shuklaambaradharaM vishNuM shashivarNam chaturbhujaM .
prasannavadanam dhyaayet sarvavighnopa shaantaye ..

The grantha script started its development in the 5th century AD, in the Southern parts of India. Throughout the ages, its primary use has been to set Sanskrit works in written form (the vast majority of modern publications occur in the Devanagari script).

Its influence on South Indian scripts is unmistakeable: the majority of modern South Indian scripts (Tamil, Malayalam, Telugu and Kannada) are all derived from this single script. The grantha alphabet, as it exists today, most closely resembles Tamil and Malayalam.

In the Southern parts of India, many rare and valuable books continue to be published in the Grantha script alone. This most commonly occurs in Tamil Nadu, where the native Tamil script does not contain enough characters to represent the entire Sanskrit alphabet. There is now a modern movement to add subscripts capable of extending the Tamil characters to represent the Sanskrit alphabet, but this is a wasted effort, when an existing alphabet which closely resembles Tamil already exists. In Kerala, Andra Pradesh and Karnataka, most modern Sanskrit publications are published in the local scripts alone.

It is difficult to find good grantha primers on the web. The following links, along with some knowledge of South Indian scripts should be enough to enable one to become familiar with the grantha script in the course of a few hours.

[link] Granthaksharamala - An Introduction to Grantha Characters by Ravisankar S. Mayavaram
[link] The Grantha Script of Sanskrit by Srikanth
[link] A Primer in Grantha Characters by K. Venugopalan (Digital South Asia Library)
[link] A basic handwritten table of grantha characters

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Please send comments to Ajit Krishnan ( webmaster _at_ mudgala.com )
Last updated Jan 2005. Copyright Ajit Krishnan [ 1999 - 2005 ]

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