Indus valley and the Madurai Meenakshi

Numerous cultural parallels suggest that the people from the Indus valley migrated to the south of the peninsula after the fall of the cities. The language they spoke was proto Dravidian and closely related to Malayalam. 

Let us take a close look at the below seal (fig 1). It has a script that has 3 important signs. They are the Akam (or inside the wall) sign, the Meen (or fish) sign and the Ambu (or arrow) sign. Meen (fish) is a rebus for Min (to shine). Iravatham Mahadevan had concluded that the fish sign is symbolic of divinity. Amb (Arrow) is the rebus for Amba/Amma (a respectable lady). The Akam/Mathilakam sign clearly depicts a portion inside the walls. It represents the fortified citadel complex. 

The script is apparently an address. It is about the divine lady of/inside the citadel. So who is this divine lady? In the earlier articles I had mentioned about the attendants of the Indus mother goddess. These ladies were held with high regard and often treated as an embodiment of the goddess herself. Their life was often centered around The Great Bath and the temple inside the citadel. 

In Malayalam,  the female temple attendants (from the Nair families) were called Achis. Achi seems to be a shortened version of the Adichi - a term for the servant (of the god/goddess in this case) or quite simply a Deva-dasi. Even today a Mootha-Achi (Muthassi) would mean an elderly and respectable Nair lady. So the fish-arrow combination in the Indus seal, in all its likelihood, represented an Achi or a divine damsel inside the Indus temple complex.

Interestingly Iravatham Mahadevan had suggested that Madurai was in-fact Matiray or a fortified wall. So it is quite possible that the goddesses in Madurai could be Meen-Achi (rooted from the Indus fish-arrow combination) who was later re-defined as the Meen-akshi (or the fish eyed). The gridded Indus streets were probably called pati/panthi (The word Panthi is still used in Malayalam to denote a grid pattern. Place names ending with pati are also very common in Kerala) and it is quite possible that people from the lower city were known as Panthiyan/Pandiyan. It becomes all the more interesting when you notice that the Madurai Meenakshi temple was built by the Pandiyans. 

I kept looking for other parallels and came across the the Dravidian name Meen-amma. This is possibly based on the literal meaning of the Indus Fish and Arrow signs.

Another parallel I found in Malayalam is the word Akath-amma (or Anthar-janam in Sanskrit) meaning the women inside.  This word resonates well with the below Indus script. Akathamma is the term for a Namboothiri (Brahmin) women. We had already seen how the Sanskrit Mana (meaning mind) could have been misunderstood as the Dravidian Akam (inside the fort) which probably led to the usage of the word Mana to connote the Namboothiri houses. 

A cultural continuity from the Harrapan age is attested by the above Dravidian parallels 

Fig 1: An Indus seal 

                             Fig 2: Meenakshi temple wall painting depicting its founding legend

Reference

Mahadevan, I. (2011). The Indus Fish Swam in the Great Bath: A New Solution to an Old Riddle . Bulletin of the Indus Research Centre.