Elements of South-Indian Palæography, from the Fourth to the Seventeenth Century A.D. c5.s4.2

c5.s4.2

² The word ‘Nāga(rī)’ first occurs, it seems, as the name of an alphabet in the Lalitavistara, a life of Buddha that is in its original form perhaps two thousand years old; but as it exists in Sanskrit and Tibetan, it would be very unsafe to put it at an earlier date than about the seventh century A. D. The Tibetan version (of which Profr. Foucaux has published a most excellent edition and translation) was made in the ninth century by three natives of India named Jinamitra, Dānaçila and Munivarmā with the assistance of a Tibetan Lotsava named Bande Ye-šes-sdes; this fact is stated in the Tibetan index to the great collection called Bkah-hgyur (Kandjur) in the description of the work in question (Rgya-tcher-rol-pa *i. e.* Lalitavistara), and is to be found on p. 16 (No. 95) of this index as reprinted at St. Petersburg. Nāga(rī) occurs as the name of an alphabet in ch. x. (v. p. 113 of vol. i. of Profr. Foucaux’s edition) which describes how the young prince, afterwards known as Buddha, was taken to a school and completely posed the pedagogue. Sixty-four alphabets are mentioned some of which are, no doubt, mythical, but others are real (*e. g.* Drāviḍa, Aṅga and Baṅga), though it is against all the evidence of the inscriptions that they existed as distinct alphabets before the ninth or tenth century A. D. If therefore the framework of the Lalitavistara be old, this passage is certainly an interpolation, though very valuable evidence regarding the ninth century A. D. But this Tibetan version by no means bears out the meaning usually assigned to the word Devanāgarī—“nāgarī of the Gods or Brahman”, nāgarī being usually referred to nagara and being supposed to mean ‘writing used in cities’. The Tibetan text has here the ordinary name (in that language) of the Nāgarī character—“klu-’i yi-ge” (as a translation of the Sanskrit ‘nāga-lipi’) and this is also literally “writing of the nāgas”. (*Cfr.* Jaeschke’s W. B. p. 7.) It is evident, therefore, what the natives of India understood nāgalipi or nāgarī to mean in the ninth century A. D., and it only remains to be seen if this derivation is possible. I think this question must be answered in the affirmative, as not only Prakṛit but also Sanskrit words exist which are formed in the same way. (Bopp’s Comp. Grammar, ed. Bréal, § 940.) There is yet another possible explanation of ‘nāgarī’—that it means the writing of the Nāgara or Gujarat Brahmans. (*Cfr.* ‘nāgara’ in Molesworth’s Mahr. Dictionary.) Albīrūnī (Reinaud, “Mémoire”, p. 298) mentions the ‘nāgara’ character as used in Malva, and the ‘arda-nāgarī’ (*i. e.* ardhanāgarī) as used in Scinde.