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120 to think that Vatteluttu had an independent source and had nothing to do with the Brahmi alphabet of Northern India. This alphabet, he says, 'was formed and settled before the Indo-Aryan grammarians of the Tamil language came to Southern India.

In opposition to this view Drs. Caldwell, Buhler and Grierson maintain (and on insufficent ground as will be shown later on) that the Vatteluttu alphabet was borrowed or rather adapted from the Brahmi or Asoka alphabet of Upper India. 'The older Mauryan alphabet', says Dr. Buhler, 'was used over the whole of India.' He says further from a palæographical point of view, the Vatteluttu may be described as a cursive script which bears the same relation to the Tamil as the modern alphabets of the clerks and merchants to their originals ... Perhaps it may be assumed that the "round hand" arose already before the seventh century, but was modified in the course of time by the further development of the Tamil and the Grantha scripts. Owing to the small number of the accessible inscriptions, this conjecture is, however, by no means certain.' Dr. Caldwell asserts 'that the Tamil characters were borrowed from the earliest Sanskrit, and the language of the Tamilians was committed to writing on or soon after the arrival of the first colony of Brahmans.' He even goes to the length of confirming this hypothesis by saying that the 'oldest known Dravidian alphabet (he means the Vatteluttu) makes no difference between long