Modi script

Mōḍī (, , , ) is an old handwritten cursive abugida script used to write the Marathi language, which is the primary language spoken in the state of Maharashtra, India. The Mōḍī script was used alongside the Devanāgarī script to write Marathi, particularly during the reign of the Maratha Empire, until the 20th century when the Balbodh style of the Devanāgarī script was promoted as the standard writing system for Marathi. Numerous archival records, official documents and correspondences written in this script exist, and there have been attempts to revive the usage of Mōḍī in Maharashtra.

There are multiple theories concerning its origin. It descends from the Nāgarī family of scripts and is based on the Nāgarī model, adapted for fluid continuous writing. Due to its handwritten nature, it has various styles and extensive character ligatures considerably different from Devanāgarī. Mōḍī has a practice of having one long headstroke (called śirorekhā) connecting all the words in a line without breaks. This is distinct from Devanāgarī and other Nāgarī scripts, where the śirorekhā is only limited to isolated letters or words.

Mōḍī is a unicameral Brahmic alpha-syllabary written from left to right. It has 46 base characters divided into 11 vowels, 36 basic consonants, 10 unique numerals and various diacritical and punctuation marks.

Etymology The name Mōḍī may be derived from the Marathi verb moḍaṇe (), which means "to bend or break".

Origin theories Hemāḍapanta origin theory

Hemāḍpant was a minister during the reign of Mahadeva (ruled 1261–1271) and the initial years of the reign of Rāmachandra (ruled 1271 to 1309)Eternal Garden: Mysticism, History, and Politics at a South Asian Sufi Center by Carl W. Ernst p.107 of the Yadava Dynasty.

Creation subtheory Hemāḍapanta created the Mōḍī script.

Refinement subtheory The Mōḍī script already existed in the 13th century; it was refined and introduced as an official script for Marathi by Hemāḍpant.

Sri Lanka subtheory Hemāḍpant brought the Mōḍī script to India from Sri Lanka.

Bāḷājī Avajī Chitnis origin theory

Bāḷājī Avajī Chitnis was the secretary of state to the Maratha king Shivaji Maharaj (ruled 1642–1680).

History

Historically, Mōḍī developed as an administrative cursive longhand form of older forms of Nāgarī in the Maratha heartlands around the 16th c.e. After the rise of the Maratha dynasties, it was officially adopted and used by them from the 17th c.e until the 20th c.e. William Carey in 1807 observed that as with other parts of India, a traditional duality existed in script usage between Devanāgarī for religious texts, and Mōḍī for commerce and administration.

There are various styles of the Mōḍī script associated with a particular era. Many changes occurred in each era

Proto-Mōḍī The proto-Mōḍī, or ādyakālīna () style appeared in the 12th century.

Yādava Era The Yādava Era style, or yādavakālīna (), emerged as a distinct style in the 13th century during the Yādava Dynasty.

Bahamanī Era The Bahamanī Era style, or bahamanīkālīna (), appeared in the 14th–16th centuries during the years of the Bahmani Sultanate.

Chatrapati Shivaji Era During the rule of Shivaji, the Shivaji style, or shivakālīna (), which was during the 17th century, the Chitnisi style of the Mōḍī script developed.

Peshwa Era In the Peshwa Era, or peshvekālīna (), various Mōḍī styles proliferated during the Maratha Empire and lasted until 1818. The prominent styles of Mōḍī used during this period were Chitnisi, Bilavalkari, Mahadevapanti, and Ranadi. Although all were popular, Chitnisi was the most prominent and most frequently used script for Mōḍī writing.

Colonial Era

During the colonial period, the final stage of Mōḍī called Anglakalin () emerged. This style was used from 1818 until 1952. The first metal fonts for printing in Mōḍī were developed by Charles Wilkins in the early 19th c.e. During this era, the script was used in newspapers, journals, private diaries and other everyday correspondence. Word spacing and Western punctuation marks were introduced. William Carey's Dictionary of the Maratta language (1810) and its subsequent later editions used the Mōḍī script for transcribing Marathi.

Decline On 25 July 1917, the Bombay Presidency decided to replace the Modi script with Balbodh as the primary script of administration, for convenience and uniformity with the other areas of the presidency. The script was still widely used, until the 1940s, by the people of older generations for personal and financial uses. The use of Mōḍī diminished after India's independence in 1947. The primary reason was the discontinuation of printing in the script due to the practical difficulty of producing metal typefaces encompassing all of the extensive ligatures and conjuncts in Mōḍī. Now the Balbodh style of Devanagari is the primary script used to write Marathi.

Revival efforts Linguists in Pune spearheaded the Mōḍī script revival movement in 2014. By 2025, over 400 students had been trained to understand it. Additionally, a primary school has begun teaching the Mōḍī script to the next generation.

Characteristics

The Mōḍī script derives from the Nāgari family of scripts and is a modification of the Balbodh style of the Devanagari script intended for continuous writing. Although Mōḍī is based upon Devanagari, it differs considerably from it in terms of letter forms, rendering behaviours, and orthography. The shapes of some consonants, vowels, and vowel signs are similar. The differences are visible in the behaviours of these characters in certain circumstances, such as consonant-vowel combinations and consonant conjuncts, which are standard features of Mōḍī orthography. The Mōḍī script has 46 distinctive letters, of which 36 are consonants and 10 vowels.

+ Vowels Vowelaāiīuūr̥r̥̄l̥l̥̄Independent Dependent VoweleaioauIndependent Dependent + Consonants

+ Signs

Head stroke

The head stroke in Mōḍī is unlike Devanagari in that it is typically written before the letters are, in order to produce a "ruled page" for writing Mōḍī in lines. Thus, there are no word boundaries that can be visibly seen, since the head stroke does not break between words.

