Indian Palaeography c8.40

c8.40

The third stage in the study of Indian palaeography begins from the close of the nineteenth century, when the Government of India started to issue regular volumes of *Epigraphia Indica*. In these journals every inscription edited has some introductory paragraphs dealing with its palaeography. A vast amount of comparative material is thus available for different periods of writing. Similar materials are also available in the epigraphic publications of Ceylon and the countries of South-east Asia. But through all these publications Bühler’s method has remained the standard. I have not been able to detect any new angle of study in any of these writings. On the same principle individual efforts have been made to trace the evolution of the regional scripts and bring them down to modern times. An elaborate application of this principle is seen in C. Sivaramamurti’s *Indian Epigraphy and South Indian Scripts*, in which he has tried to put on different pages the changing forms of every letter and thus reduce them into abstract shapes apart from the context in which they appear. The method is no doubt suitable for showing the development of the forms in a museum gallery, and the book is at best a faithful record of that method. Another recent contribution is Raj Bali Pandey’s *Indian Palaeography*, which, except for the general chapters on the antiquity and origin of Indian writing and the history of its decipherment, contains nothing on what is understood by the term ‘palaeography’. F. W. Thomas contributed an important article, ‘Brāhmī Script in Central-Asian Sanskrit Manuscripts’, in which he discussed the terminology earlier framed by Hoernle on the basis of formal shapes, and tried to evolve a regional and chronological system from the numerous manuscript materials now available. A comprehensive book on *The Development of the Kharoṣṭhī Script* by C. C. Dasgupta was published in 1958, in which the author claims to have made a detailed analysis of the forms known in the inscriptions and the manuscripts. Except for this compilation there is hardly anything original in the book, and even the compilation suffers from the defect of the simplified copying of the original forms. Palaeographical questions, when raised, have often been answered by quotation from other authors, the special problems relating to the Kharoshṭhī script are hardly touched.