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INDIAN BRANCH
381
Kadamba kingdom, fifth and sixth centuries A.D., and the early Chalukya inscriptions, A.D. 578-660. At present, the cliff inscription of Chalukya Vallabhesvara (Pulikesin I), dated Saka 465 and corresponding to A.D. 543. discovered in 1941 at Badami, by the Bombay Kannada Research Institute, is the earliest example extant of the use of the Saka era in documents and the only inscription of the famous king Pulikesin I.
(b) The intermediate script, from ca. A.D. 650-950, subdivided into the western and the eastern varieties. The cursive signs are a feature common to all the later inscriptions of the western Chalukyas, with a marked slope towards the right, while the eastern variety is remarkably square and upright, and the letters are broader and shorter.
(c) The third variety, corresponding to Burnell's "transitional," is not properly termed by Buehler (after Fleet) "old Kanarese." It belongs to the flourishing period of early Dravidian literature. This character appears first in the west, in inscriptions of the second half of the tenth century, and a little later in the east, in Vengi inscriptions of the eleventh century.
Fig. 173-175 show specimens of the ancient and modern Kanarese and Telugu scripts.
Later Kalinga Script
The Later Kalinga script-for the early Kalinga inscriptions, see p. 341-is the writing of inscriptions of the seventh-twelfth centuries discovered on the north-eastern coast of the Madras presidency. In earlier documents, the script is strongly mixed with northern forms and with Central Indian forms, while in later times the mixture of the characters is even greater, some letters being developments of the older signs, and the majority of the characters being southern Deva-nagari forms. This mixture is explained by the fact that the population of that territory, lying not far from districts where Deva-nagari, Central Indian, KanareseTelugu and Grantha (see below) characters were used, knew all those scripts.
Grantha Character
The term "Grantha," which already appears in the fourteenth century A.D., indicates that this character was used for writing books. It is distinguished into the following varieties.
Early Grantha
The early Grantha is the script of the ancient Sanskrit inscriptions of the eastern coast of Madras, south of Pulicat, of the early South Indian kingdoms of the Pallavas of Kanchi, now Conjeeveram (fifth-ninth centuries), of the Cholas (ninth-fourteenth centuries) and the Pandyas.
The Pandyas, mentioned in the fourth century B.C., constituted an independent kingdom in the time of Asoka, but the earliest indigenous documents extant
