Iravatham Mahadevan

Iravatham Mahadevan (2 October 1930 – 26 November 2018) was an Indian epigraphist and civil servant, known for his decipherment of Tamil-Brahmi inscriptions and for his expertise on the epigraphy of the Indus Valley civilisation.

Quotes

 * The sequence ensures that the text on the neolithic tool found in Tamil Nadu is not only in the Indus script but also in the Harappan language. I may add this is the archeological discovery of the century in Tamil Nadu.
 * as quoted from Malhotra, R., Nīlakantan, A. (2011). Breaking India: Western interventions in Dravidian and Dalit faultlines

About

 * Iravatham Mahadevan, specializing in the Indus script and early Tamil, is an example of a scholar who became co-opted to serve as an academic sepoy for Western manipulations.... In 1970, while he was a Jawaharlal Nehru Fellow, Mahadevan came out with a hypothesis that the Harappan script is ‘a language which resembles South Dravidian (including Telugu) in general and Old Tamil in particular’. This was music to the ears of those fanning the flames of Dravidian separatism. It supplied social and political theories of India’s divided identities by claiming ‘amazingly close parallelisms between the hierarchical structure of proto-Indian and the old Tamil polities’. He theorized that the Mahabharata was a story of class-war between a priestly oligarchy and common people in Harappan civilization – a gift to Indian Marxists looking for class-conflict wherever possible.
 * Malhotra, R., Nīlakantan, A. (2011). Breaking India: Western interventions in Dravidian and Dalit faultlines