Scribe and script in the Cālukya West Deccan

Abstract

This article concentrates on the production of copper plate donative charters by the chancellery of the later Western Cālukyas in what is now northern Karnataka. In analysing this small corpus of eight documents, I try to capture how this form of public document can be contextualised in multiple ways, in order to restore something of the pragmatic world of the emergence and use of this particular set of epigraphic materials. Over the period studied here, several changes can be observed in the relationship between the officials authorising the plates’ issue and the Brahman scribes who actually drew up the documents, while the documents themselves remain totally standardised in their orthography and general physique. The article also includes a brief cultural–historical digression on the empirical as well as subjective worlds of a literate professional in this world, suggesting a general type of disillusioned, highly mobile literatus within the professional cadres of the medieval peninsula. Scribe and script afford us evidence of separate and internally heterogeneous historical processes, which unfolded according to altogether different temporal rhythms. The complex social and cultural dynamics evident from these materials suggest new ways in which historians of medieval India can approach questions of temporality and of causal heterogeneity.