Modi Script (Marathi)

Modi (मोडी, Mōḍī) is a Brahmi-family script of Maharashtra, a cursive relative of Devanagari shaped for writing quickly without lifting the pen. Its name is usually tied to the Marathi verb moḍaṇe, 'to bend, to break', because so many of its letters are bent or broken-off forms of the Nagari ones. It was written mainly for Marathi, but Modi records also exist in Konkani, Hindi, Gujarati, Kannada, Telugu, Tamil and Persian, which tells you what it was for: administration, accounts and letters across the western Deccan rather than literature.

Modi grew up as a chancery script. It was in administrative use by the 16th century, the Marathas made it their official script in the 17th, and under Shivaji's chitnis (secretary) Balaji Avaji and later the Peshwas of Pune almost everything the state wrote came out in Modi: land grants, revenue rolls, treaties, military orders and the daily correspondence of the court. Those papers survive in huge numbers. The Peshwa Daftar, the Bharat Itihas Sanshodhak Mandal and Deccan College in Pune, the Maharashtra state archives and smaller collections abroad, including Denmark, hold thousands of bundles, the oldest from the early 17th century, and most of them have never been read by a modern historian because so few people can read the hand.

The official end came on 25 July 1917, when the Bombay Presidency ruled that Balbodh, the Marathi form of Devanagari, would replace Modi as the script of government for the sake of uniformity. Families and shopkeepers kept Modi for private accounts into the 1940s and schools taught it for a while longer, but metal type for its many joined forms was hard to cut, and after independence its use fell away until, as one Pune archivist put it, it was almost extinct. The Marathi Alphabet & Letters collection shows the Devanagari that took its place; this page is the dedicated reference for Modi itself.

How Modi works: the headline, vowels and the barakhadi

Modi is an abugida like Devanagari: each consonant letter carries an inherent a, so 𑘎 is ka, and another vowel is shown by a sign attached to it: 𑘎𑘰 kā, 𑘎𑘱 ki, 𑘎𑘳 ku, 𑘎𑘹 ke, 𑘎𑘻 ko. A vowel at the start of a word uses its own full letter, 𑘀 𑘁 𑘂 𑘃 𑘄 𑘅 𑘊 𑘋 𑘌 𑘍 for a, ā, i, ī, u, ū, e, ai, o, au. The twelve forms of a consonant with each vowel, plus anusvara and visarga, make the barakhadi (बाराखडी, 'the twelve') that Marathi children still chant for Devanagari; the Modi barakhadi of ka is 𑘎 𑘎𑘰 𑘎𑘱 𑘎𑘲 𑘎𑘳 𑘎𑘴 𑘎𑘹 𑘎𑘺 𑘎𑘻 𑘎𑘼 𑘎𑘽 𑘎𑘾, and the grid above lets you build it for any letter.

The consonants follow the classical varga order shared by every Indian script: 𑘎 𑘏 𑘐 𑘑 𑘒 (ka kha ga gha ṅa), 𑘓 𑘔 𑘕 𑘖 𑘗 (ca cha ja jha ña), the retroflex 𑘘 𑘙 𑘚 𑘛 𑘜 (ṭa ṭha ḍa ḍha ṇa), the dental 𑘝 𑘞 𑘟 𑘠 𑘡 (ta tha da dha na), the labial 𑘢 𑘣 𑘤 𑘥 𑘦 (pa pha ba bha ma), then 𑘧 𑘨 𑘩 𑘪 (ya ra la va), 𑘫 𑘬 𑘭 𑘮 (śa ṣa sa ha) and the Marathi 𑘯 ḷa. A consonant without its vowel takes the virama 𑘿, and two consonants in a row join into a conjunct, as in 𑘦𑘮𑘰𑘨𑘰𑘬𑘿𑘘𑘿𑘨 Mahārāṣṭra, where the font draws ṣ-ṭ-r as one shape. The letter 𑘨 ra is the acrobat of the script, with a hooked form above a syllable, two subjoined forms and ligatures that change with the letter before it.

Two habits make old Modi pages look the way they do. The writer first ruled a long headline (śirorekhā) right across the page with the pen or a straightedge and then hung the letters from it, so the line never breaks, and words were not separated by spaces at all: a clerk writing for speed simply kept going, and the reader was expected to know Marathi well enough to cut the stream into words. Spaces, Western punctuation and the full stop came in during the British period. Modi also never cared much about vowel length: 𑘂 and 𑘃 (i, ī), 𑘄 and 𑘅 (u, ū) and their signs were written alike in practice, and Unicode encodes both only because both occur in the teaching charts. The Sanskrit vocalic vowels 𑘆 𑘇 𑘈 𑘉 are encoded for completeness and are not in modern use.

