This entry predates the later decision to catalogue India's individual scripts, Devanagari, Gurmukhi, Siddham, Ranjana and others, as entries in their own right, each with its own specific history, region and users. Rather than retire the original broad entry once the individual scripts existed, it is kept as a family grouping, useful for a reader encountering an older source or a general reference to Indian scripts that does not specify which particular one is meant, or for material genuinely about the shared inheritance rather than any single member of the family.
Every script gathered under this entry shares a documented common ancestor: Brahmi, first securely attested in the third century BC on the edicts the emperor Ashoka had inscribed across the Indian subcontinent to promote Buddhist ethical teaching. From that single ancestral script, over the following two millennia, the Brahmi family diversified into dozens of distinct regional scripts across South and Southeast Asia, a family tree comparable in scale and complexity to the Latin alphabet's own spread across Europe, but built around abugidas, scripts in which a consonant letter carries an inherent vowel by default and is modified to show any other vowel, rather than around a Latin style alphabet writing every vowel as a fully separate letter.