Siddham (Siddhamatrika)

01The name of the primer

Children learning letters wrote siddham, ‘accomplished’, at the head of the alphabet before anything else, and the script took its name from that invocation: Siddhamatrika, the mother of the siddham letters. It took shape in the 6th century, with sharper angles than Gupta writing and a small wedge on top of each letter. Al-Biruni, writing about Bharat around 1030, names Siddhamatrika as a script used in Kashmir and at Varanasi.

02To China and Japan

Mantras and dharanis lose their power if a sound is wrong, so monks who took them to China kept the Indian letters. Siddham manuscripts and primers spread through Tang China. The Japanese monk Kukai studied in China and brought Siddham home in 806 CE; the Shingon school he founded still uses it. Two palm leaves at the Horyu-ji temple, now in the Tokyo National Museum, carry the Heart Sutra and a dharani in this script and are among the oldest Sanskrit manuscripts that survive anywhere.

03Parent of Nagari

In Bharat, Siddham slowly turned into its descendants. In the west and centre the wedges joined into a line and the letters became Nagari; in the east they bent into the Gaudi letters behind Bengali, Assamese and Odia. In Japan the bija syllables of the devatas are still brushed in Siddham on wooden grave tablets and in temple paintings, so a script that left Bharat thirteen centuries ago is still in daily use.

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