Indian Palaeography c15.s7.1

c15.s7.1

Deccan is the Persianized form of the Sanskrit word *dakshiṇa*, meaning south. The Muslim historians applied this term to those areas which lay immediately south of the central belt of the mountainous and forested regions in India, and this special sense of the term is preserved to this day. As it is commonly understood, it excludes Gujarat and Kathiawad in the west, the Tamil and Kannadi areas in the south, and Orissa in the east. The upper central region of the Indian peninsula is, *par excellence*, the historical Deccan, and here I have used the term in this sense. It was really the middle country between the north and the south. Traditions from both directions reached this region and were absorbed. Eastern Malwa was the passage through which northern ideas passed into this region, spread down the Godavari and the Kistna rivers from west to east, and finally trickled into the extreme south. The opposite current from the south to the north flowed in exactly the reverse direction. The intermediary character of this zone is clearly marked in the writing styles that developed here. The northern and southern traditions have equal weight, varying only with the force that keeps them alive. Sometimes there is a happy mixture of the two traditions leading to new forms. It is this last characteristic in the writing style with which we are concerned in this section. I have called it the Deccani style. It appears for the first time in Eastern Malwa, where southern influence had penetrated long before with the Sātavāhana advance into the north. In the fourth century A.D. this writing received a new character by the addition of a square head-mark at the top left of the verticals. This mark, which gave rise to the old term 'box-headed character', is natural neither to pen nor to stylus. Bühler is obviously wrong when he says that the solid squares were due to the pen style and the hollow ones to the stylus. It has been shown in the last chapter¹ that this head-mark is a development from the new pen style of writing that is seen from the first century A.D. onwards in the north. These peculiar heads are no doubt stylized forms of the original head-marks. This is indicated by two factors: (i) the varying shapes of the marks, as seen in the different groups of the inscriptions, depending on a particular form chosen in one region, and (ii) their superfluous nature, having no essential connexion with the actual form of the letters. This is especially true in the inscriptions of the extreme south where the head-mark was hardly understood. As a result no one style of letter-forms could develop in the Deccan inseparably associated with this square head-mark. It remained an ornament to be worn by the different characters first in Malwa and the Deccan and subsequently in the neighbouring south. But no sooner did the characters evolve new forms than the fashion had to be set aside. This Deccani characteristic had a short life and died a natural death without leaving any trace behind.