Purvi: Your work primarily focuses on using digital technology to either create typefaces, or digitise existing scripts. Can you talk about this in the broader linguistic context of India?
Vaishnavi: As a type designer and researcher, I am drawn to the study of scripts, their systems, and the ways in which they both shape and are shaped by culture. My practice engages with this space by creating tools for documentation, improving accessibility, and designing fonts that allow various scripts to find their expression.
Over the past two decades, this journey has brought me many realizations. In India, much like in many other parts of the world, languages often carry an identity that seems to demand a visible presence through a script. Early in my career, I too subscribed to the idea that a language only gains legitimacy or superiority once it is represented by a script. What feels so limiting, even absurd, to me now was once the very belief that motivated my work. In fact, my first steps in the field were dedicated to reviving the script of my own mother tongue, Tulu.
Tulu has always been an oral language, and it continues to hold on to its fluidity and innate charm, despite repeated attempts to contain it within the rigid frameworks of scripts, standardized grammar rules, and borrowed orthographies from more dominant languages. This is not just the journey of Tulu alone; it is the story of many ancient oral languages across India, languages that have yet to be reimagined in their full vitality within a world that often privileges scripts over speech. Their beauty lies in their living, breathing expression, and it is this very essence that risks being overshadowed when we try to confine them within systems that fail to honor their soul.
Purvi: Where was Tulu primarily spoken? What was its relationship with the scripts around it, being a primarily oral language?
Vaishnavi: Tulu is one of the major languages spoken along India’s southwest coast, from Goa and Karnataka to northern Kerala, a region shaped by ancient ports and enriched by cultural exchanges through trade and religion.
This region found long lasting stability under the tolerant Alupa dynasty (200–1440 CE), one of the longest-ruling houses in Indian history. Though at times subordinate to larger empires like Kadambas, Chalukyas, Rashtrakutas and Hoysalas. The Alupas were Tulu-speaking rulers.
The Alupa dynasty predominantly used the Old Kannada script in their inscriptions and copper plates. They also employed the southern Nagari script, known as Nandinagari, on their coins. Additionally, a limited number of inscriptions have been found in the Tulu-Tigalari script.
Tulu speakers have historically been literate and adaptable in their use of writing systems, as evidenced by inscriptions, manuscripts, and coins. However, they primarily wrote in Samskrita or Kannada, while Tulu itself was never standardized into a single written form.
Purvi: Could you elaborate.
Vaishnavi: Tulu speakers have always been highly literate and cosmopolitan, often bilingual or multilingual. They contributed richly to Kannada and Samskrita literature, yet Tulu remained mainly a much-loved oral language.
Tulu’s oral literature is incredibly rich. For example, Siri Paddana is a long epic ballad sung over two days about a woman named Siri, and it has entirely been passed down orally for generations. Along with this, there are many other forms of Tulu oral literature that preserve complex histories and memory.
Tulu is also important in the study of languages. Scholars believe it developed on its own within the South Dravidian family, separate from Tamil and Kannada, and it has kept many sounds, grammar patterns, and words that make it unique.
Purvi: How was Tulu spoken at the time? And how did people see it in relation to the other languages that co-existed in the region?
Vaishnavi: The region has long been multilingual, with people speaking Tulu, Konkani, Beary, Kannada (in several distinct dialects), and various indigenous languages like Koraga and Malekudiya. Kannada often served as the bridge language, especially in trade, as it was more widely understood beyond the Tulu-speaking communities.
Tulu, the language of the region’s rulers, remains at the heart of coastal life here, spoken in about six diverse dialects. These dialects differ so much that speakers from different areas sometimes struggle to understand one another. A simplified “market Tulu” helped bridge this gap, yet it has never been formally standardized.
Purvi: And what about the Tulu-Tigalari script? How was it being used?
