Indian Palaeography c13.s5.2

c13.s5.2

In the previous chapter we did not accept the division of Aśokan Brāhmī into northern and southern characters as propounded by Bühler. Aśokan Brāhmī is mainly imperial and it is hard to distinguish regional varieties. The evolution of the South Indian scripts can be traced only from the early inscriptions of Amaravati and Bhattiprolu, and from the cave records. There is one common denominator to all of them—they are Buddhistic in content. Hence the introduction of writing into the extreme south, as far as we know, must be ascribed to the activities of the Buddhist monks. It is hardly likely that these monks were isolated from the Buddhist order of North India. Another link is provided by the Prakrit used in most of these inscriptions. It is no wonder that there is a general similarity at this time between the scripts of South India and those of the north. The main differences arose only when an attempt was made to represent the local sounds in writing. Even these sounds, as we shall see, do not bring in altogether new shapes. Almost all the new letters are derivable from those of the existing script of the north. Hence there is no necessity for propounding an original Drāviḍī script different from Aśokan Brāhmī and tracing it to some ultimate source in Western Asia.