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VERNACULAR SCRIPTS OF THE INDUS VALLEY AND BEYOND

Publication Type  Article
Year of Publication  2016
Date Published  2016
Authors  Shackle,, Christopher
Original Publication  THE ELIOT ROOM, BRITISH LIBRARY CONFERENCE CENTRE LONDON
Alternate Title  Personal Reflections and Observations on the Indus Valley Scripts
Publisher  THE ELIOT ROOM, BRITISH LIBRARY CONFERENCE CENTRE LONDON
Source  

An Anthropological Perspective on the Khūdāwādī script
The unexplained sectarian nature of the revolts of the Tughluq Era in Medieval Sindh
Manuscripts in Khojki Sindhi Script: A State of the Art
Preliminary observations on the British Library's Khojki manuscript from Zanzibar

Key Words  Indus Valley Scripts; Khudawadi script; Tughluq Era in Medieval Sindh; Khojki Sindhi Script; Khojki manuscript from Zanzibar
Abstract  

After a brief introduction to the Khūdāwādī, the presentation will deal with a salient question: why did the Khūdāwādī fail to be constructed as a community script as the Khojkī was with the Khojas and the Gurmukhī with the Sikhs ? Yet the script was usually associated with the Lohāṇās, a leading ‘Hindu’ community mostly involved in trade, but also counting as the bulk of the Daryāpanthīs, the devotees of the Indus River worshipped as Udero Lāl. Using published matter kept in the British Library collection as well as the scattered epigraphical corpus collected in Sindh, it will argue that although there have been some attempts involving different actors for it to be constructed as a community script, the Khūdāwādī is still used in present Sindh as it was probably since long, as a writing system for shopkeepers’ account books.


VERNACULAR SCRIPTS OF THE INDUS VALLEY AND BEYOND

After a brief introduction to the Khūdāwādī, the presentation will deal with a salient question: why did the Khūdāwādī fail to be constructed as a community script as the Khojkī was with the Khojas and the Gurmukhī with the Sikhs ? Yet the script was usually associated with the Lohāṇās, a leading ‘Hindu’ community mostly involved in trade, but also counting as the bulk of the Daryāpanthīs, the devotees of the Indus River worshipped as Udero Lāl. Using published matter kept in the British Library collection as well as the scattered epigraphical corpus collected in Sindh, it will argue that although there have been some attempts involving different actors for it to be constructed as a community script, the Khūdāwādī is still used in present Sindh as it was probably since long, as a writing system for shopkeepers’ account books.

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