Sharada

Almost the entire textual inheritance of Kashmir Shaivism comes down in this script. The works of Abhinavagupta and his predecessors, the commentaries, the tantric literature of the region and a great many Sanskrit manuscripts of works composed elsewhere but preserved in Kashmir were copied in it, largely on birch bark, which the region supplied in quantity and which survives less well than palm leaf. That concentration means the script is a bottleneck. Editions of these texts depend on scholars who can read it, and manuscripts in it are held in collections whose catalogues were made by people with varying competence in the hand, so material can be present and effectively invisible.

Work on the region's philosophical tradition has repeatedly turned on someone reading a manuscript that had been catalogued without being understood. One much discussed manuscript is not philosophical at all. A birch bark mathematical text recovered in the northwest, written in a form of this script, contains material of considerable importance for the history of the zero, and its date has been argued over since radiocarbon results were published that gave widely separated readings for different leaves. The argument is unresolved.

As a working script Sharada was gradually replaced. Sanskrit publishing standardised on Devanagari, Kashmiri came to be written mainly in a modified Perso-Arabic script, and the everyday commercial hands of the region descended from Sharada developed into separate scripts of their own. What remained was a restricted ritual use among Kashmiri Pandits, where the script continued to be written for horoscopes, almanacs, ceremonial formulae and the opening invocations of documents. That residual use is culturally exact rather than sentimental. A script kept for the moments where correctness matters most, and abandoned for ordinary purposes, is a common late stage in the life of a writing system, and it tells you what the community regarded the script as being for.

The community's displacement from the Kashmir valley at the end of the twentieth century disrupted that transmission along with much else, and the number of people who read the hand fluently is now small. Digitisation of manuscript collections and the encoding of the script for computer use have made the material more reachable than it was, but reachable is not the same as readable, and the atlas records the script's status as a living ritual hand with a shrinking readership rather than as a dead one.