Indian Palaeography c8.41

c8.41

My particular approach to the study of Indian palaeography follows from my conception of writing as being a part of culture, and as I would seek to discover a culture through the various traits seen in the available material contents, so it is also possible to search for the different writing styles which can be inferred from the available specimens. The forms in any particular inscription are not ends in themselves. They are the materials for proper study and analysis into one or other tradition following one or other technique. The tradition relates the script to one particular culture, and thus writing becomes a part of the culture, and the difference in technique accounts for the creation of the new forms. As a palaeographer I am in quest of the traditions and the techniques that can better explain the development of the characters in India, and thus pave the way to defining the particular cultures within which the different writing styles operate. The development of their writings is a part of the evolution of those cultures. Hence I do not attach importance to the formal comparison of the signs, though in the absence of any other clue this may be made the basis of preliminary study. However, my method demands that for purposes of comparison one should take into account the total number of signs in any inscription and compare them *in that context* with similar assessments of other inscriptions. It is necessary to go beyond the outward forms and look for the inner unity of the letters on the basis of technical analysis and phonological content. The phonology will relate the script to the alphabet and the technique will dictate the nature of forms that must result from it. The study of palaeography is thus an attempt to discover the various styles of writing in any particular culture as it evolved through the centuries. When we go beyond this and act as arbiter to assign one or the other date to an epigraph, we are no longer true to the subject with which we are dealing. But it is precisely with this last objective that palaeography in India has hitherto been studied. From the time that Prinsep realized the great part that Indian palaeography could play in supplying chronological clues to otherwise undatable objects, it has been the aim of the palaeographers to perfect their method and make it as exact a subject as any other science, so as to give infallible dates. But the following pages will show that this is too much to expect from palaeography. Though I have myself not been free from the motive of assigning dates to epigraphs, I fully realize the limitation of the subject, and hence have here tried to discover the various writing styles and through them the cultures to which they rightly belong. My dating of the inscriptions is relative to the styles, and the links that I have tried to establish between them are based on the same principles as those which govern any other trait of a culture. As will be clear from the description of this method,¹ the illustrations given are not exact copies of the originals, but they are the forms of the various styles as I have reconstructed them after examining the different inscriptions. My approach to the question of the origin of the scripts follows from this concept.