Indian Palaeography c8.2

c8.2

THE history of the study of Indian palaeography falls into three definite stages. The first, which covers the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, was the period of the discovery of the inscriptions and the decipherment of the scripts used in them.¹ Individual efforts made earlier in this field were co-ordinated with the foundation of the Asiatic Society in Calcutta in 1784. The first successful effort at interpretation was made in 1785 by Charles Wilkins, who read the Badal pillar inscription (Dinajpur district, East Pakistan) of the Pāla king Nārāyaṇapāla. In the same year Pandit Radhakant Sharma read the Delhi-Topra pillar inscription of the Chāhamāna king Visaladeva. Later, the discovery of the Maukhari inscriptions from the Barabar Hill caves in Bihar enabled Wilkins to tackle the inscriptions of the Gupta rulers. Still further afield, James Tod collected a large number of inscriptions in Rajasthan, Central India, and Gujarat between 1818 and 1823. These inscriptions, which ranged from the seventh to the fifteenth centuries A.D., were partially read with the help of Yato Jñānachandra. These early efforts received a further impetus when in 1834 Babington prepared a table of letters on the basis of the Sanskrit and Tamil inscriptions discovered at Mamallapuram;² in 1833 Walter Elliot published an elaborate comparative table of the older forms of the Kannada alphabet; and in 1837 Captain H. Harkness compiled his *Ancient and Modern Alphabets of the Popular Hindu Languages of the Southern Peninsula of India*. During these years the inscriptions of the Guptas of Northern India and those of the Maitrakas of Valabhi were completely deciphered. In this new venture we may notice the remarkable personality of James Prinsep, who was to bring about a revolutionary change in the decipherment of the still older inscriptions.