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Preface
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The Nāgarī script is now used over a large part of the Indian sub-continent for writing Sanskrit and some other Indian languages. But it is seldom realised by the common people that its origin lies in Brāhmi through a chain of successive variations. The question of the origin and development of Nāgarī has been summarily dealt with in the works on Indian palaeography and a few other writings, but so far we have had no independent work dealing with the subject in a scientific perspective. The present work aims at meeting this long-felt desideratum which is an out-come of my research for the degree of Ph.D. of the Banaras Hindu University.
I have investigated into the development of the Nāgarī Script only upto the 13th century A.D. This cut-off point has been chosen because by this time, the development of the Nāgari alphabet reached its maturity and during the following centuries it became almost stagnant. The bulk of the work contains illustrations of alphabets selected from different inscriptions and manuscripts.
The present work is divided into seven chapters dealing with the different stages of the development of Nāgarī. The first one is an introduction dealing with the subjects, such as various theories on the name Nāgari and Devanāgarī, its main features and also gives a fair idea of the nature of Mauryan Brāhmi tracing the development of individual letterforms including ligatures and medial signs met with in this prototype. It also gives a reasonable account of various factors which were responsible for the development of the Brāhmi script. It is followed by a detailed account of the Kutila variety, a post-Gupta development from Brāhmī, which represents an important developmental stage between Brāhmi and
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