Cursive features

The Mōḍī script has several characteristics that facilitate writing, minimising having to lift the pen from the paper for dipping in ink while moving from one character to the next. Some characters are "broken" versions of their Devanagari counterparts, and many characters are more circular in shape. These characteristics make Mōḍī a sort of cursive style of writing Marathi. The cursive nature of the script also allowed scribes to easily make multiple copies of a document if required.

Conjuncts and ligation Numerous modifications are made to the Mōḍī script in writing as "shortcuts", reflecting its history as a quasi-shorthand form of Devanagari.

Consonant-vowel conjuncts Consonant ligation falls into three broad categories: Those that always retain their isolated form and attach their dependent vowel forms in a way common to most Indic scripts Those that take on a "contextual" form and change their form only in the presence of a dependent vowel immediately after, in which case those vowel forms are attached to the contextual form of the consonant in a uniform way as done with the consonants in Category 1 and with most other Indic alphabets Those that form ligatures in the presence of a vowel following the consonants. The ligatures are generally determined by the shape of the consonant and the presence of a loop on the right.

Mōḍī bārākhaḍī () Consonants ↓

Consonant conjuncts Regarding conjuncts, as in Devanagari, ksha and tra have special conjuncts, while other consonants typically occupy half forms or contextual forms. The letter ra is special, as it can take different visual positions as the first consonant in a conjunct cluster depending on whether it is palatalized or not. As the second consonant in a cluster, however, it functions almost identically as in Devanagari.

Alternative forms of the letter ra are also used to make multisyllabic clusters involving it. This is seen in kara, tara, sara, and a few others as a subjoined ra to the bottom right of a letter, and in joining at the end of other syllables, it is seen with a curved head. Following dependent vowel signs like -aa and punctuation marks like dandas, the ra also joins underneath, and any additional vowel marks are written directly on top of the subjoined ra.

Below is a comprehensive table of all 1156 possible biconsonantal Mōḍī conjunct clusters. Some of the ligated conjuncts may not be viable combinations in any language.

All Mōḍī jōḍākṣara () Consonants

Punctuation Mōḍī also has an empty circle that indicates abbreviations, which may also have been borrowed by Goykanadi, used for writing Konkani, which is closely related to Marathi.

+ Punctuations

Numerals Mōḍī has its own set of ten numerals from 0–9. + Digits

Usage The Mōḍī script was frequently used as a shorthand script for swift writing in business and administration. Mōḍī was used primarily by administrative people as well as businessmen in keeping their accounts and writing Hundis (credit notes). Mōḍī was also used to encrypt the message since not all people were well-versed in reading this script.

Printing Before printing in Marathi was possible, the Mōḍī script was used for writing prose and Balbodh was used for writing poetry. When printing in Marathi became possible, choosing between Mōḍī and Balbodh was a problem. William Carey published the first book on Marathi grammar in 1805 using Balbodh since printing in the Mōḍī script was not available to him in Serampore, Bengal. At the time Marathi books were generally written in Balbodh. However, subsequent editions of William Carey's book on Marathi grammar, starting in 1810, were written in the Mōḍī script. Using offset printing machines (previously Lithography) printing was in vogue.

Typing

The Mōḍī script was included in Unicode for the first time in version 7.0.BabelStone: What's new in Unicode 7.0 This inclusion has recently led to the development of Unicode fonts for Mōḍī, such as MarathiCursive and Noto Sans Mōḍī. Also, a Unicode keyboard layout for Mōḍī, named Modi (KaGaPa Phonetic)', has been recently added in the XKB keyboard stack, which is mainly used in Linux based operating systems. The character mapping of this keyboard layout is similar to the existing Marathi (KaGaPa Phonetic) layout, but uses Mōḍī'''s dedicated Unicode block for typing.

Documents in the Mōḍī script Most documents in Mōḍī are handwritten. The oldest document in the Mōḍī script is from 1389 and is preserved at the Bhārat Itihās Sanshodhan Mandal (BISM) in Pune. The majority of documents and correspondence from before Shivaji Raje Bhonsle's times are written in the Mōḍī script.

Unicode

The Mōḍī'' alphabet (U+11600–U+1165F) was added to the Unicode Standard in June 2014 with the release of version 7.0.

Sample Text Mōḍī

𑘦𑘰𑘖𑘰 𑘦𑘨𑘰𑘙𑘲𑘓𑘲 𑘤𑘻𑘩𑘳 𑘎𑘼𑘝𑘳𑘎𑘹𑙁 𑘢𑘨𑘲 𑘀𑘦𑘵𑘝𑘰𑘝𑘹𑘮𑘱 𑘢𑘺𑘕𑘰𑘭𑘲 𑘕𑘲𑘽𑘎𑘹𑙁 𑘋𑘭𑘲 𑘀𑘎𑘿𑘬𑘨𑘹 𑘨𑘭𑘲𑘎𑘹𑙁 𑘦𑘹𑘯𑘪𑘲𑘡𑙂

-Dnyaneshwar

Devanagari (Balbodh)

माझा मराठीची बोलू कौतुके। परि अमृतातेहि पैजासी जिंके। ऐसी अक्षरे रसिके। मेळवीन॥

-संत ज्ञानेश्वर

Roman (IAST)

mājhā marāṭhīcī bolū kautuke| pari amṛtātehi paijāsī jiṃke| aisī akṣare rasike| mel̤avīna||

-saṃta jñāneśvara

Gallery

Modi script

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