Iravatham Mahadevan, a man of arcane letters
October 2, 1930 to November 26, 2018.
India’s epigraphist par excellence, Iravatham Mahadevan (IM), unlocked the mystery of the cave inscriptions in ancient Tamil, which he called Tamil-Brahmi, and held the key to the Dravidian basis for the Indus Script. Though the scholarly world is divided on the latter, it is undeniable that the corpus of the Indus Script — Texts, Concordance and Tables that he compiled, published by the Archaeological Survey of India in 1977, continues to be the primary resource for all scholarship in Indus research.
I consider it a singular honour to have worked with him in the last decade of his life. It may not be an exaggeration to say that I was instrumental in keeping him productive till the very end of his life. He and I had a paper published as recently as in August 2018. See Toponyms, Directions and Tribal Names in the Indus script. There is another paper pending publication in which IM identifies the artisan in the Indus Script.
A Man of Purpose
I first came into contact with IM when Ramakrishnan of Cre-A Publishers put me in touch with him over email in 2004. This was fresh after he had published his Early Tamil Epigraphy (Cre-A/ Harvard University 2003), which the scholarly world was quick to notice as a magnum opus. My email to him which contained a sample of how a Tamil-Brahmi inscription could be digitised and presented in a video narrative, excerpted from a documentary on the origin and history of Tamil that I produced and co-directed, received no response, and I had forgotten all about my mail.
In February 2007, when I was hospitalised, I received a call from an unknown landline number. A female voice (that of Lakshmi, I later learned, who cared for Iravatham after the untimely, early demise of his wife) announced that Dr. Iravatham Mahadevan wanted to speak to me! I then heard the man,
Do you have a pen and paper to hand, if not get one and note down this email and telephone number. Contact Professor Udaya Narayana Singh, the Director of the Central Institute of Indian Languages, Mysore. I have spoken with him of the need to digitise the Tamil-Brahmi cave inscriptions, he has said that CIIL can set aside some funds for it, you should make contact with him immediately and prepare to travel to Mysore within the next 48 hours, or the funds that CIIL has for the financial year may lapse.
I remember that I tried to request IM for a meeting ahead of travelling to Mysore, but he said that he had just had a cataract surgery, and insisted that I should focus solely on the grant, on contacting Professor Singh. Truly, a man of purpose — no response to an email for three years, but cometh the hour and cometh the man.
I got the grant in October 2007, not from CIIL but from the Central Institute of Classical Tamil (CICT) with Professor K. Ramaswamy as Director. CICT was hived off from CIIL after Tamil got its Classical Language status. Iravatham Mahadevan, who had a significant role in Tamil attaining that status, was nominated as an honorary consultant to the project and I was looking forward to working with him in the field, in the 32 caves in Tamilnadu and present day Kerala.
When I first met him
In early March 2007, I met Iravatham Mahadevan for the first time, after returning from a successful meeting with CIIL in Mysore, and I can never forget it. The first thing he said to me was:
Mr. Bhaskar, can you tell me why this finger [index] is shorter than this [middle] finger? I remember managing a blank smile for an answer and he said, without waiting for a response, That’s how much this (index) finger has been run on rough rock-faces to sense the letters. My formerly blank smile returned as a knowing one, the blank filled in.
From that moment and till the day before he breathed his last, we were in daily touch, often several times in a day. However, in the last year, the frequency of our meetings diminished substantially owing to a change in my position in my professional life in science publishing. As the CEO of a fledgeling company, AuthorCafe Private Limited, I began to travel frequently.
Regardless, the last year was productive by any standard (a paper published and a paper pending publication), and as much as the previous four years. The only significant difference was that I became his co-author. In years previous, I was his digital scribe and sometimes a spokesman at a seminar or a conference that he was invited to that he could not attend himself.
Tamil-Brahmi
When CICT assigned the project to me with Iravatham Mahadevan as its honorary consultant, I had assumed that he would travel to all locations with my team to personally supervise our documentation. Unfortunately, that was not to be.
The first location was Dusi Mamandur, near Kanchipuram, in December 2007. Iravatham Mahadevan’s health took an irreversible turn for the worse after this carefully considered day trip. The remaining locations and the inscriptions therein, were documented with his Early Tamil Epigraphy as the field guide. He however made an exception to return to the field for one last occasion in January 2010 to Pulankurichi, the site of the longest inscription in Tamil.
He had to spend three nights in a humble accommodation in nearby Pon Amaravathi and work late evenings on a steep rock-face to supervise and ensure that the inscription was recorded meticulously. His reading of the inscription, with help from Dr. Rajagopal (Tamilnadu State Archaeology), as he explained during field work suggested that the whole episode of the so called Kalabhra interregnum, the ‘dark age’ of Tamil history, was much misunderstood and misrepresented. It pained him a great deal that this inscription remained unpublished.
The digitisation of the Pulankurichi inscription brought to a close the in situ documentation of ancient Tamil epigraphs.
