Chief Minister K Palaniswami and other leaders in Tamil Nadu condoled the death of renowned epigraphist Iravatham Mahadevan, who died on Monday after a brief illness. He was 88.
In a statement, Palaniswami said Mahadevan served in the Indian Administrative Service (IAS) and also as the Editor of Tamil daily Dinamani. He said Padma Shri Mahadevan researched on Tamil Brahmi script and Indus Valley script and explained the relationship between the two.
DMK President MK Stalin said Mahadevan through his research paper had established that one can know about Indus Valley Civilization through Tamil literature.
Iravatham is known for deciphering the Tamil-Brahmi scripts and for his research on scripts from the Indus Valley Civilisation. He was also the former editor of Tamil daily Dinamani.
Iravatham was offered the Jawaharlal Nehru Fellowship to do a doctoral research on the Indus Script. In 1992, he was honoured with the National Fellowship of the Indian Council of Historical Research for his work on Tamil-Brahmi scripts.
Iravatham was the former editor of the Tamil daily ‘Dinamani’ from 1987 to 1991. He was conferred with the Padma Shri in April 2009 for his work in epigraphy. Iravatham also founded the Vidyasagar Educational Trust for underprivileged children in the year 2010.
Iravatham was born on October 2, 1930, and completed his schooling from Tamil Nadu’s Tiruchirapalli. He attended college at Vivekananda College in Chennai and studied law at Madras Law College.
He completed his civil services examination in 1953 and in 1953 and was posted to the Tamil Nadu cadre. He took voluntary retirement from the civil services in the year 1980 to get back to academics.