Introduction
The role of written scripts in the demarcation and stabilization of languages, particularly in South Asia, is well attested to.Footnote 1 The ontological status of writing systems is still debated, and the view championed by Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913)—that the spoken word is considered more important than the written—continues to be the dominant theme in linguistics:
The linguistic object is not both the written and the spoken forms of words; the spoken forms alone constitute the object.Footnote 2
Writing has therefore commonly been thought of as a caricature of the spoken language, and from the mid-twentieth century onwards, the paradigm for the discipline of linguistics dictated that speech should be considered the sole object of linguistic investigation.Footnote 3 As a result, relatively little attention has been paid to the role of writing systems (scripts in popular parlance) and their social, semiotic, and political functions—including the relationships between the spoken language, the written language, and the signifiers of both.
Many languages in the world are written with two different scripts, a phenomenon called digraphia.Footnote 4 In many cases, a change in a writing system or the dominance of one script has resulted in a strengthened identity of the written form as a new language, an example of which is the early demarcation of Hindi and Urdu from Hindustani.Footnote 5 Another example of such a role played by a writing system is that of the Gurmukhi script in the creation of a Sikh religious identity, later even appropriating the linguistic identity of Indian Punjabi. Even though the Sikh holy scripture, the Adi Granth, was itself a compilation of various languages, including Lehndi Punjabi, Braj Bhasha, Khariboli, Sanskrit, and Persian, the ‘use of the Gurmukhi script added an element of demarcation and self-identity to the Sikh tradition’.Footnote 6 On the other hand, there are instances where languages have been conflated on account of shared scripts. Such is the case with many North Indian languages that share the Devanagari script as their writing system. Despite having individual histories and being different from modern Hindi in terms of grammar and syntax, Awadhi, Bhojpuri, Braj Bhasha, and Rajasthani are all classified as dialects of Hindi because they are all rendered in the same script.Footnote 7
The relationship between spoken languages and written scripts in India was extremely fluid until a culture of printing arose in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It was not uncommon for most widely spoken languages to be represented in multiple scripts—to have polygraphia determined by region. In a sense, the writing systems were more rooted in geography than in language. For example, Sanskrit was rendered in many written forms, using the Brahmi, Kharoshti, Grantha, Kannada, Telugu, Devanagari, Sharada, Bengali, and Oriya scripts, depending on the region. This use of multiple writing systems was characteristic of Sanskritic South Asia, and did not privilege one script over another to represent a language. Possibly as a result of the valency of the spoken word in the ritual use of Sanskrit (or other languages in several pre-modern societies), sound held primacy over the written visual form of the language.Footnote 8 Texts were to be memorized, and written representations remained mostly just that—representations—without tinging the sacred character of the texts themselves. Much as the Aristotelian ‘Spoken words are the symbols of mental experience and written words are the symbols of spoken words’ in De Interpretatione Footnote 9 and much like the Sausseurean thinking about writing systems, the audial word had primacy in pre-modern South Asia. In this context, it is not surprising that the Marathi language of the Deccan was represented in two forms: the Balbodh (functionally the same as Devanagari) and the Modi scripts. Without a hierarchical relationship between them, both were equally accessible to the Marathi literati. Yet, the Modi script had completely disappeared by the late twentieth century, and the neglect and abolishment of the script is commonly perceived to be the result of colonial British rule. However, the history of the Modi script, particularly its demise, is complicated by debates about caste, class, nation, and colonialism.
The Marathi language and its written form
Marathi is a language spoken by more than 75 million people, centred mostly in the modern state of Maharashtra, and descended from a late phase of Middle Indo-Aryan in the form of Maharashtri Prakrit. Marathi has a rich literary tradition. The earliest references to it are found in Kuvalayamala by Udyotansuri in the eighth century CE, while the oldest written form is the Akshi stone inscription of the Silaharas dated 1012 CE. The Modi script is unknown before the Yadava dynasty in the thirteenth century.Footnote 10 S. G. Tulpule, in his work on early epigraphical sources in Marathi, suggests that there is evidence of the use of the Modi script in the late thirteenth century, based largely on epigraphic philology.Footnote 11 From then until the 1950s, most Marathi handwritten correspondence was in this script. Today, Marathi is written largely in Balbodh, a variant of Devanagari with a few additional characters.Footnote 12
The Devanagari script and the Modi script were both employed to represent spoken Marathi. Though marginally differentiated in function, they were interchangeable, with no special emphasis or importance accorded to either. The functional differentiation made Modi the shorthand cursive of the Kayastha, Kulkarni or other scribal castes, and was thus tied to an occupation. However, unlike cases of digraphia in other languages of South Asia, such as Sindhi or Punjabi, both the scripts in question were closely related and had a shared evolution, with common descent from Brahmi.