Back in Chennai, when IM saw the pictures and videos, he was so impressed with the material that he decided to go for a revised, expanded edition of Early Tamil Epigraphy. It was published eventually in 2014 by CICT. Throughout this period, our collaboration was intense.
He was astonished to see the independent verification, as he put it, of his copying of the inscriptions which he accomplished during his field visits through the 90s with assistance from, among others, Dr. Vedachalam and Dr. Santhalingam of Tamilnadu State Archaeology. There were just two details that he had not noticed earlier that were brought to book by our team, with KT Gandhirajan as the main copyist. There were two other instances where we had strayed from his reading which we accepted. This meant that we had to go back to the field to re-capture the inscriptions.
Working with Iravatham Mahadevan
He demanded a precision that was excruciating, and refused to let himself be convinced of more convenient methods of working that I suggested. He would settle for nothing less than a perfectly typeset page with proper line and page breaks at each draft, even though he knew that the copy would reflow when changes were introduced, and changes were inevitable, and I would sit and adjust line and page breaks every time.
Sometime in 2012 when IM and I were midway between the revised edition of Early Tamil Epigraphy, I got a call from Ms. Mariam Ram, the founder of TNQ Books and Journals (now TNQ Technologies), a publishing services company where I worked, and she said that she was with the distinguished historian Professor Romila Thapar and that she would like to have a word with me!
Bhaskar, I am Romila and I believe you are working with Mahadevan on the revised edition of his book on Tamil-Brahmi. I think he has already said all there is to say on Tamil-Brahmi. It is his work on Indus that needs immediate attention. Finish the Brahmi project fast and see that Mahadevan can concentrate on and publish his Indus work.
I was guilty, and there was second opinion. What Professor Thapar said to me that day was said to me several times by IM himself. Just before he decided that he wanted to work on the revised edition of Early Tamil Epigraphy, he had received an advance from Penguin to write a book on the Indus Script. He returned the advance, just so he could devote himself wholly to the book on Tamil-Brahmi.
As I understood, the compulsions were not really external. He could have cast aside the CICT project, just as he did the Penguin advance. Whereas the Penguin project was a commission, ETE 2 was of his own making. Both of us thought at that time that it would take a year, a year and a half at the most. It took more than twice as long and no matter how long it took, there was no going back, not for IM who lived life like a character in the Mahabharata in which words once uttered could not be taken back.
As we worked together on Tamil-Brahmi, all that he spoke about was Indus. I enjoyed it more too as there was new discovery everyday with Indus, whereas Tamil-Brahmi was just work. He made an exception just once when he took a day’s master class for me in palaeography, for he considered it to be his specialisation within epigraphy, and the palaeographic charts in ETE as his most important contribution.
IM noted down his Indus discoveries in what he called the gnanodayam (Eureka) notebook, of which he has left behind ten, densely scribbled and written in a ‘handwriting that is more difficult to decipher than the Indus Script’, as he was fond of saying.
Everytime we met, he would write down an excerpt from the gnanodayam notebook into an A5 sized notepad that he called Bhaskar notebook, and explain his discovery. I have over one hundred Bhaskar notebooks with IM’s commentaries to the Indus Script. Sometimes he encouraged discussion. At other times, he would ask me to record his narrative as he read it out, which was his way of saying, Do not interrupt. Often he would riddle me to see if I had any grasp at all of what he had said to me in a previous session, and badger me till I came up with an answer.
We went on like this for years until the camera-ready copy for the revised, expanded edition of ETE was handed to the publisher in September 2013. After that IM shut Brahmi wholly out of his life, and concentrated solely on the Indus Script, remaining productive until his last birthday on October 2, 2018.
Approach to Indus
IM was clear that the Indus Script had to be interpreted, not deciphered. He remains one of the few scholars of the Indus Script that never claimed to have deciphered ‘the world’s most deciphered script’.
He would start with an Indus sign, look for parallel signs in other coeval writing systems, take it as corroborative if they agreed semiotically, then justify its semantic value by position and frequency, assign a likely Indus-Dravidian term, accept it as secure if a rebus obtained, then look for its loan word in the Rig Veda, or its loan translation, reconstruct the Vedic mythology invented to explain the loan, find its traces in the brāhmaṇa-s, later commentaries, epics, and the purāṇa-s, locate the word in Old Tamil literature, especially in clan or caste names, find its correspondence in other Dravidian languages, trail the pictogram in later archaeology (coins from Taxila, Maurya… or the Sangam period, besides inscriptions, iconography and architecture), and find its vestiges in customs and rituals.
There are at least twelve criteria that IM applied, each a test of the hypotheses, and the more the criteria that the hypothesis got past, the more acceptable the hypothesis. If the reading of a sign got past all these tests, then he would examine the sign sequence, with trembling excitement, in a pair, a triplet, and so on.
IM was consistent in his method since his very first paper on Indus in 1970. And as he declared in that paper, he applied extensively the technique of parallelisms developed by Emil Forrer.
