scripts and Sanskrit

Whitney Cox wc3 at SOAS.AC.UK
Tue Jan 12 12:26:35 UTC 2010


At the risk of being self-aggrandizing, I have a forthcoming article
on the (epigraphic) use of Nāgarī in the 11th and 12th century western
Deccan.  I would be happy to share off-prints with anyone interested
once it appears.  Please contact me off-list,

Whitney Cox

2010/1/12 Dominic Goodall <dominic.goodall at gmail.com>:
> In the discussion about scripts used for Sanskrit over the last few days,
> the widespread use of Devanāgarī (outside its "native" area) well before
> print seems to have been somewhat overlooked.
>
> S.A. Srinivasan's discussion of contamination has some interesting remarks
> on the relationship between Devanāgarī and other scripts on pp.4--5 of his
> edition of the Tattvakaumudī.
> (Vācaspatimiśras Tattvakaumudī. Ein Beitrag zur Textkritik bei
> kontaminierter Überlieferung.
> Srinavasa Ayya Srinivasan. Hamburg, 1967.)
>
> Srinivasan is, as he explains, echoing Sukthankar's prolegomena to the
> Ādiparvan of the Mahābhārata, on p.LXII of which, for instance, we may read:
>
> "The Devanāgarī script plays in the Mahābhārata textual tradition the
> important rôle of being the commonest medium of the contamination of
> different Mahābhārata versions.  A Devanāgarī manuscript of the Mahābhārata
> may, in fact, contain practically any version or combination of versions."
>
> Geographical location no doubt goes a long way to explain the dominance of
> Devanāgarī.  Presumably centres such as Benares, a pilgrimage site and
> therefore a place at which many texts must have been copied by people from
> many regions, had a role to play.
>
> And long before Devanāgarī, there is evidence of the use, in certain
> contexts, of a North-Indian standard (a proto-Nāgarī) well beyond North
> Indian boundaries: digraphic inscriptions (using both a South Indian and a
> North Indian script type) are found on Pallava monuments of the early C8th,
> for instance, and somewhat later in Cambodia.
>
> One wonders, by the way, what centres (and what other factors) created the
> South Indian and South East Asian script-standard of the 5th to 8th
> centuries.
>
> As for script-names, these are notoriously uncertain. Is it known when the
> Kashmirian script became known as Śāradā ?  And is there any old name at all
> known for the South Indian script-type so very widely used in the 5th to 8th
> centuries ?  South-East-Asianists today, of course, call it "Pallava
> Grantha"; but presumably this wasn't how it was known in C6th Karnataka or
> C6th Orissa or C6th Cambodia.
>
> Dominic Goodall
>
>
> Pondicherry Centre,
> Ecole française d'Extrême-Orient
>



-- 


Dr. Whitney Cox
Department of the Languages and Cultures of South Asia,
School of Oriental and African Studies
Thornhaugh Street, Russell Square
London WC1H 0XG





More information about the INDOLOGY mailing list