The origins of the Modi script are as poorly documented as its demise. Modi is sometimes referred to as Hemadpanti on account of its apocryphal attribution to Hemadpant (also known as Hemadri, active 1259–74), a minister of the Yadavas.Footnote 13 The common lore was that Hemadpant went to Sri Lanka and brought back this script. Yet George A. Grierson (1851–1941), in his Linguistic Survey of India,Footnote 14 stated that it was invented by Balaji Avaji, secretary to Shivaji Bhonsale (1627–80), a claim echoed in other publications.Footnote 15 However, several documents in Modi from the sixteenth century, produced under the Deccan sultanates, discount such a late origin for the script. Shivaji can at most be credited with popularizing the script as the standard written form during his reign in the seventeenth century. Scholarship suggests that Modi is derived from late Ashokan Brahmi that was used to render Pali, just as Balbodh in Marathi (called Shastri in Gujarati) has been thought to descend from ancient Devanagari.Footnote 16 However, the precise origin of the Modi script is not the issue under discussion in this article, and the relationship between the scribal shikastah of Persian (and Persianate cultures) and Modi, has been explored elsewhere.Footnote 17 Suffice it to say that a scribal script such as Modi was connected with greater Islamicate chancellory practices, and was heavily dependent on the technology of paper, which was introduced throughout South Asia in the course of the thirteenth century. The Modi script is closely related with Devanagari and other post-Brahmi abugidas. Modi was widely used to render the Marathi language from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. While Modi is certainly related to Kaithi, Gurmukhi, Gujarati, and other western Indian mercantile scripts, the exposition of those relationships would require a separate study by a specialist on writing systems and philology.
The Modi script received a boost with the rise of chancellory cultures which increasingly relied on paper in the early second millennium of the Common Era. It is possible to argue that the Modi script could not have predated the widespread availability of paper in the Deccan, as the ligatures and strokes of the script and its loose treatment of phonetic orthography suggest a scribal culture. Handwritten documents in Marathi were almost exclusively in the Modi script, as it was faster to transcribe the spoken word in that form. Religious scriptures and texts that inherently required the value of precise pronunciation (as with Sanskrit, Sanskritized works, or high literature in Marathi) were more commonly rendered in Devanagari. Yet Modi was clearly the more commonly used and widespread of the two scripts, as observed by J. G. Covernton as late as 1906:
Marathi possesses two scripts,—the Devanagri which is rarely used for printing and rarely for writing, and Modi (or Mori), a current hand almost universally used in correspondence and writing generally. The latter may be called the national character of the Marathas far more justly than Devanagri.Footnote 18
There is no evidence of any tension between the use of Devanagari or Modi, and a debate over the preference of one over the other only arose with the arrival of the printing press and the creation of a public literary sphere in the nineteenth century. The initial debates in the early nineteenth century over the use of the Modi and Devanagari scripts for rendering Marathi were largely concerned with the technological advances regarding different movables types and fonts used for printing. The ontological status of Modi was never in question, and the discussion was limited to the relative advantage of Devanagari in the print media. It was almost through a series of technological events that it was decided that Devanagari was to be the survivor with regard to print. Nevertheless, Modi continued to be used in most handwritten correspondence and other documents.
The Bombay Presidency was a multilingual administrative unit of both the British East India Company (until 1858) and the British Indian Government (1858–1947). It covered a territory that had four major languages: Sindhi, Gujarati, Marathi, and Kannada (Canarese as it was referred to in the official documents of the period). Several other languages that did not have a system of written representation, such as Kuchhi and Konkani, were considered dialects of these major tongues.Footnote 19 The four major languages were defined by their association with unique scripts, though, historically, the relationship between languages and scripts was relatively loose. Marathi was unusual in that it was the only language in this group that regularly and routinely employed two writing systems, namely Modi and Devanagari. Various small moves were made towards the abolishment of Modi in the early twentieth century. Ironically, it was Maharashtra, the successor to the Bombay State, created in 1961 on a linguistic basis, as legislated by the States Reorganisation Act 1956, that ensured the demise of Modi. A single script for the Marathi language would henceforth be championed by the state. In 1964, Devanagari was legislated as the sole legal form of written Marathi.Footnote 20
The debates about the role of the Modi writing system can be roughly devised in a chronologically sequential manner. The technological debate centred around the printing press and movable types in the nineteenth century, followed by colonial and caste-ist arguments in the early twentieth century, after which the Indian nationalist debate about languages and scripts was played out in the middle of the twentieth century.