Such exhaustive search for evidence meant that a paper could not be produced overnight. It also meant that many a hypothesis would have to be abandoned half-way for failing to meet the criteria. Seeing this, and considering that age was advancing on him, I tried to persuade him to record his research as videos. He consented but reluctantly, tried it a couple of times, looked at the results, and abandoned the method.
He regarded scholarly scrutiny as fundamental to the nature of his work, whether there was agreement or not, and sought to publish his work in peer-reviewed journals, conference proceedings, felicitation volumes, and the like.
IM took Mu. Raghavayyangar’s account of the southern migration of Agastya in his Vēḷir Varalāṟu as historical and often lamented that while the migration of people from the west- north-west into India was well studied, the migration from the north of India to the south never received the scholarly attention it deserved.
He kept an active interest in recent studies involving genetic analysis of ancient human remains, and believed that they might throw fresh light.
Our relationship
Vyasa and Ganesha. The storyteller and the scribe. This was the equation between IM and I. I was happy to be the scribe to probably the most literate man in India, one who read every script in the subcontinent, and to be only the second person to know the mystery of the Indus Script. I expect that my scribal duties will continue, and IM has demanded as much.
On the personal side, I got to know his family, his son Sridhar Mahadevan, who is now Director of the Data Science Lab, Adobe Research, after a distinguished academic career at UMass, Amherst, and SRI International, Stanford; Lakshmi, who cared selflessly for IM for three decades, in sole charge of everything from stationery to medicine, bank account to library, and his health, mental and physical; his grand children Vandana and Vinay Vidyasagar and his extended family.
I also had several opportunities to meet his peers, Asko Parpola, Romila Thapar, Andrew Robinson, to name a few. IM would always introduce me as a colleague and invite me to the meetings, and sometimes a lunch, when one of them visited him. He was very fond of my family, especially my daughter Neela, who was an additional scribe to IM when the enterprise demanded greater speed, and he wrote a beautiful letter of recommendation for her application to Hamburg University, and my son Kedar, whose bird-watching expertise IM would seek out for identifying avifauna in historical records.
He had that knack to tap the individual skills of every person that came his way, enriching the other, including his adversaries. It is not surprising that this trait has been pointed out in every tribute to IM that has appeared since November 26 when he decided to leave.
In Indian Administrative Service
As an officer in the Indian Administrative Service, he walked the straight and narrow. He rarely spoke to me about that part of his life, there wasn’t time. Recently though, when a journalist contacted him about a book that he was writing about Titan, India’s leading watch brand, IM revealed to me that he, as the Chairman and Managing Director of Tamilnadu Industrial Development Corporation (TIDCO), signed the papers that ensured the setting up of the manufacturing of Titan watches.
Iravatham Mahadevan, the Philanthropist
IM’s only great possession was his library, much of which he donated to the International School of Dravidian Linguistics, Tiruvananthapuram. He sold a beautiful beach-side house he had, bought himself a modest apartment, and put away the remaining money to charity. He formed the Vidyasagar Educational Trust in memory of his late son that gave scholarships to under-privileged children for decades. He established the Indus Research Centre at the Roja Muthiah Research Library. He gave away smaller donations to numerous causes, to cancer research, to publication of Tamil texts, to schools… He funded the establishment of the Vidyasagar Institute of Biomedical Sciences at Sankara Nethralaya. A day before his final journey, he signed the papers necessary for the closure of Vidyasagar Educational Trust and asked that the funds that remained unutilised be released to the Ramakrishna Mission. It is difficult to imagine another person who donated a larger percentage of his material possession to public causes. He was very proud of the picture that he had in his house of his wife giving away all her gold jewellery to the then Prime Minister of India, Lal Bahadur Sastri.
Our last trip
In 2015, IM was invited to the Tamil University in Thanjavur to deliver a lecture. We followed him — A. Sarangarajan, the film maker, KT Gandhirajan, the art historian, myself and a few others. After the lecture, we travelled to his ancestral village, Kandamangalam, near Tiruchi, where we filmed him reminiscing his early, formative years. He had warm conversations with the villagers who were occupying the house and recited verses from the Bhagavad Gita, the Sanskrit original, and its Tamil translation by Subramania Bharati, his favourite Tamil poet. He visited the Lakshminarayana temple at Varagur and participated in the recitation of Krishna Leela Tarangini, the beautiful Sanskrit opera by Narayana Teerthar. Here again, he made a spot donation to the temple for the continuation of the performance of the opera. This donation by IM was less to a religious cause than a literary one. In fact, he was completely agnostic and ordered that no ritual of any kind be undertaken after his death, and simply wished for his ashes to be immersed in the Bay of Bengal, next to where his wife’s ashes were.
Last words
IM wrote three prescient notes, hours before:
- To Lakshmi’s Attention, Call Sankara Nethralaya within one hour after I die (to take my eyes)
- I fear I am recovering! Shame! (close to midnight on November 25)
- When shall I die? (in all caps, and in Tamil, on November 26)
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