There is no shortage of subjects to research in the rich culture of India. One can even find 2500–3000-year-old texts previously unknown to science! As the topic of my doctoral dissertation, my teacher Pentti Aalto suggested the Drāhyāyaṇa-Śrautasūtra, which the Finnish scholar Julio Reuter began publishing in 1904.

Isolated by mountains, the densely forested state of Kerala, on the southern tip of India, has preserved its cultural traditions in all their authenticity and immense richness. In addition to well-known kathakali dance-drama, the Kerala Folk arts directory lists one hundred performance genres, of which Northern Kerala’s teyyam dance, with its amazing costumes and ordeals by fire, is particularly impressive.

In 1964 my friend Seppo Koskenniemi asked me whether I wanted to try a computer for some research tasks. In 1952, it had been possible to decipher the Linear B script without translations by studying such things as the sequence of script signs and the density of their occurrence. The computer assisted in collecting such data on the undeciphered writing system of the Indus Civilization, which now became our pastime.

The study of the Vedic tradition and the Indus Civilization has also required research into the appearance of speakers of Sanskrit, i.e. Old Indo-Aryan, in South Asia. Sanskrit belongs to the Aryan or Indo-Iranian languages, which are part of the Indo-European language family. In 1986, Sir William Jones noted that Sanskrit, both in relation to its words and suffixes, was so similar to Greek and Latin that a philologist could not avoid concluding that they sprang from the same proto-language, which was perhaps no longer in existence.

Of the many fine memories I have at the University of Helsinki, the longest in duration is studying classical philology, which already fascinated me at upper-secondary school. In the summer of 1958, I read Eutropius’s Breviarium historiae Romanae, which I had found in a second-hand bookshop, with no other help than that of a dictionary and grammar. I discovered that I enjoyed solving problems of Latin more than solving crossword puzzles.

I worked as the head of the Department of Asian and African Studies from 1994–98, the Vice President of the Finnish Oriental Society from 1981–93 and President 1994–96. I was invited to join the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters in 1990 and the Academia Europaea in 2000.