Scripting type: early printing and the technological debate
It was as early as 1616 that a book was printed in South Asia using the Roman script, although no copies of the first three editions are available.Footnote 21 There are reports of one Bhimaji Parekh of Surat setting up a printing operation in 1674. He is known to have employed someone called Henry Hills who reported the difficulties and aspirations of trying to create both Modi and Devanagari movable types (referred to as Banian and Shastri respectively in Gujarati).Footnote 22 Nothing is known of the success or failure of this venture, but Devanagari printing seems to have been accomplished successfully with a movable type in 1796, when John Gilchrist's Grammar of the Hindustanee Language was printed at the Chronicle Press in Calcutta.Footnote 23
The early attempts at printing in Marathi using non-Latin types were experiments with both the Modi and the Devanagari scripts. Though there is no surviving evidence of Portuguese attempts to print in the Modi script, there is a claim to that effect.Footnote 24 William Carey published his A Grammar of the Mahratta Language in 1805 in the Devanagari script at the Mission Press of Serampore,Footnote 25 the same year in which it printed a small portion of the Marathi New Testament in Devanagari. Marathi was the first language after Bengali printed by the missionaries at Serampore.Footnote 26 By 1806 or 1807, a Modi type was successfully made at the Serampore press, and several books were published in this script.Footnote 27 In 1807, a Marathi translation of the New Testament, and in 1810, A Dictionary of the Maharatta Language, were published at Serampore under Carey, both of which used the Modi script. Carey justified the use of the Modi script, specifically in these publications, but more generally as well:
Although [in] the Mahratta country the Devanagari character is well known to men of education, yet a character is current among the men of business which is much smaller, and varies considerably in form from the Nagari.Footnote 28
More than half a century later, in 1881, the Reverend Bruce of the American Marathi Mission criticized William Carey's printing in Modi, echoing the debate that was then under way with respect to the question of whether Modi or Devanagari should be the printed language of Marathi:
The Serampur version was printed in an antiquated style of the Modi (i.e. broken) character, which is very obscure. The printing too is very poor, so that it is very difficult to find any Marathi scholar who is able to read it connectedly.Footnote 29
Since the American Marathi Mission had aborted its attempts to print in Modi a few decades earlier, Bruce's comments could be construed as a vigorous defence of their decision to print only in the Devanagari script. The last major books printed in Modi script by the American Marathi Mission were The Wrath to Come by Reverend Gordon Hall (1829), History of our Saviour by Reverend D. O. Allen (1841), and Relief to the Sin-Burdened by Captain T. Molesworth (1846). After this, they printed almost exclusively in Devanagari. By the mid-nineteenth century, the Serampur Mission Press had also decided to favour Devanagari over Modi. Away from Calcutta and the Deccan, the third place for the experimentation with both Modi and Devanagari types for Marathi printing was Tanjore, where in the 1810s books were printed ‘. . . with Mahratta and Sanscript Types’,Footnote 30 references to the Modi and Devanagari types respectively.
Fine and much-applauded types were produced by Javji Dadaji in Bombay in 1869 when he established the Nirnaya Sagara Press, but these were Devanagari types for Marathi.Footnote 31 By the late nineteenth century, almost all the pedagogy in Marathi employed the Devanagari script. A good example is The Student's Marathi Grammar by the Reverend Ganpatrao Navalkar, published in at least three editions by 1894.Footnote 32
Around the beginning of the twentieth century, the debate about whether Marathi should be printed in Devanagari or Modi had been going on for more than half a century, and the role of printing technologies was at the forefront of most arguments.Footnote 33 The last technical argument made for a script to render Marathi took place over half a century later. In 1961, Dr S.V. Bhagwat collected over 100,000 words commonly occurring in Marathi from newspapers, textbooks, novels, magazines, etc. and calculated their frequencies. He then arrived at an estimate of the effort and time required to write the Devanagari script, arguing that it was one of the more laborious scripts, because of the number of times the pen had to be lifted. He compared Devanagari with Gujarati, Modi, Urdu, and English, and came to the conclusion that Devanagari was not the perfect script for vernacular languages. But in the course of 150 years, only the first half of this period had really been devoted to debates about printing or writing technology.
