The decoding of the Brahmi script and what it tells us about creativity
Who decoded the Brahmi script? If asked the question, you would automatically start scanning your memory bank for a name, an individual’s name. After some frenetic search, you would locate a name, James Prinsep in this particular case. You are now feeling smug having successfully exhibited your general knowledge prowess, and if this was indeed a question in your higher secondary history exam, the examiner is also perfectly satisfied with your answer. The only problem is that you are wrong, the examiner is wrong, your history textbook is wrong, the way we understand discoveries and inventions is wrong.
James Prinsep did not decode the Brahmi script. He would have been the first to say that if he was alive. He was a brilliant numismatist, and played a key role in the decoding process. He deserves the accolades including the Palladian porch built in his memory on the banks of River Hooghly, but his main contribution was reinvigorating the field of Indology through editorship of The Journal of Asiatic Society of Bengal. With the help of Asiatic Society and its Journal, a stack of evidential material was built up over time, on which a group of people- Masson, Cunningham, Lassen and Prinsep- worked diligently to decipher the script. It was a slow process, solving one piece at a time. This is how most innovations take place actually, they are mainly incremental in nature.
So, who decoded Brahmi script? Answer: The institutional ecosystem did it. The ecosystem consisted of regular people who came across some undecipherable inscriptions, puzzled over them, remembered that there is a learned society in Calcutta which is interested ancient Indian history, took copies of the inscriptions and mailed them to Asiatic Society. Or, they found some bilingual coins, recognised Greek inscriptions on one side but unidentified ones on the other, remembered Asiatic Society, organised to get them delivered to the institute.
The institutional ecosystem had numismatists, historians, archaeologists collaborating with each other through the pages of The Journal of Asiatic Society of Bengal. And, of course the institutional ecosystem had learned societies like the Asiatic Society at its heart, where things can be stored, classified, and analysed and research papers could be read at the monthly meetings.
But of course if you had written this true answer in your exam script you would have got a big fat zero. Complex societies produce complex artefacts. Cities, in general, are more creative than villages mainly because they are more complex. The complexity arises out of diversity, both at population and occupational levels, and creativity emerges almost spontaneously when that diversity intermingles at various points. Nothing illustrates this better than the process through which the Brahmi script got decoded in Calcutta.
