Alphabets

            At present Malayalam has a script of its own, but in the early centuries it used a form called the vattezhuthu which had currency all over the regions of the Cheras and the Pandyas. It disappeared from the rest of the peninsula by about the fifteenth century, but in Kerala it continued to be in use for three more centuries. Documents, letters, books and inscriptions were mostly written in this script, and even after giving it up, children first initiated into the study of the language were required to learn the vattezhuthu characters also, besides those of Malayalam and Tamil.

            From the vattezhuthu was derived another script called the kolezhuthu. It is said that the ezhuthu or writing was done with a kol, a stick, and hence the name kolezhuthu for the script. There is no fundamental difference between the two scripts except that in kolezhuthu there are no specific symbols for endings in u and for a and o. This script was more commonly used in the Cochin and Malabar areas than in Travancore. Yet another script derived from the vattezhuthu was the Malayanma, which was in common use to the south of Thiruvananthapuram. Malayanma also does not differ fundamentally from the vattezhuthu.

            With three scripts in current use the writing and reading of Malayalam must indeed have been a difficult affair. Vattezhuthu was perhaps the better form, for it had currency all over Kerala and did not have any regional variations. But the absence of character combinations, the vowels a and o and conventions for symbols were real difficulties. The trouble with kolezhuthu was still more considerable, for it knew regional variations also. And in the case Malayanma, the complexity of the script, Tamil usage and conventional abbreviations for words were handicaps which made it unintelligible to the rest of the region. It is likely that in course of time these difficulties contributed to their disappearance and brought in the grandhalipi which is the basis of the present script.

            It is held that grandhalipi-the term literally means ‘book-script’-was in use all over South India since the seventh century AD The advent of Manipravala literature must have been the major factor that paved the way for its introduction in Kerala.