An American Vedic scholar, Dr. David Frawley, and his Indian associate, Dr. Navaratna S. Rajaram, have hailed the decipherment of the Indus seal by a West Bengal-based scholar, Dr. N. Jha, as the most important advance in the study of India of the ancient after the discovery of the Harappan Civilisation.

Dr. Jha who is the Principal of the Kendriya Vidyalaya at Farakka in West Bengal, has come out with his book "Vedic Glossary on Indus Seals" holding that the script and the language of he Harappan seals are part and parcel of the Vedic world. He has disproved the dominant view in circulation in the country ever since John Marshall discovered Harappan in the then undivided Punjab in the second decade of the Century the Harappan civilisation was pre-Vedic.

Dr. Jha's success has, unfortunately, not evoked interest among scholars in the country unlike the claim made by a Finnish scholar, Dr. Ashok Parpola in the early Seventies that the Indus seals were pro-Dravidian.

Dr. Frawley, who has co-authored the treaties "Vedic Aryans and the Origins of Civilisation" with Dr. Rajaram was recently in the city. Dr. Rajaram spoke on "Indus Script and its Decipherment" at the Mythic Society here last week. A grandson of the late Navaratna Rama Rao, who was Director of Industries in princely Mysore, noted writer, classmate and close friend of C. Rajagopalachari. Dr. Rajaram is a mathematician, linguist and a historian of science who shuttles between Oklahoma City in the U.S. and Bangalore. He is also the author of "Dead Sea Scrolls and the Crisis of Christianity; An Eastern View of a Western Crisis."

In a joint statement, the two scholars have said that the decipherment of the Indus script by Dr. Jha, a Vedic scholar and paleographer represented a significant breakthrough. It shows that the Indus Valley Civilisation (or Harappan Civilisation of circa 3100-1900 B.C.) was part of the Vedic world. It overlapped with what is known as the Sutra period that came towards the end of the Vedic Age. "It puts at rest two long standing theories, that there was no Aryan invasion and that the Aryan-Dravidian divide is a modern myth that receives no support from archaeology or any other science or literature as found on the seals". They have said that besides demolishing the Aryan invasion theory, it also ends the Marxist dogma of the non-Indian origin of the Vedic civilisation. Though Dr. Jha might be little known to mainstream historians, it should be acknowledged that he is a profound scholar in the Vedas who has devoted more than 20 years to the study of the Indus corpus. He had displayed a willingness to disregard long held beliefs and look at the problem with a fresh mind.

It is of interest that a national seminar on the "Aryan Invasion" had been held under the auspices of the Mythic Society here three years ago at which the scholars dismissed it as a myth.

Dr. Frawley and Dr. Rajaram have noted that they too had put forward their finding (in their book) that the Harappan Civilisation overlapped largely with the Vedic Age. Unknown to them, at that time, a similar conclusion had been reached by the historian Prof. K. D. Sethna, "Many scholars in Europe and America no longer accept the Aryan invasion theory. By and large at is only in India that the Aryan invasion is treated as a historical fact though here too it is on its way out. The Indus script decipherment must, therefore, be see as part of this changing picture and not viewed in isolation.

They have said that Dr. Jha's book had made all previous works on the Indus script redundant and offered the solution to the greatest technical problem of ancient Indian history. Analysing Dr. Jha's work, the two scholars have noted that Indus writing was phonetic, but not a fully developed alphabet. For the most part it was a consonantal system in which the user has to supply the vowel values. Such a system is properly called a syllabary, rather than an alphabet. Some modern languages like Hebrew and Arabic are still written without vowels, Dr. Jha had shown that the script of Aramaic, which is a Semitic language is based on the Indus script. He had shown that the Indus alphabet was not a true alphabet but a hybrid. "All in all, Indus writing represents an intermediate stage between a primitive consonantal system and a highly scientific phonetic alphabet like Brahmi from which nearly all Indian scripts are derived.

Dr. Jha had shown the pictorial symbols were also there in the Indus seals, which was apparently more in common in the early stages of writing. They represented complex sounds. A bird is used to represented "Shak" (for Shakuni) and a scorpion represents "Vrish" (from Vrishchika), a dotted square or dice represents "Ksha" (from Aksha). In some cases, one can actually traces the evolution of the alphabet from the pictorial symbol. Parallel wavy lines which must have represented a river (Sanskrit 'Nadi') became the alphabetical symbol for the letter "N", Late a single wavy line came to be used.

About the language of the seals, there can be no doubt that it was Sanskrit of the kind found in the port-Vedic literature of the Brahmanas and the Sutras. Dr. Jha's findings showed that the seals were very much part of the later Vedic Age. Many of the seals contain words and expressions found in the Vedic glossary, "Nighantu" compiled by Yaska. Dr. Jha had pointed out that the Shantiparva of the Mahabharata contained an account of the Yaska's compilation of the Vedic glossary from earlier works buried in the soil.

In fact, the connection with the Nighantu seems to he they key to his decipherment. The two scholars draw a parallel with French Egyptologist. Jean-Francois Champollion, who in the 1820s deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphics or pictorial script after finding a "Rosetta Stone" which had bilingual inscription written in Greek and Egyptian.

Dr. Frawley and Dr. Rajaram have called for undertaking a comprehensive research programme for the study of more than 3000 seals belonging to the Indus corpus. Vedic scholars are needed to take it up. Jha's finding had even made it necessary to revise ancient Indian history.