- Noted epigraphist and a former member of the Indian Administrative Service (IAS) Iravatham Mahadevan, passed away on November 26.
- 88 years old Iravatham was 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.
- Mr. Mahadevan was awarded the Padma Shri in April 2009. He was also awarded the Jawaharlal Nehru Fellowship in 1970 for his research on the Indus script and the National Fellowship of the Indian Council of Historical Research in 1992 for his work on the Tamil Brahmi inscriptions.
- In the last 3 decades of his life, he devoted himself wholly to the study of India’s early writing systems.
- The Indus Script – Texts, Concordance and Tables, compiled by Mr. Mahadevan 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. Mr. Mahadevan also established the Indus Research Centre at the Roja Muthiah Research Library with his personal funds.
- He was the founder of Vidyasagar Educational Trust which he established in the memory of his late son, to support under-privileged students.
