| ஒத்திசைவு | प्रत्याह्वय | resonance |

or Rebust, ya know what I mean?

One of these days, say within the next few years, I should gather together all the old notes/jottings (as and when I locate them from three different locations & as and when I decipher :-( them) and write about or annotate a few following things that Sri Iravatham Mahadevan worked on relentlessly – thereby forming a ‘cutout dravidian pride’ template for us chest-thumping, clueless, self-centred & divisive Tamils.

1. ‘Dravidian’ epigraphy

2. His idea of how the Indus valley / Harappan civilization was ~’Dravidian’

3. His work on Indus valley seals/script via concordances and rebus (more like divining a ‘Dravidian’ origin hypothesis for it; he has talked of ‘Indus Dravidian Languages’ etc)

4. His separate descriptor of what was essentially Brahmi script which evolved later into the Tamil Script – as ‘Tamil’ Brahmi and which nowadays is being proudly called by the moniker  ‘Tamizhi.’

(However, the fact is that, most of the current Indic scripts, in fact ALL scripts of Indian South, have evolved from Brahmi – but, no one calls their regional variants/development of their roots as Telugi, Kannadi, Odishi etc over a period of many centuries, but only we Tamils show-off with ‘Tamizhi.’

Do you know why?

Because, ‘Tamizhi’ is not a linguistic or a significant scriptwise differentiator at those points of time, but merely a yet-another-new-tool for the political stunts of the Dravidians, that is being weaponized for separatist ‘more ancient culture than thou’ kind of masturbatory and counter-scientific narratives, even as we speak now…)

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I first bumped into Sri Iravatham Mahadevan (IM) in the context of my own hair-brained efforts at understanding the Harappan ‘script’ and wrote at least twice about IM – .one rather tastelessly***.

• சிந்து சமவெளி எழுத்துகள் – ஒரு குறைப் பிரசவ ஆராய்ச்சி 27/12/2014
• *** மறைக்கப்பட்ட வரலாறு: திராவிட நாகரிகம், சிந்து சமவெளி நாகரிகமே! 08/06/2018
• A somewhat detailed comment published by me in Badri Seshadri’s blog entry (this is a fine blog, please read it too, to get the context of my comment) about ‘Tamil’ Brahmi 31/10/2018

Of course, I respect IM for quite a few things – especially for his relentlessness and his occasional tentativeness about his hypothesis and findings – but alas, his ideas have been hijacked  (at one level, may be they were meant to be) in the popular ‘dravidian’ imagination, oh what to do…

Postscript: Yesterday, I got hold of the photo of IM’s bust (as below, will acknowledge it if someone points to the source)  from an acquaintance – never knew he was honored so, though the honor should have much, much greater in scope than that – considering the fact that, IM was the one who created a whole lot of scaffolding for the cardboard cutout edifice of Dravidian Theology, erm, more like Teleology – and assorted spins.

This meta-post is because of IM’s bust.

The photo below is from TheHindu, the Mountroad Monstrosity – apparently it is from the inaugural/unveiling function of the bust etc.

Could locate/identify at least two bandicoots – am so, so happy.

Postpostscript:

Today is third death anniversary of Sri IM.

He moved on, as of 26th Nov, 2018.

May we all learn from his relentlessness.