Devanagari Script

Devanagari is a Northern Brahmic script related to many other South Asian scripts including
Gujarati, Bengali, and Gurmukhi, and, more distantly, to a number of South-East Asian scripts
including Thai, Balinese, and Baybayin. The script is used for over 120 spoken Indo-Aryan
languages, including Hindi, Nepali, Marathi, Maithili, Awadhi, Newari and Bhojpuri. It is also
used for writing Classical Sanskrit texts. Generally the orthography of the script reflects the
pronunciation of the language.

The script is written from left to right. Letters hang from a headstroke, which is generally
continuous throughout the length of the word, except when writing the letters jha, tha, dha, bha, a
and ā, which all have a break in the headstroke. In handwriting, the headstroke is sometimes
omitted.

Devanagari is an abugida; each letter represents a consonant with an inherent [ə] vowel, which
can be modified using vowel diacritics. Vowel diacritics can be written above, below, to the left
or to the right of the consonant. There are thirty-two consonant and ten vowel letters, plus ten
vowel diacritics. The vowel signs represent long and short forms of five vowel sounds. Vowel
sounds which are not preceded by a consonant are written with a vowel letter; otherwise they are
indicated by a vowel diacritic, or, in the case of [ə], the lack thereof. There are also two letters
for the long and short forms of the syllabic consonant [r̩], which are ordered with the vowel
letters.

Origin of Devanagari Script

· Devanagari is a combination of two Sanskrit words: deva, which means god, brahman, or
celestial, and Nagari, which means city.

· The name can be translated as "script of the city," "heavenly/sacred script of the city," or
"[script of the] city of Gods or priests."
· The Nagari or Devanagari alphabet arose from eastern variants of the Gupta script known
as Nagari, which first appeared in the 8th century.

· By the 10th century, this script was beginning to resemble the modern Devanagari
alphabet, and it began to replace Siddham around 1200.

· It traces its origin from the Brahmi script. It has a Brahmi system of phonetics.

· It was developed during the 1st to 4th century CE.

· Brahmi script evolved during Vedic times.

· During the Buddhist and Jain periods Brahmi script was spread to various parts of the
subcontinent.

· It was called Bharati script and became a permanent feature in Bhagwat Gita.

· This Bharati script evolved to the Gupta script during the Gupta period then to Nagari
and ultimately Devanagari script.

Characteristics of Devanagari Script

· It consists of specific signs of phonetic sounds of human speech.

· It acts as an auxiliary script for languages such as Punjabi, Sindhi, etc.

· This script does not require an arrangement of spellings.

· Vowels having different roles are assigned a specific character.

· Presence of top line is an integral feature of Devanagari script

· There is conjunction formation of consonants.

· Some of the vowels are indicated by putting a half-moon mark on top of the word.

· Different signs are used for short and long vowels.

· It is written from left to right.

· It has an independent origin of vowels with each having its character.

· In this script basic arrangement of phonemes is phonetic.

· It is made of 47 primary characters.

 Devanagari – The Makings of a National Character
The story of Devanagari type from early print to the digital age, as Indian print culture both
sparked and responded to intense socio-political change and constant technological innovation.

History
The Devanagari script (also called Nagari) emerged in the 7th century CE as a descendant of the
Gupta script, alongside the closely related ancient Śāradā and Siddhamātr̥kā scripts. It reached
maturity around the 13th century CE.
Although primarily used to write Sanskrit in inscriptions and religious manuscripts, Devanagari
was also used to write vernacular languages across much of northern, northwestern and western
India.
As was customary in pre-modern India, these written traditions utilised more than one script. For
example, the cursive Moḍī script was used for scribal Marathi, as opposed to Devanagari, used
for Marathi inscriptions.

Modern status

Today, the Devanagari script is used to write three major languages: Hindi (over 520 million
speakers), Marathi (over 83 million speakers) and Nepali (over 14 million speakers).
Collectively, Devanagari is the most widely used Brahmic script in the world, with many
millions of people using it to read and write text on a daily basis.
 Hindi is one of the official languages of the Government of India (alongside English), while
Nepali is the sole official language of Nepal as well as an official language of the Indian state of
Sikkim. Marathi is the official language of the Indian state of Maharashtra and is co-official in
Goa. Sanskrit, the primary Hindu liturgical language, is also usually written in Devanagari,
including in regions where the local language is not written in Devanagari.
Within India, Hindi is official in the following states: Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Rajasthan, Haryana,
Himachal Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Uttarakhand and the National
Capital Territory of Delhi.
In addition, Hindi is used by Indian Central Government institutions across the country, and is
widely taught and spoken as an additional language outside Hindi-speaking states.
Devanagari is also used for non-standardised languages constitutionally recognised by the Indian
Government: Bodo, Maithili, Kashmiri, Sindhi, Dogri and Konkani.