Vaishnavi: The Tulu-Tigalari script, also called Taulava Grantha, was mainly used by Brahmin communities to write Samskrita texts. Daily writing, however, was often done in Kannada script. This community also extensively used the Nandinagari script for Samskrita. How these multiple scripts came to coexist remains a subject of research. Far from a community-wide script, Tulu-Tigalari was specialized, chiefly serving to preserve sacred knowledge.
Purvi: What kind of resources or manuscripts for the script did you find during your research?
Vaishnavi: Most manuscripts in Tulu-Tigalari are in Samskrita. Rarely, you find Kannada or Tulu written in the script, usually as notes or translations of Samskrita works like the Ramayana, Bhagavata, Devi Mahatmya, and Mahabharata. These translations were meant to be read aloud so that a wider audience could understand. Still, nearly all Tulu-Tigalari manuscripts, about 99.95 percent, are in Samskrita.
Purvi: There is a popular narrative among a lot of Tulu speaking people, that this script went into decline with the coming of printing presses in the region, brought in by British Missionaries in the 1840s. People often believe that the missionaries favoured the Kannada script over the Tigalari script. Do you agree with this narrative?
Vaishnavi: This view is common, but evidence shows otherwise, as detailed in my paper Naming the Tulu-Tigalari Script, available online. By the time printing presses arrived, Tulu-Tigalari was already losing ground. Political upheavals, wars, and disruptions gradually weakened traditional scholarly networks from the late medieval period onward, causing collective amnesia about this script. Missionaries in the region added to the confusion by calling it the “Tulu Script,” which has led many to mistakenly believe it was a script for the Tulu language. However, the presses had little incentive to revive a script that had already fallen out of practical use.
Purvi: The missionaries decided not to use this script in the printing presses?
Vaishnavi: Exactly. They printed in Kannada because it was already established and accessible. Tulu-Tigalari was not suppressed by the press; it had declined before printing arrived.
Purvi: So the missionaries printed Tulu language books using the Kannada script?
Vaishnavi: Yes, as most Tuluvas already knew the Kannada script. The modern idea that “Tulu was deprived of its script by colonial powers” is more a constructed identity narrative than a historical truth.
Purvi: Can you situate your work with digitising the Tulu-Tigalari script in the context of this history?
Vaishnavi: At first, I thought giving Tulu its own script would strengthen the language. But deeper study showed that the so‑called Tulu‑Tigalari script was used mainly for Sanskrit and in several parts of Karnataka beyond the Tulu‑speaking region. For Tulu itself, the Kannada script has always been the natural fit. The real strength of Tulu lies in speaking it and in re‑imagining how its rich oral knowledge systems can be revived within communities that come together around the language.
The real treasure lies not in reviving Tulu‑Tigalari for everyday use, but in preserving and opening up the manuscripts and inscriptions written in it. That means digitising them, developing digital fonts, and making these texts searchable and accessible so this heritage can be read, transcribed, published, and studied worldwide. Reviving the knowledge systems preserved in these materials is where my work belongs.
Purvi: We don’t often hear people talk about forgotten scripts in that way. Why do you think this idea of pride and identity is so deeply intertwined with language?
Vaishnavi: The creation of linguistic states in India came from strong demands to redraw boundaries along language and culture, leading to the States Reorganization Act of 1956. This act improved governance and gave regional languages greater recognition, but it also turned language into a political tool, fueling regional nationalism. Driven more by politics than history, this shift created rigid identities and recast histories and figures through the lens of language. Earlier, however, India’s multilingual society seems to have thrived on fluid, overlapping identities that were not necessarily tied to a single tongue.
Purvi: Finally, how do you hope for people to engage with the Tulu language and the Tulu-Tigalari script?
Vaishnavi: I hope we move beyond seeing language as a burden or just a political symbol. Our oral and written traditions can be celebrated with joy and curiosity. In a multilingual country like India, languages endure not through government support alone, but when communities keep them alive in songs, stories, and daily life. For centuries they have survived through meaning and pleasure, and if we approach them with openness today, they will continue to nourish generations to come.
Transcription Support: Kalpi Devrani