Indian Script Computing and Language Technology: Policies, Standards, and the Malayalam Experience

Abstract

India’s multilingual computing ecosystem has evolved through coordinated efforts in script encoding, keyboard standardization, and language technology development. From ISCII and BIS keyboard standards to Unicode harmonization, institutions such as the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), the Unicode Consortium, and Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) have played pivotal roles. While national-level initiatives under TDIL structured Indic computing frameworks, the Malayalam experience presents a particularly complex trajectory involving nineteenth-century print standardization, twentieth-century script reform, emergence of dedicated voluntary groups of Rachana movement for traditional script that reprecents community-driven font activism, SMC (Swathanthra Malayalam Computing) and Unicode debates. This paper re-examines Indian script computing emphasisising the Malayalam, highlighting contribution of Benjamin Bailey (1824), the implications of the 1970 script reform, and the decisive interventions of the Rachana movement and SMC in preserving orthographic plurality within the Unicode era