The script
Graphically, Devanagari is marked by its prominent use of the shirorekha (head stroke, from
which letters hang), and vertical bars (full or half) supporting most letters. Most letter forms tend
to only be moderately rounded, and almost always feature elements with straight lines.

Consonant clusters can be represented vertically stacked, or linearly. Traditionally, vertically

stacked forms predominated, and they are still preferred for Nepali and Sanskrit. Vowel diacritic
markers can appear above, below, to the right or to the left of a consonant letter. A full set of
numerals from 0 to 9 is also commonly used.
Hindi, Marathi and Nepali largely share the same set of letters, although there are some regional
letter-form variants preferred by each language group. Conjunct formation, numeral and
punctuation preferences also differ.

From manuscript to print

The printing press reached India via Portuguese colonial authorities in 1556, changing forever
the face of Indian literary history – the visual representation of Indian scripts, the means in which
texts circulated, and the development of modern linguistic communities.
Indian literary traditions at the time were largely oral, with writing playing a secondary role.
Literacy was also overwhelmingly the preserve of the social elite, and most written records from
the pre-modern period appear in the form of manuscripts and inscriptions.
Given this, the circulation of early Indian printed texts was even more limited, and in many cases
intended primarily for a European readership. Even so, by the early 1800s, schools, run by
 missionaries and colonial authorities, were opened up across British India, with some native
rulers following suit. This formed the basis for public education in India, setting the stage for
wider literacy.

Pre-print conventions
Writing in pre-modern Indian society was characterised by the use of a range of scripts across
linguistic traditions, where languages were often written in different scripts based on
considerations of author, audience, context and purpose.
When a language was written down, such as in manuscripts or inscriptions, the choice of script
was dictated by socio-cultural factors on one hand, and technological considerations on the other.
These rich traditions of multiscriptal negotiation and co-existence largely remained stable over
the course of pre-modern Indian history, albeit restricted to traditionally literate communities.

Latin Centrism
Although major Indian languages had established and highly cultivated scribal and manuscript
traditions, typography was essentially a European import to the region. As such, the technology
was designed for the Latin script.
Indian language typography involved a balance between adhering to norms used in writing
Brahmic scripts, and adapting these scripts to the technologies available.
One of the most persistent influences of Latin centrism was the linearisation of Indic scripts.
Stacked conjuncts, and even vowel diacritics, were easier to represent linearly, and led to varying
degrees of simplification depending on print technology and language.
This history of Latin centrism carries a legacy that still makes its presence felt, through
conventions formalized at different stages in print history. After all, digital fonts have their basis
in fonts designed for metal types.

Early attempts
The earliest extant sample of printed Devanagari is in the 1667 text, China Illustrata, compiled
by the German missionary Athanasius Kircher. The text features samples of Devanagari, in the
form of individual letters, letters with combining mātrās, and short example texts.
 Another important early print sample is a Konkani language section written in the Devanagari
script in a 1678 text, Hortus Indicus Malabaricus, printed in Amsterdam.

The first ever metal Devanagari type was cast in 1740, thousands of miles from India – in Rome
by Indian converts to Catholicism. This was used to print Alphabetum Brahmanicum in 1771, the
earliest extant text we have printed in a Devanagari font. The vernacular samples in the text
reflect the linguistic variety the British termed ‘Hindustani’.
 Although the Portuguese had begun printing in India in 1556 (followed by European
missionaries printing in Tamil in the Tamil region), they neither cast a Devanagari font nor
printed in the script. On the contrary, metal font casting in Devanagari was carried out in Europe,
mostly by Germans and British scholars.
Devanagari printing in India would have to wait a few centuries, until the close of the 18th
century.

Calcutta
Direct colonial British authority in India (following the 1757 Battle of Plassey) was first based in
the city of Calcutta. Soon, Europeans in Calcutta began to study local culture and languages.
Although the city’s local language was Bengali – written in the Eastern Nagari script, also known
as the Bengali-Assamese script – British expansionism at the time pushed further and further into
‘Hindustani’- speaking territory further west, making ‘Hindustani’ texts part of their research in
Calcutta.
In 1778, Charles Wilkins, employed by the East India Company, designed the first successful
metal type font cast in India, for Bengali.
Wilkins then cast the first Devanagari font in 1786 – used in printing Sanskrit and Urdu verses in
a book in 1789 – with the assistance of the English-run Chronicle Press in Calcutta. Wilkins was
assisted in his typographic endeavours by Panchanan Karmakar, a native blacksmith.
 The letter forms used in these Calcutta (and Serampore) produced fonts formed the basis of the
so-called Calcutta style of Devanagari, in particular the ones used in Charles Wilkins’ A
Grammar of the Sanskrita Language (1808). These types took three years to produce.

