Iravatham Mahadevan, noted epigraphist, passes away
- Iravatham Mahadevan, 88, one of the world’s leading scholars on the Indus Valley Script, the pre-eminent scholar on the Tamil Brahmi script, and a man of many accomplishments, passed away .
- A former member of the Indian Administrative Service (IAS), Mr. Mahadevan joined the service in 1954 and took voluntary retirement in 1980, after holding various positions in the Central and Tamil Nadu governments.
- In the last three decades of his life, he devoted himself wholly to the study of India’s early writing systems. He kept in active touch with leading scholars of early India, including historian Romila Thapar and the Finnish specialist on the Indus Valley Script, Asko Parpola.
- The Indus Script - Texts, Concordance and Tables, compiled by Mr. Mahadevan with a grant from the Indian Council of Historical Research and published by the Archaeological Survey of India in 1977, continues to be a definitive and an indisputable resource for Indus Valley scholarship.
- His Early Tamil Epigraphy, first published jointly by Harvard University and Cre-A in 2003 and subsequently in a thoroughly revised version by the Central Institute of Classical Tamil in 2014, is regarded as the most authoritative work on early South Indian epigraphy.