Reforming society and script: colonial, nationalist, and caste narratives
As early as 1826, an official decree was passed by the Company-administered Bombay Presidency that Marathi would be fixed in the Devanagari script. As pointed out by Veena Naregal, reasons of ‘official convenience and economy’ were the declared motivation for this move.Footnote 34 The implementation of this order was limited to printed Marathi, schoolteachers recruited for government schools, and publications of the Native Education Society. But even in this limited jurisdiction, the enforcement and reception of these attempts were lukewarm at best. Printing and education still continued in both scripts, and educators, students, and readers were neither impressed nor convinced by the arguments in favour of the Devanagari script.Footnote 35
In 1913, the Maharashtra Sahitya Parishad (the literary conference for Marathi) addressed a petition to the government objecting to the introduction of Devanagari in the public offices of the Deccan.Footnote 36 The main objections were: ‘(i) the abolition of Modi was ordered without sufficient consideration, (ii) Modi being a national script should not have been abolished, and (iii) the introduction of Balbodh caused hardship to the clerks [in government service]’. These charges were refuted by the government in The Times of India–it argued that the experiment had been successful since its beginnings in 1908 at the Poona District Court. There, the clerks were observed recording depositions as fast as the judge could record them in English. This was then implemented in the Forest Department offices, and finally extended to the Registration offices in Nasik and Ratnagiri districts, where it was equally successful. The government felt that Devanagari was also a national script, just like Modi. And, in an interesting twist, it was argued that Devanagari was the ancient Sanskrit script in which all the epics and scriptural texts were written, and the Modi script was accused of being a foreign character. The bizarre story that Hemadpant brought it from Ceylon was repeated to make this point. Finally, the hardship of the clerks was shot down on the grounds that the British officials and lower castes who could not read Modi were entitled to the ease of reading provided by Devanagari, as Modi was used by the literati and a class of people that would later be referred to as the ‘clerkly castes’.Footnote 37 The local press was quick to denounce The Times of India, as prompted by government authorities. The Anglo-Marathi Indu Prakash daily of Bombay immediately launched its criticism by refuting every justification of the ‘supersession’ of Modi.Footnote 38 Similar charges were levelled against both the government and The Times of India by the Mahratta:
The supersession of the Modi script by the Balbodh in some of the districts of the Deccan, sanctioned by a high-handed executive fiat, without even so much as a previous consultation with expert Marathi scholars calls fresh attention to an undesirable and mischievous feature of the unsympathetic and obtuse administration in India. Government Resolution No. 11277 of 9th December 1912, ordering at one wide jump that Balbodh should be adopted in all public offices, is not the first instance in which ignorant officials have tried to interfere with the cherished customs of the people, with a total disregard of the sentiments or convenience of the people for whose benefit the officials exist. Not only in political matters, but even in the literary or linguistic sphere, such high-handed and inconsiderate interference is sometimes visible.Footnote 39
Two other dailies, the Dnyanodaya and the Jagadvrtta, were quick to embrace the displacement of the Modi script.Footnote 40 The former was an Anglo-Marathi missionary concern edited by Reverend Robert Allen Hume, who pointed out that Hindi in the Devanagari script was used in the Central Provinces with ease, causing no hardship to the clerks. The Jagadvrtta merely pointed out the futility of agitation against the abolishment of Modi.
In May 1915, the Maharashtra Sahitya Parishad held its eighth session in Bombay. Here, they passed a resolution for the restoration of the Modi script in courts and government offices in Marathi-speaking districts, along with the introduction of vernacular languages in schools and colleges.Footnote 41 A committee was set up to send representation to the government to reconsider their decision of doing away with Modi. There were a few dissonant voices in this debate, such as Rao Bahadur Madhavrao Kimbe who championed the idea of a uniform script for the vernaculars and the notion that Devanagari would be the most suitable candidate.Footnote 42 Almost as if to demonstrate the affinity of a written script and cultural identity, the debate then digressed into the suitability of Hindi as a lingua franca for the entire country.
In 1917, the Bombay Legislative Council, at their monsoon sitting in Poona, considered a resolution moved by (Wrangler) Sir Raghunath P. Paranjpye regarding the restoration of the Modi script in the official correspondence and records of government.Footnote 43 Another member of the Council, Mr G. K. Sathe, elaborating on the recent history of official policies towards Modi, voiced his concern that the substitution of Modi by Devanagari was first undertaken by Mr Kincaid in Poona in 1907 in an unofficial capacity, and this was replicated in 1909 by Mr Maconochie in Ratnagiri. Kincaid was succeeded as district collector by one Mr Ghosal, who thought that the policy was a complete failure. Maconochie was then transferred to Nasik where he implemented this reform. In 1912, the government launched their programme of replacing Modi with Devanagari in all government offices, without consulting any other collector or judge in the Central Division. One Mr Upasani had moved a resolution in 1913 against it, only to withdraw it. He then tabled it again in 1916, and subsequently the government reviewed their orders. In 1915, Sathe went on, a resolution was issued which stated that only government officials were bound to use the Devanagari script, and all others could turn in documentation or petitions in the Modi script. In early 1917, the government had declared that all departments, not only in the Central Division, but also in Thana, Ratnagiri, and Kolaba were to abolish the use of Modi in their documents. Sathe then went on to demonstrate that Devanagari was proven to be more illegible than Modi when written fast. The solution, he argued, was not the substitution of Modi with Devanagari, but the employment and training of clerks with ‘better hands’. He also suggested that British officers learn Modi as it was in their interests to adopt the current writing system of the people.
