Brahmi Da 𑀤

The Sanskrit root meaning to give begins with this letter, and its derived noun, the word for a gift or a donation, is the single most important word in the history of reading Brahmi. When James Prinsep worked out the values of the letters in 1837 he did it not from the great Ashokan edicts but from the short records cut into the railings at Sanchi, dozens of them, each naming a donor and closing with that word. A formula repeating with only the names changing is exactly what a decipherer needs, because the constant part can be guessed and the variable part then tested against it.

The same root supplies a great deal of ordinary vocabulary, and the giving of gifts to religious communities is the subject of most of the earliest Brahmi inscriptions there are. The donative record is the characteristic early Indian inscription: a monk, a merchant, a guild or a queen gives a pillar, a railing, a cave or a cistern, and the fact is cut where the gift stands. Thousands survive.

That means the corpus a palaeographer works from is heavily shaped by a single social practice. What early Brahmi records in bulk is not literature, law or narrative but the naming of donors, and the vocabulary of the surviving material is correspondingly narrow. Letters that occur in the donative formula are attested in thousands of examples; letters that do not are far harder to date.

This is one of the letters whose descent through the family is easiest to follow. Its Brahmi form is simple, its later forms across the northern and southern branches keep a visible family resemblance, and a reader who knows a modern Indic alphabet can often recognise the ancestor without being told. That is not true everywhere in the script: several letters changed past recognition, and the conjuncts changed more than the simple letters did.

Comparing one letter across the descendants is the ordinary working method of Indian palaeography, and it produces a picture with two main branches. The northern line runs through the Gupta hands into Siddham, which carried Buddhist texts to China and Japan and is still used there for writing mantras, and into the Nagari group that produced Devanagari, and separately into Sharada in the northwest and the scripts of the Himalayan region. The southern line produces Grantha, from which the Tamil and Malayalam alphabets descend, and the Kannada and Telugu pair, and Sinhala.

A third path runs out of the subcontinent altogether. The chancery script of the Pallava dynasty travelled with Indian religion and Indian administration into mainland and island Southeast Asia and stands behind the Khmer, Mon, Burmese, Thai, Lao, Javanese and Balinese writing systems, which is why this letter has descendants in a dozen countries where no Indian language has ever been spoken.