Indologist

"The Indus script is perhaps the most important system of writing that is undeciphered," says Asko Parpola, a leading Indologist.

In 1883 the renowned German Indologist and philologist, Eugen Julius Theodor Hultzsch copied and translated the inscription into English, dating the text to the year C.E.

References to Dostoyevsky, T. S. Eliot, Octavio Paz, Mark Twain, and contemporary thinkers, such as the Indologist Sheldon Pollock, flit in and out of the narrative, pell-mell, but they offer an international precedent for India’s uneasy encounter with modernity.

The manuscript was found by a farmer in a village called Bakhshali, in what is now Pakistan, in 1881 before being acquired by the indologist Rudolf Hoernle, who presented it to the Bodleian Libraries in 1902.

A superb three-volume photographic corpus3 of Indus inscriptions, edited by the indefatigable Asko Parpola, an Indologist at the University of Helsinki, was published between 1987 and 2010 with the support of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization; a fourth and final volume is still to come.