Signs, punctuation, the huva and the digits

The four signs that sit on a letter are the ones every Indian script has: the anusvara 𑘽, a dot for nasalisation (𑘦𑘳𑘽𑘤𑘃 Mumbaī); the visarga 𑘾, the two dots that end a Sanskrit word in a breath; the virama 𑘿 (halant), which kills the inherent vowel; and the ardhacandra 𑙀, a half-moon that Modi borrowed for writing English sounds in loanwords and names the way Devanagari uses the candra in bĕṅk 'bank'. Modi has its own danda 𑙁 and double danda 𑙂 to end a sentence or a verse, and you should use these rather than the Devanagari ones, because a ra after a Modi danda takes a special shape.

Two characters are pure chancery. The abbreviation sign 𑙃 marks a shortened word, the way a clerk would cut a title or a month short in a ledger. The huva sign 𑙄 is an invocation written at the very top of a document before anything else; it descends from the Arabic huwa, 'He', which Persian-writing officials put at the head of their letters as a nod to God, and Modi clerks took the habit over, so a Maratha land grant can begin with a sign of Islamic origin above a Hindu text. Unicode notes it simply as 'used as an invocation'.

The ten Modi digits 𑙐 𑙑 𑙒 𑙓 𑙔 𑙕 𑙖 𑙗 𑙘 𑙙 are decimal and run left to right like ours, so 1818, the year the Peshwa's rule ended, is 𑙑𑙘𑙑𑙘. Accounts in Modi also used the old Indian fraction and rupee marks for annas and quarters, which Unicode keeps in a separate block shared with other northern scripts; the rupee mark and the ali placeholder are not Modi-specific characters and are not part of this chart.

Modi script today: reading the archives and the revival

Nobody writes a shopping list in Modi any more, but the script is far from dead, because the history of Maharashtra from Shivaji to the British is locked inside it. The Maharashtra state archives run reading workshops, the Bharat Itihas Sanshodhak Mandal and Modern College in Pune have taught certificate courses since the late 2000s, Savitribai Phule Pune University put a course online in 2021, and linguists in Pune who began a revival push in 2014 had trained several hundred readers by 2025. A Pune monthly, Vasundhara Vrutta, has been printed in Modi since 2017 using a CDAC font after years of being written by hand.

Learners come for three reasons: historians and students of Maratha history who need to read the Peshwa Daftar in the original (the script turns up in competitive exam syllabuses for exactly this reason), families tracing land, vatan and inheritance papers written before 1917, and Marathi speakers who simply want the script of their ancestors in a tattoo, a wedding card or a nameplate. For the last group, remember that Modi spells sounds, not letters: write the Marathi word first, then convert it syllable by syllable, as in 𑘫𑘱𑘪𑘰𑘕𑘲 Śivājī or 𑘢𑘳𑘜𑘹 Puṇe. The 'Modi lipi to Marathi translator' apps people search for are transliterators that do this mapping; none of them can yet read a 1750 clerk's handwriting reliably, which is why scanned documents still go to human readers.

How to copy, type and display Modi script

Tap any character above to copy it. Modi has been in Unicode since version 7.0 (June 2014), in the block U+11600 to U+1165F, 79 characters encoded from Anshuman Pandey's proposal; the page you are on uses those real characters, not pictures, so they paste into documents, chats and design apps as text. If you see empty boxes or question marks, the device has no Modi font: install the free Noto Sans Modi from Google Fonts (it is also packaged for most Linux distributions), which draws the vowel signs and conjuncts correctly in any app with complex-script shaping, such as Word, LibreOffice, browsers and Figma. Phones generally do not ship a Modi font, so a bio in Modi will show as boxes to many of your readers; copy it as a picture for Instagram.

To type rather than copy, use an online transliteration keyboard such as the Lexilogos Modi keyboard, where typing ka gives 𑘎, capitals give the retroflex letters (T for 𑘘), M gives the anusvara and q the huva sign, and the virama is clicked on screen. In Word you can also type a code point and press Alt+X: 11600 Alt+X gives 𑘀. Scholars transliterating old documents into Devanagari keep the Hindi Alphabet & Letters and Marathi Alphabet & Letters collections open beside this one, since every Modi letter has an exact Devanagari partner in the same varga position.