Kaithi

Kaithi is a historical script of the Brahmi family that was widely used in northern and eastern India to write several regional languages, most notably Bhojpuri, Magahi, and Maithili. It also saw use for Hindustani in administrative records during the early modern period. Kaithi was written left to right and is known for its cursive, rounded shapes that facilitated faster handwriting by clerks and scribes. It served as a major script for government and legal documents in parts of present-day Bihar, eastern Uttar Pradesh, and western Bengal during the 17th to 19th centuries.

Origin and distribution: Kaithi emerged in the 16th century during the Mughal era’s bureaucratic expansion. Its use spread among revenue officers, merchants, and scribes, becoming a practical script for everyday record-keeping. By the 18th and early 19th centuries it was widely employed in administration and literature in the region. With the broader adoption of Devanagari for many languages and changes in administrative practices, Kaithi declined in official use by the late 19th century.

Script features: Kaithi is an abugida, where base consonants carry an inherent vowel and diacritics mark other vowels. A virama suppresses the inherent vowel to form conjuncts, and the script includes numerals and punctuation of its own. Glyphs tend to be more cursive and rounded than Devanagari, reflecting a workflow-friendly handwriting tradition. Conjuncts and ligatures are common in longer texts.

Modern status: Today Kaithi is primarily studied by linguists and historians. Unicode encodes Kaithi in the block U+11080–U+110CF, enabling digital representation and research. In contemporary education and media, Devanagari is predominant, but there are revival efforts, dedicated fonts, and keyboard layouts to support Kaithi in scholarly and cultural contexts.