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Nāgarī in Manuscripts (11th-13th Century A.D.)
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time and again dried. The dried leaves were rubbed with conch, or cowrieshells, or a smooth piece of stone and finally cut into folios of equal size. According to the length of folio, the writer or scriber divided it into two or three columns separated by narrow vertical margins. Generally, the external sides of the first and the last folios were left blank.
The earliest available manuscripts, in general, were written by twosects --Bauddha and Jaina. The Buddhist tradition was prevalent in eastern India, chiefly in the provinces of Bihar and Bengal; while the Jaina tradition was widely spread in western India. Several religious complexes of these groups were established where among other things the task of copying and illustrating the manuscript was a part of the monastic activity During the 12th century, the Muslim invaders razed to the ground and burnt down many religious and monastic establishments in U.P., Bihar and Bengal. As a consequence, the art of Buddhist manuscript illustration came to an abrupt end in Eastern India. The Jain tradition in Western India, however, escaped such misfortune and remained to develop in the subsequent centuries without any significant interruption.
The alphabet employed in the manuscripts of these two sects is Nāgarī. The manuscripts generally were written in North India, with pen and ink, while in the South the letters were incised on the leaves with a sharppointed needle and were made black by besmearing ink on the writing. As in the inscriptions so also in manuscripts, the Nāgarī unravels a process of development into the Bengāli script in Bihar and Bengal; and in Western India, a variant of Nāgarī, termed Jain-Nāgarī.
In the study of manuscript-Nāgari one confronts some problems such as determining the provenance, date, etc. Manuscript writing was then a universal tradition. Document writers from time to time transcribed from older manuscripts in which, optionally, the same original date is repeated in the later copies. The later manuscript reveals a more advanced form of the alphabet on the basis of which the earlier may be discriminated. However, it was not impossible that the script of the same period shows different stages of development in the different geographical distributions. In these conditions it is not easy to sort out the alphabets of manuscripts
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