Indian Palaeography c13.s5.1

c13.s5.1

South Indian palaeography received early attention with the publication of a monograph by Burnell in 1874. But the paucity of materials from the early period left many problems unsolved. The discovery of the inscriptions from the Bhattiprolu stūpa in the Kistna district and their masterly handling by Bühler raised for the first time the question of the southern alphabet and the script. Bühler had already maintained the existence of a Drāviḍī script, including in it the character of the Peninsular inscriptions of Aśoka. Bhattiprolu gave him a new idea, that South India had a script of its own derived independently of the Aśokan. This statement was not borne out by the discovery of the 'early' inscriptions from Amaravati. The palaeographers did not pay heed to this discrepancy between the Bhattiprolu and the Amaravati scripts, probably because the Amaravati inscriptions are all in Prakrit and hence need not include characters suitable to the Dravidian languages. But a large number of cave inscriptions discovered in the districts of Madura and Tinnevelli and in the former state of Puddukottai, which are all, as has been shown by Subrahmanya Ayyar, in Tamil, once again raised the question of the Drāviḍī script. Ayyar has pointed out the differences that are found between the Bhattiprolu and the cave inscriptions, but even now C. Sivaramamurti has not touched the important question of the origin of this script in his recent memoir on *Indian Epigraphy and South Indian Scripts*.