What were the Features of South Indian Script in the Beginning of Christian era?

It is common knowledge that Indian languages had no script before the 6th century BC, roughly speaking and that the Vedic literature was only spoken and not written.

This in part was responsible for the greater respectability of oral tradition in India. The earliest positive direct evidence of writing comes to us in the edicts of Asoka which are in the Brahmi script.

The origin of Brahmi has been a matter of some controversy. Some scholars have without great success sought to maintain an Indian origin for Brahmi while others have suggested a foreign, i.e., a Middle Eastern origin. The script in which Tamil was written around the beginning of Christian era is known as Tamil brahmi for it is really Brahmi with accommodation provided for special Tamil phonetic sounds.

Really it was a case of regional accommodation of an all India script. This script is seen in the writings one comes across in the short inscriptions donated to ascetics by local chieftains in the centuries immediately before and after the commencement of the Christian era. There are scholars who claim that Tamil had its own independent script which later was influenced by Brahmi and so attained its present form.

This opinion is expressed on the basis of references in the Tolkappiyam to formation of Tamil letters. This is yet an undecided question. It is possible that though a well ordered script was familiar to the Sangam Tamils much of their poetry was remembered and orally transmitted.

In the Pallava period the need to express a more of Sanskrit words necessitated a new script which was made up of a mixture of the older Tamil letters and certain new signs to stand for Sanskrit letters; and this script was called Grantha. Grantham was used mostly by religious pedants and for sacred purposes. Alongside this the other more genuine Tamil script also was evolving.

From the Pallava period onwards till the eighteenth century the development of the script was slow and steady but in the eighteenth century certain changes were brought about by Virmamunivar and others to modernize the script to accommodate punctuation marks and other modern devices. In the case of Malayalam which had need for a script only about the eighth or ninth century an adaptation of the Tamil script was enough and that was attempted.

But another and a fundamental change was coming over the scriptal representation of languages other than Tamil, i.e., the alphabet signs for Telugu, Kannada, and Malayalam absorbed the Chathurvargha pattern for the consonants, Ka, Cha, Ta, Tha, Pa; and the alphabetic symbols following the Devanagiri style became more numerous in the case of these other Dravidian languages while Tamil which had developed its script earlier maintained a severe economy of symbols in the script.

This basic difference was reflected in the entire development of these languages, with the result that Kannada, Telugu and Malayalam absorbed a large number of Sanskrit words and even delighted in doing so. The Tamil writers however followed the rule that innovations were to be permitted only when necessary.

The ground was already prepared for a purist movement in Tamil. Marathi being a Prakrit and naturally Sanskrit in its linguistic characteristics followed the Nagari pattern. While all the languages in the South were marked by a wide difference between the written and the spoken styles there was also the other difference i.e., between the printed style of the letters and the manuscript style.

In the case of Marathi the difference was accentuated and the manuscript form is well-known as Modi read only by specialists. The device of printing has uniformised the Dravidian scripts within their respective linguistic areas.