The Name Siddham and the Invocation at the Head of a Manuscript

The script is named from a word rather than from a place or a people. Siddham is a Sanskrit form meaning accomplished or perfected, and it stands at the head of a text as an invocation of success, sometimes in a fuller phrase amounting to a wish that there be accomplishment. A learner beginning the syllabary began by writing it, and the practice of opening with the word is old enough that the name transferred from the invocation to the letters themselves. In Japan the script is called shittan, the same word carried through Chinese, and the study of it is shittan-gaku.

Naming a script from the first thing written in it is not unusual, and the abecedaries of the Mediterranean world do something similar by a different route, taking their names from their opening letters. What is unusual here is that the name is a wish rather than a sound. It records what the script was for in the eyes of the people who taught it: not a neutral technology for putting language on a surface, but a thing whose use began with an act of intention.

The name does a practical job for scholarship as well. Indian palaeography distinguishes a family of related hands descended from the Brahmi of the Gupta period, and the label Siddhamatrka marks the branch this script belongs to. Siddham in the narrower East Asian sense is what that hand became once it had been carried out of India and kept in use by traditions that needed it for a purpose India itself had stopped serving.