Scripts

Hmm… During my recent visit to Shimla for a friend’s marriage, I walked over to the museum. There were the collections of costumes - I never knew there could exist so many different kinds of them within the small state of Himachal Pradesh. There were the collections of arms.

There were the collections of photographs - Simla happens to have had a profound place during the freedom struggle where our then British masters and their would be Indian successors all left for the comforts of the hills in the summers, leaving the huge majority of Indians reeling in the plains (as usual).

What interested me most were the collections of stones and several items carved from stones - from idols to temple entrances, from tools of daily use to tablets with scriptures on them - this last I read bore scripts that were a precursor of Dewanaagiri. What astonished me was the similarity with the Bengali script I can read. Both have triangular letters. How strange - the script of Bengal and Assam (which are the same) and the script of ancient Himachal - a preliminary idea of India’s map will reveal the strangeness of it all.

But that’s not all - I remembered the time when I was in the South and passed AP on the rails - barring a few letters like ‘ka’, the Telugu script is much the same as the Kannada one. Now this ‘ka’ happens to be the same as that of the Gujarati script. Another wonder. Not Karnataka, not Maharashtra, not Madhya Pradesh but Gujarat - and I don’t think it has anything to do with the common penchant for US settlement in both the states. The ‘ka’ also looks suspiciously similar to the US dollar symbol. :-))

Thoughts…