Mr Charles Norman Seddon of the Council countered Mr Sathe and justified the decision to abolish Modi. He said that using Modi had proven to be a problem in Khandesh, because this meant the government could not hire Muslims as they were not fluent with the script. Furthermore, it was generally difficult to use for non-Marathi- speaking people. This sectarian character of the Modi script was then furthered by referring to the case of the Indian Christians, Parsis, and the Gujarati Hindus in Thane. It was explained that the move away from Modi was also intended to disadvantage Brahmin, Shenvi or Prabhu castes, who had a real hold on the clerical jobs. The last protest in this sitting was led by Dewan Bahadur K. R. Godbole, who, on the basis of discussions with clerical staff, stated that the change from Modi to Balbodh was a ‘ridiculous invention’.Footnote 44
One Mr Desai of the Council suggested that documents in Modi should not be admitted under the Evidence Act. There was a chorus of voices claiming that the use of the Modi was a ‘dangerous nuisance’ in the administration of justice and good governance generally. Sir R. P. Paranjpye countered by saying that his petition included Gujaratis and Muslims, but the whole debate was squashed when Mr Carmichael and Mr Pratt objected and said that the matter should not be under discussion because the government was at liberty to decide the most efficient way for its own functioning. When the resolution was put to vote, that ‘. . .the Council recommends to the Government that the Modi script be restored in the official correspondence and records of Government’, 18 members voted for it and 17 against. However, the recommendation was never implemented. The abolishment of Modi in government offices, which had thus far been an unofficial policy, was therefore made official by not implementing the recommendations of the Bombay Legislative Council.
In response to this, within a fortnight, B. R. Gogte of Miraj wrote a letter to the editor of The Times of India entitled ‘In defence of Modi’.Footnote 45 Mr Gogte extolled the virtues of Modi which had allowed it to ‘gain ascendancy over Balbodh since the eleventh century in all the public and private transactions of ordinary use and dispatch’. More importantly, he reminded government officials that it was untrue that Modi was not used much outside government offices, mentioning the ‘very large class of shroffs, merchants, traders, bankers, etc. who far outnumber the class of printers, editors, authors, etc’.Footnote 46 Two days after Mr Gogte's letter, the historian V. K. Rajwade had also composed a letter to the editor of The Times of India.Footnote 47 Both letters were published on the same page on the same day. Very presciently, Rajwade wrote that ‘[N]otwithstanding the strong arguments [by] the Hon. Mr Paranjpye . . . one can almost foresee the fate of his proposal about the restoration of Modi on account of official opposition.’ He went on to argue eloquently that the people who were competent to compare the two scripts should be surveyed. Rajwade went on to describe Modi as cursive Balbodh, and therefore suggested the English officials had double standards regarding their own longhand. He then suggested a spelling reform for English, and proceeded to blame the change of script on the ‘. . . convenience of a few officials in doing which they have overlooked the inconvenience caused to large numbers’.
The local and vernacular press supported the restoration of the Modi script, as seen in reports from Young India, Message, Gujarati, Kesari, Indian Social Reformer, Praja Mitra, Sanj Vartaman, Bombay Samachar, and the Parsi.Footnote 48 The English column in the Gujarati pointed out that it was reprehensible of the government to invoke sectarian divisions to justify its actions:
[It] was a deplorable feature that high officials should have stooped to the level of insinuating that the Honourable Mr Paranjpye and the supporters of his motion were inspired by the wish to maintain the monopoly of Brahmins in public service. It was an undignified imputation unworthy of any member of Council. Are we to suppose that those who trotted out the difficulties of Mahrattas, Muhammedans and Parsis were touting for their sympathy and vote and seeking to set up one class against another? [. . .] it is a pity that any such insinuation should ever have been made in the debate upon the motion.Footnote 49
One can sense in this period, an urgency of the part of the colonial government to move towards an ideal of a common script (Devanagari) to be used across the entire subcontinent. Perhaps because of its versatility and ability to represent a large number of phonetic values, Devanagari was envisioned as the script that would unify languages from ‘Quetta to Mysore’.Footnote 50 This later would be an ambition championed by the Republic of India.
