Indian Epigraphy: A Guide to the Study of Inscriptions in Sanskrit, Prakrit, and the Other Indo-Aryan Languages c7.s1.t2.6

c7.s1.t2.6

Because of the virtual absence of actual documentary evidence for writing in the blank period, many historians and epigraphists have addressed the question of the possibility of literacy in pre-Mauryan India through the examination of literary and other evidence. The literature on the subject is far too extensive to be presented in detail here. The discussions by Burnell (SIP 1–11), Bühler (OIBA 5–35 and BIP 3–6), Ojhā (BPLM 1–16), Pandey (PIP 1–22), and Sircar (IIEP 104–6) may be taken as more or less representative of earlier opinions, of which a complete survey and up-to-date analysis is provided in Falk's SAI. To begin with Vedic literature, certain authors (notably Ojhā in BPLM 9–13 and, mostly following him, Pandey and others) have claimed evidence for a literate culture in the later Vedic texts, and even in the *Ṛg Veda*, on the grounds of references therein to poetic meters, grammatical and phonetic terms, very large numbers, and relatively complex arithmetic calculations. But it is by no means certain that such cultural phenomena presuppose literacy, and it may be argued to the contrary that the absence of a single explicit and indisputable reference to writing anywhere in early Vedic literature suggests that the Vedic culture was a preliterate one.¹²