seals were primarily used for enforcing certain rules involving taxation, trade/craft control, commodity control and access control,” going on to elucidate further the semantic scope of these inscriptions in the same paper. “The seal-iconographies, most of which were animal-centric, most possibly functioned as different sea-issuing organisations emblems, “she notes, pointing out that Indian clans, tribes and sects have been named after animals since antiquities. 

Bahata’s interest in the Indus Script was first piqued back in 2009 when she heard about a paper written by a bunch of mathematicians who had tried to analyse the structure of this script mathematically. In 2014, at a dinner party, she met one of the mathematicians who were part of this study: Ronojoy Adhikari, today a professor of statistical physics at the University of Cambridge. She recalls approaching him and talking about it, only to learn that he was not researching it anymore since he had no one to help him. Though she had stumbled into software, she had always been interested in science and analytical thinking, so she volunteered to assist him.  “I wanted a deep problem that I could contribute to by making some scientific analysis,” she admits. 

Their partnership didn’t quite pan out how she thought it would; he wanted to focus on building the Indus script’s corpus through computerised image recognition and machine learning, while she was more interested in semantic analysis, aka the process of drawing meaning from the text. So, they ended up parting three months later on cordial terms, leaving her with some resource material and a desire to know more about this cryptic script.