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WRITING— THE BEGINNINGS
119
We cannot, therefore, be far wrong if we suppose they were not merely indifferent to the use of writ. ing as a means of handing on the books so lucrative to themselves, but were even strongly opposed to a method so dangerous to their exclusive privileges, And we ought not to be surprised to find that the oldest manuscripts on bark or palm leaf known in India are Buddhist ; that the earliest written records on stone and metal are Buddhist ; that it is the Buddhists who first made use of writing to record their canonical books; and that the earliest mention of writing at all in the voluminous priestly literature is in the Vāsishtha Dharma Sūtra'-one of the later law books, and long posterior to the numerous references quoted above from the Buddhist canon.
It is, of course, not impossible, a priori, that the priests in India had developed an alphabet of their own out of picture writing; and that it was on to such an alphabet that the borrowed letters were grafted. General Cunningham went even farther. He thought the alphabet was altogether developed, independently, on Indian soil. But we have at present, not only no evidence to that effect, but much the other way. All the present available evidence tends to show that the Indian alphabet is not Aryan at all; that it was introduced into India by Dravidian merchants; and that it was not, in spite of their invaluable services in other respects to In. dian literature, to the priests, whose self-interests were opposed to such discoveries, but to traders, and to less prejudiced literary circles, that India
'xvi. 10. 14.
Shree Sudharmaswami Gyanbhandar-Umara, Surat
www.umaragyanbhandar.com
