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Standardisation of the Devanagari-Kashmiri
Script
By Maharaj
Krishen Raina
In late 1990s and early 2000s, KP scholars were busy standardizing the
Devanagari-Kashmiri script. After a series of meetings and workshops held
under the leadership of Dr. Roop K. Bhat, the script was finalized in late
2002. At Project Zaan, a Primer of the script in March 2001 was published
which covered the ad hoc standard decided upon earlier, and issued a
Revision covering the final script in September 2003. CIIL, Mysore issued
the Primer (http://koshur.org/pdf/primer.pdf) and the Reader (http://koshur.org/pdf/reader.pdf)
in August 2003. (Note - another writeup on this topic coming up shortly).
Sandeep Bhat, a software engineer from Pune, who was associated with the
experts' team for finalization of the script, worked hard and developed
Arinimal software for the Devanagari-Kashmiri. He did it free of cost. This
software was used by one and all, as also by those Kashmiri magazines which
had Kashmiri sections. Since Raina sahib was doing a lot of transliteration
work, he encountered certain issues with the Arinimal software. Sandeep Bhat
had by this time left the organization where he had developed this software
and could not work further on it.
Raina sahib met the engineers of Cyberscape Multimedia (of Akruti Software
fame) at Navi Mumbai and asked them to develop the Akruti Kashmiri Software
incorporating therein the newly developed vowels of the Kashmiri language.
He paid Rs. 25,000 for it and got it installed on his four PCs. Later, at
the initiative of All India Kashmiri Samaj (AIKS), Cyberscape Multimedia
engineers were approached for the free use of their software without
conditions. They demanded two lacs of rupees. With the good offices of
Sandeep Bhat, who toiled hard and had a series of meetings with them, the
price was reduced to Rs. 50,000. Papaji, Shri J.N. Kaul of Faridabad, helped
financially and AIKS paid the amount. As per the request of Dr. B.K. Moza of
Kolkata, the Software was renamed Akruti Kashmiri Arinimal Engine (in
recognition of Sandeep Bhat's work on basic Arinimal Software). This
software is now in use almost everywhere and is available at the AIKS office
free of cost.
There were several players involved in the standardization of the Devanagri-Kashmiri
script. A writeup by Sh. Raman Kaul of USA will soon be shared that will
provide details about the meeting that he arranged between the experts and
scholars, in addition to two other fonts that he created (including one for
Sharda), and his efforts to make the script Unicode
compliant, i.e., use of the language on the internet means the fonts have to
be universal in order to be reader friendly and search engine friendly.
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