page_title: Hunterian transliteration
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Hunterian transliteration / History
caption_attribution_description: English: A description of anusvara using modified Jonesian/Hunterian transliteration
context_page_description: The Hunterian transliteration system is the "national system of romanization in India" and the one officially adopted by the Government of India. Hunterian transliteration was sometimes also called the Jonesian transliteration system because it derived closely from a previous transliteration method developed by William Jones. Upon its establishment, the Sahitya Akademi also adopted the Hunterian method, with additional adaptations, as its standard method of maintaining its bibliography of Indian-language works.
context_section_description: The original precursor to the Hunterian system was a transliteration method developed by Charles Wilkins, who is sometimes called the "father of Devanagari typography" because he was also the creator of the first Devanagari typeface. William Jones, who also founded the Asiatic Society, further developed the transliteration method. It was given a more complete form in the late nineteenth century by William Wilson Hunter, then Surveyor General of India. When it was proposed, it immediately met with opposition from supporters of the phonetic Dowler system, which climaxed in a dramatic showdown in an India Council meeting on 28 May 1872 where the new Hunterian method carried the day. The Hunterian method was inherently simpler and extensible to several Indic scripts because it systematized grapheme transliteration, and it came to prevail and gain government and academic acceptance. Opponents of the grapheme transliteration model continued to mount unsuccessful attempts at reversing government policy until the turn of the century, with one critic calling appealing to "the Indian Government to give up the whole attempt at scientific (i.e. Hunterian) transliteration, and decide once and for all in favour of a return to the old phonetic spelling."
caption: Max Muller's 1866 anusvara transliterations
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