What is Kaithi Lipi?
Kaithi lipi is a historical script that was used during the period of 16th to mid 20th century. It was used for writing legal, administrative, private records and financial documents. The script was predominant in the parts of Northern India such as Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal and Jharkhand, it was also used in Nepal, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan.
As we can see in the above picture that the script was widely spread in many regions, so let’s now see the reasons behind it.
The Kayastha is an Indian community of people who are traditionally related with the writing profession as they worship kalam-davaat. Primarily, only they were the people who knew the writing works so they used to handle the accounts and administration of the royal(Mughal) courts and colonial governments of North India by maintaining records of revenue transactions, legal documents and title deeds for which they used Kaithi script. Since there were only “Kayastha” who used to deal with all the writing works in most of the places which was written in Kaithi, this is reason for the widespread use of this script.
Now, let’s see the historical importance of this script
This script was widely used during the Mughal period for a variety of languages, including Maithili, Angika, Awadhi, Bhojpuri, Hindi, Magahi, and Nagpuri.
During British period (1880s), Kaithi was the official script used in the law courts of Bihar for writing all the legal documents. Previously, 18,54,77,368 schools were in Kaithi script, as compared to 25,151 in Devanagari and 24,302 in Mahajani.
Among the three scripts widely used in the ‘Hindi Belt’, Kaithi was widely perceived to be neutral, as it was used by both Hindus and Muslims. The persian(Arabic) script and Devangari script which have now replaced Kaithi, were only used for Religious Literature and Education purposes by Muslims and Hindus respectively. But the fact that it was used by both Hindus and Muslims, made some religiously conservative people less interested in using this script. As a result, Kaithi script became the rarely used script and now in a way to extinct which was once very popular for Maithili, Awadhi, and many more languages.
Significance of Kaithi script in modern world …
Kaithi lipi has its real importance in the modern world. As this blog describes that Kaithi was the main script and widely used for such a long period of time, so definitely we have an immense amount of documents, records, writings, etc which was written in this script. But since now we are forgetting about the script and have less knowledge about it, hence we are unable to read those historical writings and in a way to loose all those precious parts of our history.
Therefore, in order to protect the history, we can learn the script. There are Kaithi books available which can be used to learn the script and there are also Kaithi experts who take classes for the same.
Let’s together protect our history from being unread forever.