Use of Devanagari for Sanskrit

[George Hart]

In a draft about unicode Eric Muller has written "By the eleventh  
century, the modern script known as Devanagari was in ascendancy in  
India proper as the major script of Sanskrit literature."  This seems  
wrong to me -- certainly, in South India grantha, Telugu, Malayalam  
and Kannada scripts  continued to be used for Sanskrit into the 20th  
century and, to some extent, are still used (e.g. by priests in the  
Murugan temple in Concord, CA).  I would be interested in getting  
some feedback on this matter -- when and where did Devanagari become  
standard for Sanskrit?  I would guess that it begins fairly early in  
the North and only reaches South India in the 20th century.  Many  
years ago, I purchased 2 large collections of Sri Vaisnava books from  
the estates of two devotees who had passed away (their children had  
no use for them, sadly).  The books, all of which were published in  
the first half of the 20th century, include perhaps 1/3 Sanskrit  
texts.  Of these about 1/10 are in devanagari, 75% are in Telugu  
script and 15% are in grantha.  The collections also include a large  
number (30%) of Tamil books printed in Telugu script -- which enables  
one to write Sanskrit phonemes which are not represented in the Tamil  
script.  The rest are Tamil books in Tamil script, with Sanskrit  
(quoted and used liberally by commentators) generally in grantha.  It  
is worth remembering that after 1100 or so, the majority of Sanskrit  
writers have been South Indians -- at least that is what I have  
read.  George Hart