Dr. Shikaripur Ranganatha Rao (S.R.Rao), M.A., D.Liitt. (born 1922), is the discoverer of a large number of Harappan sites including the famous port-city of Lothal in Gujarat. His excavations at Rangpur and Lothal after the partition of the subcontinent of India not only added a new Province to the Indus Empire but also cleared many doubts about the survival and contributions of Indus Civilization to the progress of mankind. After serving the Archaeological Survey of India for 32 years he retired in 1980, but immediately thereafter his services were requisitioned by the Indian National Science Academy and later by the Department of Science and Technology and the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research to be the EmeritusScientist at the National Institute of Oceanography, Goa, He is the pioneer of Marine Archaeological Studies in India.

Among the several honours and awards received by him, particular mention may be made of Jawaharlal Nehru Fellowship for decipherment of Indus script, the Centenary Gold Medal of the Archaeological Department of Karnataka and the first World Ship-Trust Award for individual excellence in Marine Archaeology. He is most well known for the discovery of the sunken city of Dwaraka and his analytical work for the decipherment of the Indus script.

THE LOST CITY OF DWARAKA

The discovery of the legendary city of Dvaraka, which is said to have been founded by Sri Krishna, is an important landmark in the history of India, It has set at rest the doubts expressed by historians about the historicity of Mahabharata and the very existence of Dvaraka city, It has greatly narrowed the gap in Indian history by establishing the continuity of the Indian civilization from the Vedic Age to the present day.The discovery has also shed welcome light on second urbanization in the so-called 'Dark Age', on the resuscitation of dharma, on the resumption of maritime trade, and use of Sanskrit language and modified Indus script. Incidentally, "scientific data useful for a study of sea level changes and effect of marine environment on metals and wood over long periods has also been generated by underwater exploration. All this was possible because of the dedicated and daring efforts of marine archaeologists, scientists and technicians of the Marine Archaeology Centre of the National Institute of Oceanography.

THE DECIPHERMENT OF THE INDUS SCRIPT

The discovery of the Indus Civilization by the archaeologists took the academically recognised history of India 3000 years back from the days of Asoka,and about half that number years back from the postulated period of the Aryan Invasion. But the liguistic identity of the Indus people became a major subject of controversy. The identification of the language spoken by the Indus prople is therefore of very crucial significance for Indian History. But the main problem in identifying the language of the Indus people was that they did not leave behind documents and inscriptions in their language. The only things, in this connection, excavated by archaeologists from the Indus sites were thousands of small seals (used for stamping purposes) made of seatite, terracotta or copper, depicting figures of human beings and animals, and bearing short inscriptions of a few letters each, in an unknown script which has been simply called the Indus or Harappan script. The major obstacle in deciphering the script was the inadequacy of the available material. The script was an absolutely unknown one, it was not found anywhere in conjunction with another known script and the inscriptions on the seals were nowhere of any great length than a few letters each. Many attempts were made to decipher the Indus script, by individual scholars like Langdon, Hunter, Hronzy, Mahadevan and others, and by teams of Finnish and Soviet scholars. All these attempts, however, met with failure as they set out on the exercise with two preconceived notions: first, that the script could not be an alphabetic one, and could only be pictographic- ideographic one; and second, that the language of the inscriptions was a Dravidian one or Sanskrit. Using these arbitrary and whimsical methods, it is not very surprising that these scholars came up with a hundred different, even diametrically opposite "readings" for any single seal, and ended up tying themselves up into knots and convincing no one but themselves and their committed admirers. However, Dr. S.R. Rao, the eminent archaeologist, decided to be less speculative in his method. He refused to presume the identity of the Indus language to be either Aryan or Dravidian, and preferred to await the results, if any, to decide its identity.

He noticed two basic facts about the Indus script which had not caught the attention of the earlier scholars. Firstly, he noticed that of the 400 to 500 letters found on the seals, some letters seemed to be basic letters, while most of the other letters seemed to be those same basic letters with some additional signs attached to them. Secondly, he noticed that the script was, as generally believed, absolutely uniform over the entire period of the Indus civilization. Those seals, which were later in time, seemed to have less complicated letters, thereby indicating an evolution. I He, therefore, gathered together all the data on the different inscriptions and classified them period wise. He also separated the basic letters from those with additional signs, and arrived at a small number of basic letters. Then, he decided to examine, without prejudice, those scripts and alphabets of the world which were closest, in time, to the Indus script, to see whether those scripts or alphabets could give any clue as to the sound-value which could be assigned to these basic letters. The oldest extant inscription of the Indian Brahmi script dated to around 450 BC or so, while the Indus sites excavated dated down to the mid-2nd millenium BC, leaving a gap 0 of a thousand years. However, in West Asia, the South Arabic and Old Aramaic alphabets had come into prominence by the beginning of the 1 st millennium BC, and the Ahiram Sarcophagus I 0.1 (1300 BC) and Gezer potsherd (1600 BC) provided the earlier stages of these West Asian scripts. And here Dr. Rao struck gold. He found that ,many of the basic letters of the Indus script bore resemblance to the letters of these two West Asian alphabets. He decided to assign to each Indus basic letter the same sound-value as the West Asian letter which closely resembled it. After assigning these values to the Indus letters, he proceeded to try to read the inscriptions on the Indus seals. The language that emerged turned out to be a "Aryan" one. The above is rather simplistic narration of the procedure adopted by Dr. Rao, which is given in detail in the two relevant books: Lothal and the Indus Civilization, The Decipherment of the Indus Script. Among the many words yielded by Dr. Rao's decipherment are the numerals aeka, tra, chatus, panta, happta/sapta, dasa, dvadasa and sata (1 ,3,4,5,7 10,100) and the names of Vedic personalities like Atri, Kasyapa, Gara, Manu, Sara, Trita, Daksa, Druhu, Kasu, etc. While the direct connection between the late Indus script (1600 BC) and the Brahmi script could not be definitely established earlier, more and more inscriptions have been found allover the country in the last few years, dating 1000 BC, 700 BC, and so on, which have bridged the gap between the two. Now it is evident that the Brahmi script evolved directly from the Indus script.