Vijayawada: Rich tributes were on Thursday paid to well known researcher of Indus Valley and Tamil Brahmi scripts and veteran epigraphist and former IAS officer Iravatham Mahadevan, who passed away on November 26.
A memorial meeting was organised by the Cultural Centre Of Vijayawada and Amaravati in its premises where CCVA CEO Dr E. Sivanagi Reddy remembered Iravatham’s services.
Iravatham was born in a village near Tiruchirappalli on October 2, 1930, joined All India Service in 1954. He resigned from service in 1980 to pursue his research on the pictogram script of the seals of Indus Valley.
He began to collect coins as a hobby and this led him to study the label inscriptions on them, thereon, Iravatham developed an interest in South Indian scripts.
Thus he started deciphering Tamil Brahmi inscriptions found on the rock-cut caves of Tamil Nadu, wrote a book titled Early Tamil Epigraphy from the Earliest Times to the Sixth Century AD published by Harvard University in 2003.
Recognising his unstinted research in epigraphy, the Union government honoured him with Padmasri and he was inducted into Jawaharlal Nehru National Fellowship by ICHR.
