Tradition · script · India
Grantha script
The script South India used to write Sanskrit, developed out of the Pallava form of Brahmi around the sixth century and used in Tamil country for more than a thousand years — because Tamil script could not represent the aspirates and voiced stops that Sanskrit needs. Its Pallava parent is the ancestor of most of the writing systems of Southeast Asia, and its own descendants include Malayalam, Tigalari and the Sinhala letters, with the Maldivian script in the same family.
- Function
- Text & inscription
- Confidence
- Not assessed
- Location
- 12.830, 79.700
Worth knowing
Tamil and Grantha were used together in the same manuscript for centuries — Tamil for the Tamil and Grantha for the Sanskrit words inside it — which is why a single palm-leaf page can carry two alphabets doing two jobs.
Connections (4)
- TransmissionThe Maldives
The Maldivian script belongs to the South Indian family. Dhives Akuru descends from Brahmi and its earliest inscriptions closely resemble South Indian epigraphy of the sixth to eighth centuries, with the later cursive forms standing near the medieval scripts of Sri Lanka and the Tamil country — Sinhala, Grantha and Vaṭṭeḻuttu — and some Kannada-Telugu elements. It was written left to right, unlike the Thaana that replaced it, and was still used in the southern atolls into the nineteenth century.
- TransmissionŚrī Kṣetra
The Pyu cities took their writing, their weights and their coin symbols from India. Pyu inscriptions are in a Brahmi-derived script of South Indian type, their silver coins are struck to weight standards derived from Indian practice, and the commonest device on them is the śrīvatsa, the auspicious mark associated with Viṣṇu and Lakshmī, with a rising sun and a svastika on the reverse. The coinage circulated across mainland Southeast Asia and is one of the clearest measures of how far the Indic monetary idiom reached.
- Craft tradition ofKānchī / Kānchīpuram / Kanchipuram
Grantha existed because Tamil could not write Sanskrit. The Tamil alphabet has no separate letters for aspirates or voiced stops, which Sanskrit requires, so the Tamil country developed a second script out of the Pallava hand purely for Sanskrit — and used both together, Tamil for the Tamil and Grantha for the Sanskrit words inside the same manuscript. Kānchī, as the Pallava capital and a centre of Sanskrit learning with its ghatika, is where that division of labour was institutionalised.
- AnalogueDzongkha and the Bhutanese script
Brahmi went two ways out of India and both are still written. Southward, the Pallava hand became Grantha and then the scripts of Southeast Asia — Kawi, Khmer, Thai, Burmese, Balinese. Northward, a Gupta-period derivative became the Tibetan alphabet and through it the writing of Bhutan, Ladakh, Sikkim and Mongolia. The two families look nothing alike now, and a Thai and a Bhutanese sign share an ancestor about as close as Latin and Devanagari.
On these journeys
- India and Southeast Asia — scripts, Sanskrit and sacred kingship
- The making of Indian languages and scripts
Sources
Wikipedia, “Grantha script”. Richard Salomon, Indian Epigraphy (1998); Iravatham Mahadevan, Early Tamil Epigraphy (2003).
Open Grantha script in the repository →