Calcutta-style fonts featured stiffer forms than those found in scribal writing, presumably
reflecting the usage of steel-nib pens to reproduce written text instead of the traditional reed pen.

Lithography
Lithographic printing reached India in 1822, via Europe. In North India, metal type and
lithography spread side by side, and lithography seems to have been preferred locally.
Lithography was ideal, particularly for reproducing the elaborate, highly calligraphic nastaliq
hand used to write Persian and Urdu (both important written languages in North India at the
time), which metal type was decidedly unsuitable for. In fact, more Persian books were printed in
India than Iran in the 1800s, and Indian printers even exported Persian texts to Iran.
Lithographic printing also made multilingual and multiscript printing convenient, a huge plus in
reproducing Indian textual traditions where different scripts and languages routinely appeared in
the same text.
Its ease, portability, suitability to complex scripts, and lower set-up costs facilitated the
participation of more Indians in printing, effectively helping drive the emergence, growth and
consolidation of Indian literary communities.
 Lithographic printing was an important phase in the history of Indian printing, especially in
North India. It’s sadly all too easy to overlook its massive influence in shaping how texts were
produced, and the graphical development involved.

Bombay
The port city of Bombay (now Mumbai) on India’s west coast rose to prominence in the 1800s
by gaining a firm place in global trade. Bombay was a major node in Indian Ocean mercantile
and cultural networks, and even traded with ports further east, including Hong Kong. Bombay
lay in the Marathi linguistic zone, but was also home to sizable communities speaking Gujarati.
The most important of these were the Parsis, adherents of the Zoroastrian faith who had fled
from Iran centuries earlier. Bombay’s Parsis became heavily involved in the city’s bustling global
trade, and were among the first Indian communities to associate with the commercial and
administrative interests of the British.
In 1835, Bombay’s American Mission Press (set up in 1817) brought equipment to cast its own
types. Thomas Graham¹, a blacksmith, became the press’s type designer.
In 1836, Graham designed a new Devanagari font for Marathi, recognised for its superior
legibility and aesthetic design, with letter forms more rounded compared to their Calcutta-style
predecessors.
The letter forms used by the American Mission Press’s Bombay foundry under Graham form the
basis of Bombay-style Devanagari type. To be sure, letter-form variation in Devanagari existed
well before Graham, but Graham’s font gave the Devanagari of the Marathi region new
expression, in metal type. It is strongly suggested that Graham’s font was heavily influenced by
lithographed Marathi printing undertaken in earlier years, which would have involved greater
input from native scribes than Calcutta-style fonts. Graham’s innovations also extended to the
mechanical working of print. His font reduced letter size and used fewer conjuncts, cutting costs
in half and greatly reducing the number of type matrices needed.
Graham took the existing phalā system of typesetting, and developed it into the so-called degree
system. In degree typesetting, vowel diacritics and combining forms were given independent
sorts, and had to be combined with the base consonant while typesetting in a three step process –
one with the base character in a reduced size, one for combining diacritics above, and one for
diacritics below.
A new generation of local craftsmen apprenticed under Graham at the American Mission Press,
began to learn the typographic arts.

Devanagari and the Indian national movement

Bal Gangadhar Tilak, a charismatic and highly influential nationalist leader from the Marathi
region, was one of the earliest major figures to articulate India’s need for a common national
script. In an impassioned 1905 speech in Varanasi at the Nagari Pracharini Sabha, Tilak asserted
the need for a pan-Indian script across Indo-Aryan languages, and chose Devanagari as the ideal
candidate for such a task.
In doing so, he drew from existing debates over script and identity in North India and the
emerging Hindi sphere. By asserting that the Devanagari movement was an integral part of
Indian national identity, he linked the script to ideas of national unity.
One of Devanagari’s strongest supporters was none other than Mahatma Gandhi himself (a
Gujarati speaker), who spoke of the script’s unifying character as early as the late 1910s, and
more extensively during the 1920s. In a 1936 address at a literary conference, Gandhi declared
that Hindi would be the national language of India, making clear the extent of his unequivocal
support for the language. In the years to follow, Gandhi also lent support to literary associations
dedicated to Hindi promotion.

