Jaini

A Kalpasutra manuscript from 1503 CE is the main reference for Jaini. The Jain scribes who wrote these manuscripts had a calligraphic style quite unlike Balbodh, the Devanagari most readers see today:

• the shirorekha, the headline over the letters, is broken, with triangular wedges
• upper matras are short, and lower matras tuck inside the body of the letter
• the letters are squarish, with a large kana height and heavy knots

Some of the old letter shapes have drifted so far that a modern reader would not recognize them. So Girish Dalvi and Maithili Shingre, who drew the Devanagari at Ek Type in 2016, put the manuscript’s visual features onto contemporary letter structures. Jaini also uses the modern horizontal conjuncts; its sister, Jaini Purva, keeps them stacked vertically as the manuscripts did.

The Latin came in 2023, from Taresh Vohra, and it looks to present-day India. Where Devanagari dominates, Latin letters are often hand-lettered with a Devanagari pen angle, nearly at right angles to the usual Latin one, and leave a faint hint of a headline on top. Vohra took that street style and matched it to the wavy stems and squarish counters of the Devanagari.

1 style, with 3 stylistic sets and discretionary ligatures. For a festival poster or a book cover in Hindi with an English line under it, the 2 scripts look like they came from the same hand.