Indian Palaeography c14.s10.1

c14.s10.1

The old palaeographers¹ wrote of a common Gupta alphabet with regional variations. Fleet distinguished two classes—northern and southern—and Hoernle further pointed to a distinction between the eastern and western group mainly on the basis of a few letters. This classification was based on the materials available to them. Newly discovered North Indian inscriptions belonging to the second to fourth centuries a.d. remain unexplained if this concept of the old palaeographers is adhered to. The so-called special letters of the Eastern Gupta alphabet were long in use in the inscriptions of the Magha rulers at Kauśāmbī. Their influence has been traced in the rare inscriptions of Kanishka and Huvishka at Mathura, and in the east at Sahet-Mahet the looped *sa* and hooked *ha* have been found.² The Mathura style of the Kushāṇa writing is seen at Sanchi, but is hardly observable in the east, except that the Mathura system of vowel-marking is noticed in the Kanishka inscriptions of Kosam, Sarnath, and Sahet-Mahet. The other local inscriptions maintain a different variety.³ Malwa was affected by the incursions of the Western Kshatrapas and the Sātavāhanas, and hence the style in that region rapidly changed. In the fourth century a.d. these regional variations are maintained. The Allahabad pillar inscription and the Bhita seals are in the Kauśāmbī style, but the longer inscription of Pavarika at Sahet-Mahet and the seal of Dhruvasvāminī at Basarh show a different eastern style, as seen in the Sarnath inscription of Aśvaghosha. The Eran inscription of Samudra Gupta, and the Sanchi inscription and all but one of the Udayagiri inscriptions of Chandra Gupta II follow the Malwa style, while the Mathura inscriptions of Chandra Gupta II are in the Mathura style. But a change was definitely coming towards the close of this century. The earliest evidence is supplied by the Udayagiri cave inscription (Fleet, no. 6) of Chandra Gupta II, which is written entirely in the Kauśāmbī style. Similarly the influence of Kauśāmbī is traceable in one or two letters at Mathura. In the fifth century a.d. the Kauśāmbī style became the predominating system of writing in the Gangetic Valley, though the other styles continued to be used occasionally in the local inscriptions. In the face of this evidence it is difficult to choose one or the other style and call it the Gupta alphabet. I have therefore followed the regional and chronological classification. The Gupta inscriptions of Samudra Gupta and Chandra Gupta II are analysed here, and the others will be described in the next chapter.