The case for Devanagari

Of course, Devanagari was neither inherently neutral nor uniquely equipped to handle the task of
representing all Indian languages. Much of this rhetoric – such as Tilak’s – emphasised the
script’s ‘scientific’ features, particularly the perceived one-to-one mapping of letters and sounds.
Its widespread usage was also brought up. In addition, Devanagari was seen by some as closer to
a Hindu religious identity, given its proximity to Sanskrit written traditions and contemporary
usage by Brahmins to write Sanskrit across different linguistic regions.
Devanagari was also considered a link to India’s ancient past, and pre-modern inscriptions in
Devanagari were often referenced. One thing did set Devanagari apart from other major Indian
scripts, however – its usage across multiple South Asian regions, for distinct written traditions
dating back many centuries.
Pre-modern writing in Devanagari can be found in locales as disparate as Goa, the Kathmandu
valley, Gujarat, Bijapur in the Kannada region, and Delhi. On the other hand, most other scripts
were usually limited to interconnected regions or transregional communities, such as the Grantha
script, used to write Sanskrit in the Tamil region.

Devanagari standardisation in India since Independence

Hindi standardisation and promotion, as well as Devanagari reform, continued to be subjects of
immediate interest for nationalist leadership after Indian Independence, with one critical
difference: they became institutional projects under the newly independent Government of India.
After Indian Independence, language planning at the central level primarily concerned itself with
building and maintaining a unified national identity, articulated through Hindi.

Hindi standardisation
The Constitution of India, drafted in 1949, states that ‘The official language of the Union shall be
Hindi in Devanagari script.’ Hindi was originally intended to be the sole official language of the
Government of India, but stiff opposition from non-Hindi-speaking regions (especially the Tamil
region) ensured that English remained co-official as a more palatable, neutral option.
Regardless, Hindi occupies a place of privilege in Indian language policy, and its development
has been undertaken by the Central Government directly, as opposed to other languages, which
are limited to individual states and their institutions.
Language policy post-Independence mandated the usage of Standard Hindi in writing at Central
Government institutions across the entire length and breadth of India, giving Devanagari a visual
presence in virtually every corner of the country – even where the script was not used for local
languages.
The Lucknow Conference of 1953, the first major institutional attempt at standardising
Devanagari, was driven by the need for uniformity in written language across India, and for
Hindi to be easier to use on typewriters.
 Marathi standardisation
The state of Maharashtra was formed in 1960, as a state for Marathi speakers, following the
Government of India’s linguistic reorganisation of states. Although the Lucknow Conference of
1953 was intended to propose a Devanagari standard for usage across Indian languages, the
Government of Maharashtra chose to devise its own standard for Marathi.
This standard, presented in 1962, continued to follow local conventions, and rejected the push to
bring Marathi writing more in line with Hindi. This can also be seen as the assertion of a
graphical identity distinct from Hindi. In contrast to the shift towards Bombay-style letter forms
in Hindi (where they were not traditional), the Government of Maharashtra did not replace any
letter forms used in Marathi with their Calcutta-style equivalents. This ensured a continuity in
Marathi letter forms from the earliest days of Bombay-cast fonts into the digital era, unlike the
more decisive shift in Hindi away from older print conventions.
In the Maharashtra Official Languages Act 1964, the Government of Maharashtra defined
Marathi as ‘the Marathi language in Dev[a]nagari script’, formalising Devanagari as the sole
script for Marathi. The cursive Moḍī script had finally been phased out of official usage and was
 no longer taught at schools from around 1959 onwards.

Devanagari for other scheduled Indian languages

During the drafting of India’s new Constitution (1946–50), Hindi was proposed (primarily by
North Indian nationalist leaders) as India’s official language, in continuation with pre-
Independence Hindi promotion.
The Report of the Official Language Commission (1956), headed by B.G. Kher, then Chief
Minister of Bombay state, echoed earlier nationalist rhetoric and recommended that all Indian
languages, especially Indo-Aryan languages, be written in Devanagari.
Although further attempts were made in 1961 and 1967 to design a unified Devanagari script
across Indian languages, they were solely on paper, and never implemented.³

Devanagari standardisation in the digital era

In 1991, the Government of India released a short-lived 8-bit encoding standard named ISCII
(Indian Script Code for Information Interchange), where Devanagari forms correspond to those
adopted by the Government of India in 1966. The ISCII forms in turn seem to have influenced
the choice of Unicode’s representative Devanagari glyphs.
This is important, because it shows how the visual specifics of a seemingly ‘neutral’ Devanagari,
intended for Hindi, ended up being perceived as default and unmarked in the digital age. Digital
fonts have tended to stick to these ‘neutral’ forms, in contrast to ‘marked’ Devanagari letter
forms that represent other conventions.
Ironically, the switch to digital fonts also seems to have finally consolidated these standardised
Devanagari forms for Hindi, with older Calcutta-style letters rapidly diminishing in print usage
as older technology was phased out.

