A History of South India from Prehistoric Times to the Fall of Vijayanagar c6.25

c6.25

In addition to stone inscriptions, copper-plate grants come into vogue under the successors of the Sātavāhanas, and some dynasties among them like the Brihatphalāyanas are known only by a single copper plate. Prākrit continues to be the language of the inscriptions till about the fourth century A.D., and then Sanskrit comes to be preferred as the sole language of official documents by the Kadambas, Gangas and Pallavas for a period of two or three centuries. Later inscriptions become bilingual, employing Sanskrit generally at the beginning and the end, and the local speech of the people—Kannada, Telugu or Tamil—in the body of the document, particularly when describing in detail the gifts made and the boundaries of land given to temples, learned men, and so on. From about the tenth century A.D. inscriptions composed altogether in the popular speech become very common, though Sanskrit continues to be employed wholly or in part in other records and holds an honoured place everywhere as the best medium of cultural intercourse. The script undergoes many changes and evolves, in the Deccan, into the ancestor of the modern Telugu and Kannada scripts while farther south its evolution first assumes the early form of Grantha known from the Pallava inscriptions of the seventh and eighth centuries, and then undergoes modifications under the influence of the Tamil alphabet in its two forms—Tamil properly so called and Vaṭṭeḻuttu or round hand. The origin of these two scripts is by no means definitely settled yet. It may be noted, however, that Bühler held it probable that the Tamil alphabet was derived from a northern alphabet of the fourth or fifth century which in course of time was strongly influenced by the Grantha used in the Tamil districts for writing Sanskrit. He also pointed out that ‘the Vaṭṭeḻuttu may be described as a cursive script, which bears the same relation to the Tamil as the modern northern alphabets of the clerks and merchants to their originals, e.g. the Moḍi of the Marathas to the Bālbodh and the Ṭākari of the Dogras to the Śārada’. The Vaṭṭeḻuttu went out of use in the Tamil country about the tenth century A.D. though it continued in use till much later on the west coast.