Modi Letter Sa

It is the Modi letter for the sound «sa».

Accounts differ: a 2023 lecture places Modi use in the fifteenth century; Unicode dates its emergence to the sixteenth and its earliest surviving document to the early seventeenth. A 2022 Pune report also mentions surviving documents from the sixteenth century.

Modi derives from Nagari and was shaped for continuous writing. It carried Marathi correspondence and revenue records, often alongside Persian; Balbodh, Marathi’s Devanagari form, served literary and sacred writing. In the nineteenth century, print favored Balbodh, and Modi was formally discontinued in the 1950s. A 2023 lecture notes renewed interest and symbolic ties to the early modern Maratha state.