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Clear out junk files and repair common Windows errorsFree Scan →Scan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minuteDriver Scan →Repair Windows errors before they cause bigger problemsFix Now →Peggy Mohan’s argument is that the short Indus inscriptions we have found do not show that the people of the Indus Valley lacked language, stories, or oral traditions. The surviving signs may have served practical purposes—such as identifying goods or recording transactions—rather than preserving long works of literature. Whether the signs represent speech at all, and which language or languages they might encode, remain unresolved.
“No literature” in what sense?
The phrase refers to the surviving written record, not to everything the people may have spoken, sung, or remembered. Indus seals bear animal images and short groups of signs; they do not preserve long narratives or poems that can be read today. But a lack of surviving literary texts cannot establish that a society had no oral literature.
Mohan makes this distinction by pointing to the oral preservation of the Rig Veda: a tradition can be transmitted without being recorded in long written works. Her point is not that Indus people recited the Rig Veda, but that oral literature and practical writing are different kinds of evidence. If the seals were used for identification or administration, they would tell us little about the stories people told.
What might the Indus seals have recorded?
The signs’ brevity and their appearance on seals have prompted several possible readings. Mohan asks whether they might represent names, transaction marks, edicts, sounds, or concepts such as numbers. The objects could have been economically useful even if their inscriptions were not prose.
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One proposal comes from Bahata Ansumali Mukhopadhyay, who described the seals as “formalised data carriers.” Mohan discusses the possibility that some signs related to gold measurement or craft and commercial activity, a reading she found familiar in light of the physical tools and workshop context. This is a proposed interpretation, not an accepted decipherment. Mohan’s analogy to present-day barcodes and QR codes illustrates how an inscription might carry practical information; it is not evidence that Indus signs worked in the same way.
These functional possibilities do not by themselves settle whether the signs encode language. A short label can contain a spoken name, while a symbol can convey information without spelling words. The sign system’s length is therefore relevant to the debate, but length alone cannot decide it.
Do the signs represent a spoken language?
Researchers disagree over whether the signs encode speech or functioned as nonlinguistic symbols. Mohan discusses the argument made by Steve Farmer, Richard Sproat, and Michael Witzel that the inscriptions are too short to represent language. In their 2004 challenge, as recounted in her excerpt, they offered $10,000 for an inscription of at least 50 symbols and cited 17 symbols as the longest they considered. That figure is part of their argument, not a universally agreed maximum for the corpus.
A separate Indian Express explainer gives a different summary: inscriptions average about five characters, with the longest around 26. Its page’s publication date is not established here, and its figures differ from those in Mohan’s account of the 2004 claim. The differing counts are a reason to attribute each figure to its source rather than treat either as an uncontested total.
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One free scan finds every outdated or missing driver and matches the right update for your exact hardware.Free scan · exact hardware matchStatistical analysis, including work discussed by Markov, identifies obstacles to decipherment: the texts are brief, there is no bilingual inscription to compare with a known language, and the language behind the signs is unknown. The Rosetta Stone is a useful contrast because its parallel texts and known language provided a key. The Indus material has no equivalent bilingual key in the accounts cited here.
What language did Indus Valley people speak?
There is no established answer. Mohan’s reconstruction imagines a multilingual region, with many languages and dialects, perhaps including a central standard variety, related languages, and some unrelated ones. This is a historical hypothesis, not a documented language census. It also matters that the language or languages spoken across the region need not map neatly onto whatever the seals may encode.
Several language-family proposals appear in Mohan’s account:
| Proposal | What it suggests | Status in Mohan’s account |
|---|---|---|
| Dravidian | Asko Parpola has proposed Dravidian etymologies for some non-Sanskritic words. | A hypothesis; it does not amount to a decipherment of the seals. |
| Para-Munda | Michael Witzel has proposed a Para-Munda origin for some terms. | A competing hypothesis about possible linguistic traces. |
| Elamo-Dravidian | Franklin Southworth and David McAlpin have argued for a connection. | A proposed relationship, not an established identification of the Indus language. |
Mohan considers these families as possible starting points for a hypothetical “Language X.” A review of Father Tongue, Motherland: The Birth of Languages in South Asia describes her broader proposal as a substrate whose traces may persist in modern South Asian languages. The review says she considers Burushaski a possible approximation to an ancient Indus language, while stressing that the proposal is speculative and depends on inferences across millennia. Neither “Language X” nor a connection to Burushaski should be read as a confirmed identification.
What would help resolve the debate?
Longer inscriptions could reveal patterns that brief seal texts cannot; a bilingual text could provide a comparison with a known language; and demonstrable correspondences to that language would be stronger evidence than resemblance-based readings alone. These are the kinds of evidence that could help clarify whether the signs encode speech and, if so, which language or languages they represent. Until such evidence is established, proposed readings of the signs and proposed language-family connections remain hypotheses.
Where Mohan’s argument comes from
The article is based on an excerpt from Peggy Mohan’s Father Tongue, Motherland: The Birth of Languages in South Asia. Berkeley’s Institute for South Asia Studies republished the excerpt on October 1, 2025, noting that it was originally published by Scroll.in on February 19, 2025. The excerpt presents Mohan’s interpretation of the evidence, not a settled decipherment.
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