In the meantime, some of the Marathi-speaking princely states had already been co-opted into the project of recognizing only Devanagari as the official script for Marathi.Footnote 51 The state of Kolhapur embraced this idea on 25 July 1917, when the government approved the measure, and the Karvir State Gazette issued official orders on 11 August 1917. Several details in the Gazette suggest a fanatical intolerance of the Modi script: all government correspondence was to be in Devanagari only, where each character had to be written separately. Personal signatures could only be in Devanagari, and commercial accounts could not be admitted as evidence in court unless in Devanagari.Footnote 52 These last two clauses ensured that Devanagari was to be the only recognized written script even in non-state documents. To make this diktat truly draconian, an ordinance was passed on 9 November 1917 that all clerks who wrote the Devanagari script without a clear space between words (as happened with cursive Modi) were to be suspected of attempting ‘the reinstallation of the old Modi Marathi script’ and were to be dismissed forthwithFootnote 53 (another case of divide and rule). Whether it was political and personal contempt for the Brahmanical peshwas, who had been seen as the custodians of the Marathi language, or a move demonstrating solidarity with the British colonial government, or even a genuine belief in the ‘progressive’ and ‘modernizing’ agency of the Devanagari script, such actions by princely states served to emphasize the decentralization of linguistic control and proprietary claims of any one Marathi-speaking constituency.
From the largest of princely states, Hyderabad (25 per cent Marathi-speakers), to some of the smallest, such as Bhor and Miraj (completely Marathi-speaking), at least 15 states had significant stakes in the debates about Marathi and its writing system. Largely through the Deccan States Agency, other states in the Gwalior Residency and the Baroda Residency also had interests in the future of Marathi because most of the nobility at these courts were Marathi-speakers. These states had been part of the erstwhile ‘Maratha Confederacy’. The historic records and internal correspondence in all these states was largely in Marathi in the Modi script, as that was the lingua franca of the great eighteenth-century Maratha Confederacy. Thus, any resolution or act of defiance by the public against the move by the Bombay Presidency to slowly abolish the Modi script could be countered through the actions of other political states in British India. All these arguments for the discontinuation of the Modi script were couched in terms of creating better efficiency in government offices.
At least in the case of Kolhapur, though it may not be exceptional, the desire to disempower caste groups that had control over reading and writing of the Modi script would have been a prime consideration for Chhatrapati Shahaji II (known as Shahu Maharaj). As a social reformer and champion of lower castes, he pioneered ‘significant social reforms in favour of non-Brahmins in Kolhapur state’, and from July 1902, ‘an ordinance was passed by Shahu which aimed at reserving at least half the posts in the state service for non-Brahmins’.Footnote 54 Many of the other princely states allied with Kolhapur, as ‘leaders of the Mahratta Confederacy, such as Holkar, Maharaja of Indore, and Gaekwar, of Baroda held Kolhapur in high esteem’,Footnote 55 because of their kinship connections as members of the Maratha caste, as opposed to the fewer and smaller princely states under Brahman rulers (Bhor, Miraj, Sangli, Jamkhindi, etc.).
As with other princely states, Shahu Maharaj wanted to ‘stem the tide of militant nationalism’Footnote 56 and was closely tied with the British imperial cause. The higher castes traditionally associated with clerical positions (Brahmans, Prabhus, etc.) were also thought of as dangerous seditionists and nationalists by the British government.Footnote 57 A number of senior British officials, particularly in western India, felt that ‘Brahmins as a class were associated with extremism, and were thought to be disloyal.’Footnote 58 The abolition of the Modi script thus became the venue for playing out these various social and political moves, and became a means to disenfranchise caste groups that were perceived as being literate and seditious, and often both.
A new nation: national language and script
The issue of script reform and abolishment of Modi became the locus where several debates were played out. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the hegemony over Marathi by districts in the northern Konkan and the Western Ghats (Colaba, Pune, Ratnagiri, Nasik, Satara) was kept in check through language and script control. These were all British-controlled areas that had urban centres with higher concentrations of Brahmans and scribal castes, and were perceived as hotspots of resistance against British rule. As pointed out by William Bright, ‘In South Asia, there is indeed a widespread feeling that a self-respecting language should have its own unique script to confirm its status as a language.’Footnote 59 It was precisely in this respect that the unique visual representation of a language was wrested away through a set of executive orders by the state apparatus.
Consequently, the caste-groups that spearheaded the renaissance of linguistic nationalism and resistance to colonial rule were disenfranchised with regard to control over their own language. These were mostly Brahman and traditional scribal communities like the Prabhus and the Shenvis, a point astutely made by the government voice in The Times of India when reporting Mr Seddon's arguments in support of abolishing Modi.Footnote 60 On the contrary, several other sources do mention that Devanagari was a script whose use was limited to higher castes, whereas Modi was more widespread.Footnote 61 But caste, class, and occupational rifts were not the only divisions invoked in the debates. Whether Devanagari or Modi was used by scribal castes, it was certain that the Marathi-speaking world was the sole constituency that used Modi. Breaking the sense of identity for the linguistic ‘imagined community’Footnote 62 centred on Marathi speakers was important, because such an imagined Marathi nation could easily be retrospectively recreated as the Maratha Confederacy. Nationalist movements and local historians in the Marathi-speaking regions were catalysts in such narratives, and the dissolution of a writing system that could visually signify a separate identity was not entirely a coincidence.
