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Eternal India
encyclopedia
EXPRESSIONS OF INDIA
THE BRAHMI SCRIPT
Thus speaks the King, Dear to the Gods,
Priyadarsi.
When I had been consecrated twenty-six years I ordered this
inscription of Righteousness (
Dharma
) to be engraved. Both the world and the other are hard to reach, except by great
Love of Righteousness, great self-examination, great obedience (to Righteousness), great respect (for Righteous-
ness), great energy. But through my leadership respect for Righteousness and love of Righteousness have grown
and will grow from day to day. Moreover my officers, of high low and medium grades, follow it and apply it,
sufficiently to make the waverer accept it; the officers on the frontiers do likewise.
The earliest known Indian system of writing, serving as a vehicle
of language, was the one used by the people of the pre-historic
Harappan or Indus Valley civilisation (2500-1550 B.C.) Among the
remains of this civilisation are a number of inscribed seals on which
a few letters of an unknown script occur. The script written from
right to left has not been fully deciphered so far although several
attempts by experts are under way. (refer -
N- Archaeology
)
The Aryans, when they entered India around 1500 B.C. did not
have a script for the language spoken by them, namely, Sanskrit. The
first vestiges of writing appear in the Mauryan period (300 B.C.). In
the pre-Ashokan and Ashokan inscriptions there was a fully devel-
oped system of writing in which the dialects then current in north
India, the Prakrits, were written. This script, written from left to
right, is Brahmi.
Another alphabet found in use in India in the Mauryan period was
the Kharosthi script. This was confined to the north-west of India
and was written from right to left. Kharosthi was little used in India
proper after the 3rd Century A.D. but it survived some centuries
longer in Central Asia where many Prakrit documents in Kharosthi
script have been discovered. The Kharosthi script was derived from
the Arabic script used in Iran.
The Brahmi script was first deciphered in the second quarter of
the 19th century by an English scholar, James Prinsep. In 1837 he
deciphered the characters used in the inscriptions, which later proved
to be those of the Mauryan emperor Ashoka.
It has been suggested by Dr. S.R. Rao who has deciphered the
Harappa script to a large extent that both the Semitic and Brahmi
scripts evolved from it. (refer -
N- Archaeology)
The original direction of Brahmi was from right to left, but this
seems to have changed to left to right. In an early Sinhalese
inscription and a coin the writing is from right to left. In an
inscription of Ashoka discovered in Yerragudi in Andhra Pradesh
the writing is
boustrophedon,
with the lines alternately leftward
and rightward..
Indian languages are offshoots of four language families.
However, the diverse scripts found in India are developed from
a single source — Brahmi. The earliest Brahmi inscriptions are
those belonging to the reign of Ashoka. The earliest specimen
of a child learning writing is preserved in the Sugh terracotta
of the 2nd century B.C. Variations in the Brahmi script, seen from
the time of Ashoka, resulted in the Devanagari script in which
Sanskrit and Hindi are written today. Marathi was formerly writ-
ten in the Modi script, originally a Deccan modification of Brahmi,
but it was replaced by Devanagari. Regional variations led to
the development of individual scripts for Punjabi, Bengali, Oriya,
Gujarati, Assamese and Maithili.
In the Deccan and South India, Telugu and Kannada are two
styles of the same form of the Deccan Brahmi. The Brahmi
characters which were mainly linear became rounded or curved.
The Tamils evolved an angular script known as Grantha for San-
skrit from which the modem Tamil alphabet is derived. Malayalam
belongs to the same Tamil-Grantha group.
Besides the above scripts derived from Brahmi, the Perso-Arabic
script is employed in India to write Urdu as well as Kashmiri and
Sindhi. Sindhis who have migrated to India after Independence
have adopted the Devanagari script for Sindhi.