Indian Epigraphy: A Guide to the Study of Inscriptions in Sanskrit, Prakrit, and the Other Indo-Aryan Languages c7.s2.t6.49

c7.s2.t6.49

In northern India, the late forms of Siddhamātṛkā gradually shaded into early versions of the modern northern scripts, the most important of which is the Nāgarī or Devanāgarī script.¹¹⁴ Bühler (BIP 51) cited examples of inscriptions in Nāgarī, or showing Nāgarī characteristics, as early as the eighth or even seventh centuries, but V. S. Sukthankar¹¹⁵ argued that there are actually no authentic specimens of this script earlier than two Śilāhāra inscriptions from Kāṇheri dated a.d. 851 and 877/78 (CII 6, 3–8). By the beginning of the eleventh century, Devanāgarī has supplanted Siddhamātṛkā for epigraphic and literary purposes and has essentially attained its modern form, characterized by the horizontal top line across the entire character, rectangular corners and generally square frame, and fully extended vowel diacritics. The individual characters have by now undergone extensive, sometimes radical remodeling, as in the case of *ja*, *tha*, and *ha*. Thus, although numerous subvarieties of (Deva-) nāgarī are known from both epigraphic and literary sources from different times and regions, by about a.d. 1000 it can be said to have essentially achieved its standard form. As such, it became the closest thing to a national script of India for writing Sanskrit; although the regional scripts continued to be widely used for this purpose in medieval, and to a considerable extent still in modern, times, Nāgarī was not rarely used for Sanskrit inscriptions outside of northern India, including the Deccan and the far south (the so-called Nandi-nāgarī variety; for examples see IESIS 184–93).¹¹⁶