Navjani: A Systematised Extension of the Mahajani Script
Navjani (नवजनी, contracted from Nav Mahajani, "new Mahajani") is a writing system that starts from the letterforms of Mahajani and rebuilds the parts of it that made the script hard to learn.
The script
Everything below is ordinary Devanagari text with the Navjani font applied — identical code points, different letterforms. The font is served by this page, so nothing needs to be installed to read it.
| Devanagari | Navjani | |
|---|---|---|
| Name of the script | नवजनी | |
| Vowel signs on क | क का कि की कु कू के कै को कौ | |
| Anusvara, visarga, virama | कं कः क् | |
| Digits | ० १ २ ३ ४ ५ ६ ७ ८ ९ |
The vowel row is the clearest demonstration of the placement rules described below: every sign sits in the same band beneath क, centred on it, and none of them overhang it.
Why
Mahajani was a mercantile script of northern India, used into the twentieth century by the mahajan merchant and banking castes for account books, promissory notes, and correspondence in Marwari, Hindi, and Punjabi. This project began as a personal one: writing Marwari in a script that had historically been used for it.
That turned out to be harder than expected. Mahajani behaves more like an alphabet than the abugidas typical of Indian languages, and it was designed for readers who already knew what the words were:
- Vowels are largely unwritten. Mahajani has independent vowel letters, but no developed system of dependent vowel signs, and the vowels it does have do not cover everything a spoken language like Marwari uses. One character can stand for several similar vowels, and sometimes the vowel was skipped entirely.
- Consonants are under-differentiated. Distinctions Devanagari marks — voiced against voiceless, aspirated against unaspirated — are not consistently maintained.
- There is no cluster mechanism. Mahajani has no virama and no conjunct formation, so consonant clusters have no unambiguous written form.
Each of these is a reasonable trade for a script used inside a known domain, and an obstacle outside one. Mahajani was in decline by the mid-twentieth century, so the layer of knowledge that resolved these ambiguities — how a writer chose to spell a given word, which distinctions survived fast writing — lived with a community of practice that has largely disappeared.
The design
Navjani keeps Mahajani's letterforms as a base layer, resolves the ambiguous letters, adds the missing ones, and adds a new diacritic system.
The vertical space around a consonant is divided into reserved zones. The vowel zone sits immediately below the consonant and spans the full descender depth; every dependent vowel sign lives there. The modifier zone is inset within it, shallower and shorter, and holds anusvara and visarga, which are visually distinct from vowel signs by being dots rather than strokes. A further slot above the consonant is reserved for tonal marks, so the tonal languages of the region can be written without inventing anything later, though the current font does not yet draw those marks.
Within the vowel zone, placement is stated in three rules:
- Vertical position is fixed. A sign occupies the same band regardless of its consonant, and is never raised, lowered, or vertically scaled.
- Horizontal position is centred on the consonant.
- Width is the sign's own, compressed to fit. Under a consonant at least as wide as the sign's natural width, it is drawn at that width; under a narrower one, it is compressed horizontally so that it never overhangs its base.
Consonant modifiers follow rules 1 and 2, but not 3 — a dot is a dot and is not stretched.
Putting every vowel sign below the consonant is the largest departure from Devanagari and other Brahmic scripts, where signs are distributed above, below, before, and after the base. Navjani also borrows a concept from Tamil: consonants marked with a virama are written in full form, rather than forming a ligature with the following character. Navjani also has its own digits, one per Devanagari numeral, written on the line and taking no vowel signs.
Relation to Devanagari
Because the diacritic system was rebuilt to cover every vowel and every modifier rather than the subset Mahajani wrote, Navjani ends up in near one-to-one correspondence with the Devanagari repertoire. The font maps onto the Devanagari block, so existing Devanagari text renders in Navjani directly and a standard Hindi keyboard types it — the specimens above are ordinary Devanagari text with a font applied.
Status
This was a project started in grad school that was completely different from the technical work I was otherwise doing. There are improvements still to be made to the script, but it is generally usable.
Downloads and licensing
The font software (Navjani.ttf) is released under the SIL Open Font
License, Version 1.1, with Reserved Font Name
"Navjani". You may use, study, modify, and redistribute it, including in
commercial work, as long as it is not sold by itself, it stays under the OFL,
and a copy of the license travels with it. The Reserved Font Name means a
modified version has to be released under a different primary font name.