Description

Why is that woman sitting on a tree branch? What is she signalling with her left hand to a tiger, standing on the ground? Why is the tiger’s head turned backwards? What do the signs of a script — a fish, a jar with two handles, two vertical strokes and so on — inscribed above the woman, seek to convey? How did the engraver accommodate all this within the cramped space of a seal, measuring, say 3 cm by 2.5 cm, found in a trench at Mohenjo-daro? On April 6, 2022, inside a tent near the trenches at the Harappan excavation site of Rakhigarhi in Haryana, Shiv Kumar Pushpakar, a photographer from The Hindu, senior epigraphist V. Vedachalam and this writer were shown a tiny masterpiece of glyptic art. It was a sealing, not a seal. Within a circular piece of unbaked clay not more than 1.5 cm in diameter, a master engraver had carved with clarity and precision a realistic motif of an elephant. Above the elephant were seven signs/ characters of what is called the Indus Script.