The status of a Marathi linguistic community defined by a script was not challenged just by a colonial administration. A nationalist camp that included B. G. Tilak was in favour of Devanagari being used as the national script for all languages across India to unite the country. At the 1905 Nagari Pracharani Sabha in Varanasi, he urged a common script for a united India.Footnote 63 It was this nationalism that would lead to several attempts at creating a national language and writing system.
In June 1949, the government of Bombay appointed a committee led by Dattatreya Balkrishna (alias Kakasaheb) Kalelkar to propose script reforms for two of the languages that were used in the state, Gujarati and Marathi. The objective was to make ‘printing, typing, teleprinting, reading and writing in the two scripts easier, maintaining at the same time the essential requisites of scientifically sound script’.Footnote 64 One of the more ambitious aspects of the project was to advise on the viability of a common script for Gujarati and Marathi as they were the two largest language groups in the Bombay State, after the loss of Sindh to Pakistan. The Kannada-speaking districts in what eventually became the northern Karnataka state were either bilingual or had a large proportion of Marathi speakers. The recommendations of this committee were, not surprisingly, in favour of the Devanagari script for Marathi, in keeping with the ideal of a national script to unify linguistic differences. As early as 1935 when he was the chairman of the Hindi Sahitya Sammelan Committee, Kalelkar had already proposed Devanagari as the universal Indian writing system.Footnote 65 Kalelkar had been the founder member of the Maharashtra Hindi Prachar Samiti, which he started in 1937 to propagate Hindi language and literature. He wrote several essays championing the use of Devanagari not only for the Indian Republic, but also for languages in other areas of the world.Footnote 66 In the complicated political landscape of the Bombay state, several political parties were struggling between loyalty to the new nation-state and retaining linguistic regional identity. The national Official Language Commission was based in Bombay and headed by B. G. Kher (prime minister of the Bombay province, 1937–39, 1946–52). The Report of the Official Language Commission (1956) recommended the adoption of Devanagari for all languages in India,Footnote 67 particularly for the ‘daughter languages of Sanskrit, Hindi, Bengali, Marathi and Gujarati’, quoting Nehru in its support.Footnote 68 Kalelkar's solution of affirming the regional language while capitulating to a national writing system was completely in line with this thinking. As a result, the teaching of the Modi script was unceremoniously discontinued in schools from about 1959 onwards, and students learned Marathi in Devanagari alone. One of the few public intellectuals who wrote about the loss of the Modi script was D. D. Karve (husband of the anthropologist Iravati Karve), who wrote a piece in The Times of India in 1961.Footnote 69 He was not convinced of the suitability of the Devanagari script for all Indian languages.
In August 1961, the chief ministers of all states, including Maharashtra, set up an expert committee that would devise a common script for all languages. By 1967, such a script was declared to be ready,Footnote 70 but the political momentum regarding this issue had been tempered by other events. The nation had seen two wars in the interim, and the deaths of two prime ministers within a couple of years. National integration was not driven any more by matters of language and writing systems, as the nation-state had pulled together and become unified in the face of war. More importantly, it was not the idea of a unified India that needed to be reinforced: the intensive diversity of India along lines of region, caste, class, and religion—the core of identity politics today—needed to be given political space. Ironically, the differences that were to be smoothed over with a common language and script were now being recognized as being the essence of the mosaic of Indian identity.
