1859.] On the Introduction of Writing into India. 147 



writing, &c, not one of them has as yet been discovered in any 

 Sanskrit work of genuine antiquity. Book, in modern Sanskrit, is 

 pustam or pustakam, a word most likely of foreign origin.* It occurs 

 in such works as the Hitopade'sa, where we read of a person, 

 " neither read in books nor taught by a tutor." The Hitopades'a 

 itself is said to be written (likhyate) as an extract from the 

 Panchatantra and another book.f 



To write is likli and lip, the former originally used in the sense 

 of scratching, whether on stone or leaves, the latter, in the sense 

 of covering a surface with ink. Thus in S'akuntala, the chief 

 heroine, when advised to writs' a love-letter (madanalekha), com- 

 plains that she has no writing-materials (lekJianasddhandni) , and 

 her friend tells her to take a lotus-leaf as smooth as the breast of 

 a parrot, and with her nails to scratch the letters on it. This is 

 clearly writing. In the Vikramorvast again, Urvas'i not daring to 

 face her lover, writes a letter (lehha) on a birch-leaf (bhurjapatra). 

 The king, who sees it, calls it bliurjagato aksharavinydsa, " letters 

 put down on a birch-leaf;" and when he reads it, he is said to 

 make the leaf speak (vdchayati) . The leaf (patra) is used here not 

 in the sense in which we found it in S'akuntala, as the leaf of a 

 tree, but as a leaf or sheet of paper. This paper was made of the 

 bark of the birch-tree ; and hence, when the queen picks up the 

 love-letter, she thinks " it is a strip of fresh bark which the south 

 wind has blown thither."J 



Passages like these, to which we might add the well known in- 

 troduction of the Mahabharata, leave little doubt that, at the time 

 when these modern plays were composed, writing was generally 

 practised by women as well as men. Why should there be no 

 such passage in any of the genuine early Sanskrit works, if writing 

 had then been equally known ? 



* Could it be apesta7c, originally the Sanskrit avasthdna ? See Spiegel, 

 Grammar of the Parsi Language, p. 204. 



X There are, I believe, but two Sanskrit MSS. in Europe which are written 

 on birch bark, one in the Royal Library of Berlin, the other in the Library of 

 All Souls College, Oxford. 



T 2 



