Ḍhaddha and the Script as a Public Question

Gurmukhi has not always been a purely technical subject in the Punjab. In the decades after the partition of 1947 the question of which language and which script the state of Punjab should use became a political one, and the movement for a Punjabi-speaking state, argued through the 1950s and settled by the reorganisation of the state in 1966, turned in part on how people declared their mother tongue and in which script they wrote it. Because Gurmukhi is the script of Sikh scripture and Devanagari and the Perso-Arabic script carry other religious associations, census returns on language did not divide the way a linguist would expect, and communities speaking the same language returned different answers.

Historians of the period treat the episode as one in which script functioned as a marker of identity rather than simply as a technology for writing, which is a role writing systems have taken in many places and rarely without cost. The atlas records the fact without taking a side in it, because the point for a reader of the alphabet is a narrower one: a letter is not only a sound. The thirty-five letters of the painti are also a set that a community recognises as its own, and the reason the script survived the collapse of its original mercantile function was that it had acquired a second job as the carrier of a scripture and, later, of a public identity. Ḍhaddha is an unremarkable letter within that set and shares its history entirely.