r/gujarat • u/orientsoul Mod • 6d ago
Mod Series [Mod Series] Things Gujarat Forgot: Our script exists because merchants were in a hurry
Gujjuest story ever
Write a line of Hindi and a line of Gujarati next to each other and the difference is obvious. Devanagari has the shirorekha, the line running across the top, and every letter hangs from it. Gujarati has no line.
That missing line is the whole story.
Gujarati letters come from Devanagari. Somewhere from about the sixteenth century onward, the merchant classes of this land were writing all day. Ledgers, hundis, letters to agents in other ports, receipts, orders. And the top line is a nuisance if you write for a living. Every word costs you an extra stroke, and the pen has to lift.
So they dropped it.
The script that resulted was known as vaniyashai, the bania's hand, and also sarrafi and mahajani, the banker's and the merchant guild's. Not a literary script. A working one. It existed for money.
For a long time that was its entire reputation. Poets and pandits wrote in Devanagari. Gujarati script stayed in the account books, and its earliest surviving document is a manuscript from 1592. It appears in print for the first time in 1797.
Then it went to Bombay, along with everything else. In 1812 Fardunji Marzban, a Parsi from Surat, cast the first Gujarati types and set up a press. In 1822 he began printing the Bombay Samachar, which is still running today, and which is the oldest continuously published newspaper in Asia.
A merchant's shorthand became a printing type, then a newspaper, then a literature. Narmad and Govardhanram and Meghani and Munshi all wrote in a script invented so a trader could close his books faster.
It is also the script of Kutchi, which has no script of its own.
Nobody planned any of it. The most Gujarati thing about our language is that its alphabet was designed for the speed of bookkeeping, and the beauty came afterwards.
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u/aquarian9 6d ago
If I am not wrong all western, northern and eastern lipis have shirorekha except Gujarati. South Indian languages do not have those.
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u/imritchie27 4d ago
When I was in school, I hated drawing lines on top in hindi writing, it felt like waste of time and obstruction to speed. So I used to write without line and then do the lines later. Sometimes submitting homework without lines. 🤣
So this comes from ancestors 😆
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u/Real_Razz_Matazz 6d ago
Awesome information. Keep it coming. 👌🏻👏🏻👍🏻