Thirteenth-century polymath-scholar Hemadpant is said to have given birth to the Modi script. Medieval scribes believed that he received the lipi as a gift from the king of Lanka, Vibhishana, for saving the former from a difficult ailment. However, Modi, as per some scholars, goes close to the cursive Mudiya in Rajasthani, as well as the Mahajani in Gujarati writing.  The Modi script, key to Marathi record-keeping for centuries, was modelled on the broken-bent-cursive form out of the Perso-Arabic writing system prevalent in South Asia.  

Academic-scholar-author Prachi Deshpande’s new book Scripts of Power follows the trajectory of the Modi lipi. More than its legendary origins—folklore and trivia served as finger food to the main course—she is interested in how and where people used the script, and their attitudes to it. Deshpande, associate professor of history at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata, calls Modi “an opaque text” which is present as well as absent in the larger story of Maharashtra’s history. So many Modi records are available in archives and in print, but the script itself is no longer in regular use. She urges the reader—not necessarily a Maharashtrian, but anyone curious about the history of change—to see the different ways in which a visually symbolic script can alert us to historical processes.