Conclusion
Most histories of the Marathi language or of the formation of the linguistically defined state of Maharashtra omit any mention of the history of writing.Footnote 71 Using arguments formulated by Jeanette Allis Bastian, it would not be wrong to claim that the shared past of Marathi-speaking peoples has been alienated from the present generation by denying them literary access to historic records. As she said about historic records for a community:
A community of records may be further imagined as the aggregate of records in all forms generated by multiple layers of actions and interactions between and among the people and institutions within a community.Footnote 72
The people connected by this archive of documents written in the Modi script are far from being just an ‘imagined community’ as defined by Benedict Anderson, but a real living community with not just a shared language. The Marathi-speaking peoples across the western Deccan and the erstwhile Maratha Confederacy are connected by kinship groups, family ties, and common histories. Today more than 45 million historic documents in several large public archives and various smaller collections are inaccessible to the Marathi linguistic community that created them because they are in the Modi script, or rather, because the skills to read Modi have largely been lost.Footnote 73
While the debate about using a single script for rendering the Marathi language became relevant only after the advent of printing, the fast-changing social and political landscapes lent their own weight to the discourse. In a period of just 150 years, Devanagari won, but at least three different debates were used to dismiss Modi. The first was about printing types, and the legibility and economy of Devanagari. By the end of the nineteenth century, the social empowerment of the literati and administrative convenience were the issues being debated. By the early twentieth century, the British administration in India embarked on a project of undermining nationalist efforts in western India, particularly among the Marathi-speaking peoples by chipping away at the softer forms of sovereignty like the Modi script. The underlying motivation of disempowering the clerical and upper-castes of the Peshwa period because they were perceived to be nationalists was picked up by non-Brahman movements and their champions. Sectarian arguments were thus invoked to justify the use of Devanagari, drawing upon divisions of language, religion, and caste. The government apparatus was used as a means of making or denying language-identity claims, much as Pakistan insisted almost half a century later that all official correspondence was to be conducted in the Urdu script, even if the language of ‘East Pakistan’ (Bangladesh after 1971) was Bengali. There have since even been suggestions that only the Roman script should be used to represent Hindi, Urdu and Sanskrit.Footnote 74 Neither the colonial authority nor the nationalist post-colonial government wished to sustain the memory of the Maratha Confederacy. The British government certainly did not want to revive the memory of the Confederacy, given the Anglo-Maratha wars and the troubles with its erstwhile members in the Mutiny of 1857.
The potency of writing systems as well as scripts in defining cultural bounds, creating imagined communities, and creating political discourse is well known, and well studied through the Korean and Turkish cases.Footnote 75 As expounded by Richard Collin, nation-states such as the former Soviet Union had effectively used writing systems for political control:
[T]he Soviet Union made and unmade dozens of script systems, uniquely to achieve specific ideological objectives. The Soviet script change legacy has left societies from Moldova to Mongolia destined for years to come to grapple with deep societal decisions to make about language and the writing of language, since a civilizational writing system can become deeply identified with nationalism . . . It was argued that it would be easier to teach children if they only had one script to learn.Footnote 76
The British are not thought of as manipulators in this realm of realpolitik, though they seem to have deployed the same arguments against the use of Modi in the early twentieth century as the Soviet state did for a number of other languages. In almost all instances where the state has favoured the use of a single script over other writing systems, the arguments have been fairly similar: a script simplified and better suited to net a larger literate population, a script as a vector of modernization, and the creation of a writing system to be used nationally. Whether such strategies are a causal effect of administering large polylingual and polyglot states would require a separate investigation, yet it is clear that fragmentary ethnic or linguistic populations are undone by challenging their writing system. Taking away the most visible marker of their literate and therefore linguistic cultural identity and discontinuing a living historic continuity with the archival record of a community have both proved effective.
Eventually, the third scenario for the abolishment of the Modi script, under the nascent Republic of India, proved to be the most powerful. The debate now was not about technical problems, administrative ease, or suppressing nationalistic fervour. The project was now increasingly about creating a new national character that would flatten linguistic differences. The project of trying to define the nation through a dominant language using the Devanagari script as a means for this operation have been pointed out in other studies.Footnote 77
There is a common misunderstanding that the end of the Modi writing system is connected with the end of British colonial rule in India, and several popular newspaper articles and sources claim that it was used until around 1950 (when India became a republic).Footnote 78 Ironically, the demise of the Modi script was a result of nationalist policies of forcing a culturally unified Indian union, and instituting a state where Marathi became the official language with a single script.
Epilogue
The creation of bilingual dictionaries was a strategy used in the past to validate a language, because bilingual lexicons provided commensurability with a wider world of languages. Similarly, the electronic compatibility of encoding scripts is a strategy to keep a writing system relevant in an era of of electronic communication and information systems.
As an applied knowledge, the two professional groups (not mutually exclusive) that rely most heavily on their ability to read the script are historians and court-certified legal Modi experts. Both rely on the value of their unique expertise, and have become the sole interpreters of the past (for academic or professional gain). In yet another ironic twist, the control over written documents by a clerical class, which was sought to be eliminated by adopting the Devanagari script for Marathi, has instead been reinforced with the emergence of a new class of scribal experts.
The survival and revival of scripts is now also tied in with information and communications technology. In much the same way that movable types ensured dissemination, recognition, and the survival of writing systems and, by extension, languages, today Unicode character sets are the markers of legitimacy. They hold the key to survival into the next era of information. The creation of Unicode glyphs for a script is the next step in ensuring the survival and legitimacy of that writing system for the future.Footnote 79 Unicode proposals for Modi have been made at least twice.Footnote 80 However, Unicode 6.3 has not yet validated the Modi script. As of 2014 the proposed script is in the process of being approved, which will ensure the survival of the script into the digital age, albeit with very few people able to read it.
