Last year, the Delhi Typerventions group put up a Devanagari-Bharati Braille installation at Amar Jyoti School, an institute for the visually-impaired, in Delhi. I, of course, was in faraway Cupertino then, but it didn’t stop me from making a small contribution—designing the Devanagari lettering and composing it with the Braille. The most challenging part of […]
Category: Research
Cheestan
At the Rampur Raza Library, I saw a delightful book called Cheestan, whose description I had read in Katharine S. Diehl’s article, Lucknow Printers 1820–1850. Printed in 1839, this is by far the oldest children’s book I have had the pleasure of seeing up close. The book was produced by the Mohammadi Press, where it […]
Chasing curiousities
The last time Gerard (Unger) gave me feedback on my typeface, he introduced me to two typefaces by Monotype—Veronese and Italian Old Style. Monotype Veronese, as Christopher Burke writes in his article in the centenary issue of The Monotype Recorder, was one of the few typefaces that Monotype made at that time as a custom […]
Beginning the dissertation
Finding a topic I didn’t expect it, but the journey of finding a dissertation topic was very tumultuous. When I came to Reading, I had thought that it would be the perfect opportunity to do more research on Kaithi. In the course of the months, and after dissertation week in December, I was less and […]
Twelve select views of the seat of war
After a lot of nervous brain-racking, I submitted my dissertation proposal late last month. It took me longer than I expected to zero in on a subject for my research. Only a week before the submission was due did I have the epiphany (while reading Graham Shaw’s articles) that lithography in India would be an […]
Duncan Forbes’ A Smaller Hindustani and English Dictionary
Following up on the theme of dictionaries from my last post, here is another one. This is Duncan Forbes’ A smaller Hindustani and English Dictionary. It was produced in 1861, about forty years after Shakespear’s dictionary. It does away with problem of multi-script typesetting completely, and is printed entirely in the Latin alphabet. This decision […]
John Shakespear’s Dictionary, Hindustani and English
I’ve been looking at Hindi dictionaries to get a sense of the information provided within each entry. Of the dictionaries I’ve looked at, the oldest so far is John Shakespear’s Dictionary, Hindustani and English, which was published in 1817. As the name of the dictionary suggests, it deals with Hindustani (which is not necessarily the […]
The Queen, the Begam and the Princess
In his book One Language Two Scripts, Christopher King writes about a Hindi drama from late nineteenth century India — a personification of the language and script conflict in Northern India. In the play, Queen Devanagari pleads to Begum Urdu to return her rightful place. King believes that the drama needed one more character, Princess […]
How we learn to write
Aksharaya — Letter Conscious People, the amazing folks who gave me a chance to be a part of their workshop and camp last year, are on a drive to collect script primers from India and abroad. This call is on behalf of Prof. Kshirsagar, who is pursuing his PhD from the Industrial Design Centre at […]
Bangalore Diaries/A visit to Brahmi Computing
On Thursday evening, I caught an auto to travel across Bangalore to meet the guys at Brahmi Computing. Now, the only way I really knew of them till then was through their website and Twitter account, and so I was not only looking forward to meeting them in person, but also finally seeing their Indian […]
