Sharada Script: Why Its Revival Is Crucial For Kashmiri Community To Reconnect With Its Roots

नमस्ते शारदा देवी काश्मीर पुरवासिनि ।

त्वामहं प्रार्थये नित्यं विद्यादानं च देहि मे ।। 

I pray to Thee O Sharada Devi, who resides in the land of Kashmir.

I pray continuously to you and seek that you bless me with vidya.  

The identity of the Kashmir Valley with that of Shiva and Shakti are well known.

Be it in the blossoming of Utpaladeva’s Ishvarapratyabhijna that found its peak in Abhinavagupta’s Tantraloka and other seminal works, the countless rishis propounding the secrets of Shaiva and Vaishnava tantra agama, women have played no less a role in propagating vidya in Kashmir, be it in the divine shlokas of Mata Rupa Bhavani or the immortal vakhs of Laleswari.

What tied nearly all of them despite their obvious variances was one constant that has an immemorial resonance with Kashmir itself — Sharada. 

Sharada Devi has recently re-entered the sacred geography of Kashmir valley in a new form, but even in the most testing of times she has always made her presence felt in the valley.

As the deity of vidya, she personifies herself and is seen as the janani of the Sharada script. As Malini, she wears the Sanskrit varnamala, as an ornament that is dear to her.

It is no different when we expect even as Shakti, for as the great Trika Shaiva master Swami Lakshmanjoo had explained, Shakti is Maya personified.

She manifests herself in the form of the varnamala, which is not surprising given how everything and anything that you can conceive in this universe can be defined within the very varnamala that personifies Her.

Sharada is the very personification of the Vedas, as she is seen as the personification of Vaag Devi (Vac), and as Sreenivas Rao Subanna wrote:

And yet, where did this script disappear? What pushed it to the point that at one stage there were fewer than 100 estimated readers of the script within the Kashmiri community? 

What we do know is that till the nineteenth century, the usage of this script was significant.

However, as the Kashmiri language became a civilisational battleground like much else, the Sharada script faded away from people’s memory barring a few who dared to hold on to it.  

This was extremely ironic because the very justification given for the replacement of the Sharda script with Arabic stands on weak ground. 

As Anshuman Pandey from the United States of America documented in a unicode application with inputs from Prof Dr Jurgen Hanneder (Philipps-Universitut, Marburg, Germany, an expert on the Sharada script, from the twelfth century, Sharada was used to write manuscripts of Vedic and classical Sanskrit texts. So if Vedic texts could be written, how could it be deficient? 

Yet, this script seemed on the verge of extinction in Kashmir’s civilisational memory at one stage. Even as one finds Adi Shankaracharya paying homage to the Sharada script in Soundarya Lahiri, there was a struggle to save its sacred space and geography.

An Attempt To Revive The Script; An Attempt To Reconnect With Roots

And yet, a stubborn bunch is more than eager to revive the glory of Sharada, battling all odds. I recently came to know about the Core Sharada Team.

A bunch of individuals hailing from Kashmir and Karnataka, they have been battling the strongest odds to keep alive a script, a heritage and a civilisation that has been standing on the brink for a while now.

For many, their misery sees no end, but to this core group, there is clearly an attempt to stand up and be counted.  

It was with the divine inspiration of the Shankaracharya of Kanchi Kamakoti Peetham, Sri Jayendra Saraswati Swamigal ji, that Rakesh Koul ji felt the need to do something to revive a crucial but neglected part of the Kashmiri Pandit culture and heritage.

Having been introduced by a friend and volunteer of the Peetham, Premnath Swaminathan, Rakesh Koul ji recently told a YouTube channel how the meeting proved to be a divine inspiration.

“Swamiji gifted me a copy of Sharada Akshara Jnana authored by Pandit Omkar Nath Shastri ji and told them that this was the original script of Kashmir. It was shock to me personally because the exodus had left us and our younger generations with a void in us on our identity. This gift which I got in Kanchi and written by a Kashmiri Pandit from Jammu, and in that moment Swamiji instructed us that we should work towards this script.”

This proved to be the moment in which the Core Sharada Team was born.

While the team is global in nature, the organisation’s home base is Bengaluru. This gives the Core Sharada Team a sense of civilisational deja vu, given how Kashmiri Pandits traversed even in the past and settled in the land of Karnataka.

The effort within a micro community does seem to have gained significant attention, though their demands like recognition for the script’s association with Kashmiri language seems to have almost no takers even in the current dispensation. 

The team has managed to achieve many milestones, including primers, keyboards, standardisation of Kashmiri vowels and introducing the script to over 6,000 students, including several non-Kashmiris.

The group is trying to advocate its popularity amongst the Kashmiri Pandit community for starters, and wants scholars to look at Sharada based manuscripts and open up a vast library of yet unexamined texts floating around.

One example of this is the fact that the Bakshali manuscript, written in Sharada, is the oldest reference to zero.

To quote the University of Oxford’s official page on the significance of the discovery: 

The surprising results of the first ever radiocarbon dating conducted on the Bakhshali manuscript, a seminal mathematical text which contains hundreds of zeroes, reveal that it dates from as early as the 3rd or 4th century - approximately five centuries older than scholars previously believed. 

The team also feels that the revival of the script is critical for the Kashmiri Pandit youth to feel a sense of identity and staying connected to their roots.

“Absolutely! It is proving to be a connecting link for the Kashmiri youth to our heritage as they are getting to understand our identity, our mother tongue and its original script. We have seen a lot of people starting to use this in their daily lives for writing greetings, wedding cards etc. We have faced a ethnic cleansing from our motherland and like Sharada peetha, Sharada lipi is our heritage that needs to be not only preserved but revived as well,” Nidhi Bhat, another member of the team, replied to another query of mine.

Not Just Kashmir, Sharada Is The Key To Understanding North-West India

One other significant but less discussed fact of importance for the revival of Sharada script is the fact that Sharada formed the base for many other scripts, including Takri, Dogra Akkhar and Gurumukhi.

As the mother script, unlocking the perceived mysteries of Sharada would also lead to understanding, appreciation and a hot interest in pursuing and analysing texts written in these other scripts.

In fact, it has been believed that when Kashmiri Pandits came to Punjab hills along with the traders, they brought with them the Sharda script which took on various forms and became Kullui, Mandeali, Sirmauri, Chambeali, Jaunsari, each slightly different from the other. 

Takri’s revival has been pursued by a similar bunch of people in Himachal Pradesh, and in Jammu there are calls to revive Dogra Akkhar, a standardised Takri variant used earlier to write Dogri.

The critical part one misses however is that the revival of these scripts will be directly related to the revival of Sharada and will make people realise the commonalities of language across large parts of north-west India, be it in verbal or in written format.

Kashmiri as a language will have greater reach and accessibility to non-native speakers who use similar scripts. 

For now though, it is important that we encourage the efforts of the Core Sharada Team for making the effort against the odds.

It represents the very essence of Sanatana civilisation, that like a flame withstood the strongest gales of time and kept burning bright.

With inputs from Nidhi Bhat (Core Sharada Team).