Participants at ScriptTalk, a series of talks and exhibitions organized by the IMSc Computational Epigraphy Lab. It introduced a general audience to the different aspects of writing as cultural practice. (Photo: Aysha Mahira)
The Institute of Mathematical Sciences (IMSc) recently hosted ScriptTalk, a public event consisting of a series of talks and exhibitions showcasing various aspects of scripts, signs, imprints and inscriptions. The event took place between 21-23 July and was organized by Sitabhra Sinha, Md Izhar Ashraf and Nandini Mitra from the IMSc Computational Epigraphy Lab (iCEL).
“The event was planned as a general introduction about various aspects of scripts,” says Sitabhra, who is a faculty member at IMSc. “Many programs organised by iCEL, like the annual Bits & Scripts workshop, are aimed at training students and researchers in the study of writing as a technology,” he explains. The second edition of the Bits & Scripts workshop, held from 13 to 24 March 2025, aimed to introduce an interdisciplinary audience to computational tools in epigraphy to decipher scripts. “On the other hand, ScriptTalk was envisioned as a public event to make people aware of writing as social and cultural practice,” Sitabhra adds.
In his talk, ‘In the absence of a Rosetta Stone…’, Ashraf spoke about iCEL’s efforts in understanding the Indus script over the years. Incidentally, last year marked the centenary of the official announcement of the discovery of the Indus Valley Civilization. Its inscriptions are found on various artifacts excavated from sites (located mostly in the northwest of the South Asian subcontinent) associated with the mature phase of the Indus Valley Civilization, dated between 2600-1900 BCE. “Our approach to deciphering the Indus script is based on comparative analysis of structures in different types of writing. We use databases of several known writing systems, both ancient and modern, and employ computational tools to compare their features with the Indus script,” he explains. As the Brahmi script, whose origin has been dated back to the 3rd century BCE, is the oldest deciphered South Asian writing system till date, they started collating a comprehensive digital database of the earliest Brahmi inscriptions to extend their database, in work led by Nandini. The group is also looking at expanding their database to include other South Asian scripts.
The Indus inscriptions consist of several hundreds of symbols and the script was first described as a “pictographic language”. Scholars believe it to be a logo-syllabic script, whose smallest subunit may represent a word or a single syllable.“However, there is a school of thought that says that the Indus inscriptions may not represent a writing system at all,” adds Ashraf. “But non-linguistic sequences would not exhibit the type of structural patterns that are associated with linguistic inscriptions. So in our search for a suitable non-linguistic system that we can use as a null model to compare with sequences that encode speech, we arrived at punch-marked coins as a good example.” These earliest coins of India, which were discussed in detail in a talk by Dr Rehan Ahamad, the Curator of the Mint Museum at the Indian Government Mint, Kolkata, are so-called because, instead of written inscriptions indicating, for example, the names of rulers who issued them, various symbols such as the sun, animals, plants, trees, hills, and geometric designs were punched onto them. The team is also working on creating a public database of 3D scans of artifacts that can provide contextual information related to the object on which Indus inscriptions have been found, which is currently missing in existing data.
Nandini’s talk on ‘Hand, Surface, Implement’, elaborated on the context in which writing systems evolved in early India. She spoke about how regional variation may arise from the different materials on which inscriptions were made and the tools used to make them. She traced the evolution of scripts from writing on potsherds, Ashoka’s corpus of inscriptions on rock edicts and pillars, and the appearance of Indo-Greek coins. “From the first century CE, we start seeing regional variations in the script. This happens when the material changes – for example, the rock inscriptions during Ashoka’s period look different from those on metal pillars. The hand making the inscriptions also changes and differences start to appear,” Nandini explains.
Pooja Saxena (center), a typeface designer, lettering artist and typographer, gave a public talk on public signage and the different materials used to make them. IMSc displayed a collection of her photographs showing signs from across India. (Photo: Aysha Mahira)
“I was struck by Pooja Saxena’s opening talk in ScriptTalk about typography in modern signs, how it differs between places, and the importance of the materials used in making them,” she says. “I could relate this to aspects of my own work on the evolution of writing systems. Listening to her talk brought to my mind the scribes who would have engaged in writing in Early India,” adds Nandini. “It is always possible to relate the present to the past.”
Pooja’s talk on ‘Material—Language’ was followed by an exhibition of her photographs of public signs. “It displayed the myriad aspects of writing in public places, which can also tell you something about society,” says Sitabhra. “She stressed the importance of preserving the legacy of hand-created signs, which brings together individuals, artists, and a long history of how commercial enterprises present themselves to the public and what kind of information they wish to convey,” he adds.
Another exhibition that opened during the event was Priyanka Mullick’s ‘From the House of the Harafs’. Priyanka is a descendant of Panchanan Karmakar, who is synonymous with the earliest printing technology in Bengal. Karmakar, under the supervision of Sir Charles Wilkins, an English printer and typographer in the service of the East India Company, carved the Bengali type used for printing the first book with printed Bengali characters, Nathaniel Brassey Halhed’s A Grammar of the Bengal Language (1778). Priyanka displayed some of the equipment used to cast type by Karmakar and his successors and demonstrated how the type was made.
Priyanka Mullick gave a talk on ‘From the House of the Harafs’ and demonstrated the typeface and tools used by her ancestors to print the first Bengali newspaper. (Photo: Aysha Mahira)
Apart from these talks and exhibitions, there were lectures by the heritage expert R Gopu on Mamallapuram inscriptions, Sundar Ganesan, the Director of the Roja Muthiah Research Library (RMRL), on how the collections at RMRL present the history of print in its various guises in Southern India, Mayank Vahia, a former professor of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai, on the socio-cultural milieu in which the Indus Civilization inscriptions were created, and MV Bhaskar, an independent Indus researcher, on certain design aspects of Indus seals.
“Events such as this can help us understand why we write and why we write the way we do,” says Nandini. “Tracing back the history of writing can help people get a broader perspective of why and how we do things. It gives context to what we see today,” she adds. “It also makes us wonder how writing will evolve in the future in an increasingly digital world.”
"To understand the paradigm shifts in human societies over time, we need to understand the remains of the past,” says Ashraf. “We can find out about the Indus civilization by deciphering the inscriptions. Since the available data is limited, we need more people to engage with the study of the Indus script,” he adds. “Public events such as this can make the research accessible to the public and generate interest among them.”
Photos: Aysha MahiraThe exhibitions are currently on display at the IMSc Library, which is accessible to the general public between 9:30 am to 7:00 pm on weekdays and 10:00 to 5:00 pm on Saturdays.