Anatomy of Devanagari Typefaces

Introduction
The anatomy of a letter can perhaps be defined as a system which depicts the structural makeup
of a letter; describing certain key parts within the letter for a given typeface. These
morphological articulations of the characters within the font form the first level of description
within the typographic ontology of a script. The Latin script, due to its long and elaborate
tradition in printing; has a fairly standardized vocabulary to describe its letterforms. Unlike
western typographic systems, theory and literature on the anatomy of Devanagari letters is sparse
—although there are a few experts who have tried to articulate the various features of
Devanagari letters.
 Bhagwat & Naik
One of the first attempts towards a graphical classification was done by S.V. BhagwatB.
Devanagari letters till then had notC been subjected to such a graphical analysisD. Bhagwat’s
main focus was on handwritten Devanagari and not on printed Devanagari; NaikE nonetheless
believed that his insights on the graphical structure of Devanagari are enlightening. Bhagwat first
creates groups of letters based on shared graphical properties. Six grouping systems for letters
based on the following criteria are given on:
1. Size
2. Simplicity
3. Motion, stroke and angles
4. Endings, flourishes, fenced etc.
5. Groups according to the parts of letter design.
6. Groups based on graphical similarity

He then goes on to define the guide lines for the letters and terminology for some of the
graphical elements that exist within the letters. The guide lines defined by him are as follows:
 The top lines are the “Rafar line”, followed by the “Upper matra line” and the “Head line”. The
head line is also referred to as the “Shiro rekha”, Bhagwat chooses Anatomy of Devanagari
Design Thoughts … January 2009 31 the upper limit of the Shiro rekha to denote the head line
After the head line, the upper mean line and lower mean line are indicated. The upper mean line
denotes the point from which the actual letter starts, it is the line where the “pegF” of the letter
ends and the actual letter begins, for example the topmost counter of the letter क and व. The lower
mean line is marked where the distinguishing characteristics of the letters comes to an end for
example the lower end of the first half of ग or the lowermost part of the counter of the letter क and
व. These lines are followed by the base line, which is where the complete letter ends and the
lower Matras begin. The lowermost line is the “Rukar line” named so that is the line where the
lowest portion of the Rukar ends.
This division of letters is simplistic in comparison with the other schemes discussed in this
article, it fails to address issues of the proportion of letters, double ligatures etc. It is also
obsolete in a certain sense primarily because it uses handwritten Devanagari as its source
material. Therefore it is interesting to note that, in this model two lines are marked above the
Shiro rekha—the Upper matra line and Rafar line. A marked difference between the height of the
matras and the height of the Rafar is seen mostly in handwritten or calligraphic Devanagari.
This scheme cannot be applied to contemporary Devanagari as in most of these the typefaces the
heights of the Rafar and the Upper Matras are equal. If we were to consider Bhagwat’s scheme
for contemporary Devanagari typefaces then the two lines (Upper Matra line and Rafar line)
would merge into one another. Bhagwat titles his figure as “Graphic Elements in Devanagari
Letters”, the new contribution that he makes to the vocabulary of graphic elements of
 Devanagari is the term—the “loop”, which. he uses to describe the top of letters such भ and श.

Conclusion
The existing literature on this topic is very limited and experts have afforded only a page or two
to the description of the Devanagari letters. Considering the existing literature on the anatomy of
Devanagari letters—it seems as if there exists a common unanimous vocabulary which is used to
describe Devanagari vowel signs—minor linguistic differences do exist within these terms, but
they are translatable in most cases.
There are a number of differences in the nomenclature used by experts to describe the specific
parts (stroke elements) within Devanagari letters. Many a times, the same elements are labelled
by different experts differently, in this again some experts describe certain terms much more
elaborately than others. The Latin typographic letterform is almost unanimously governed by at
least four reference lines—the ascender, descender, x-height and the cap height. There exists no
universal consensus on the reference lines for Devanagari letters.
One can see from the given literature there are differences in the methods and nomenclature
within the theories proposed by the various authors. However there are certain similarities too;
these similarities ascertain the significant features and divisions of Devanagari letters. We can
sense here a need for a unifying anatomical model for Devanagari typefaces which resolves the
differences between the given assorted schemes by incorporating the essential features
mentioned by each of the experts.
The Devanagari script can be regarded as a widely used script used for over 120 languages. It
was developed from north Indian Gupta and Brahmi scripts. It was quite popular from the 7th to
11th century CE and evolved. It includes long, horizontal strokes on top of the letters. In this
script, vowels are recited before the consonants.