Ranjana gets carved onto prayer wheels and painted across scroll paintings; Prachalit still shows up in newspaper body text. Bhujimol, older than both and arguably the more historically significant of the three, mostly just sits quietly in palm-leaf manuscripts nobody outside a handful of specialists ever reads.

Table of Contents

1. A Script Named for a Housefly
2. Possibly Older Than the 5th Century
3. The First Confirmed Inscription, 1005 CE
4. The Telltale Squiggle
5. Nepal’s Foundational Texts Were Written in It
6. One of Several ‘Curve-Headed’ Scripts
7. Why Ranjana Gets All the Attention
8. Conclusion

A Script Named for a Housefly

In Nepal Bhasa, bhujin or bhojini means housefly, and mol means head, giving Bhujimol its literal translation, housefly-headed script. The name refers to the distinctive rounded, curved mark placed above each letter, standing in for the flatter horizontal head-stroke used in scripts like Prachalit, resembling, to whoever first named it, the small curved forewing of a fly.

Possibly Older Than the 5th Century

Bhujimol is generally described as the most ancient form of Nepal script, and some sources point to an even earlier possible origin: a brick inscription discovered in Chabahil, an old quarter of Kathmandu, in 2003, bearing both Bhujimol and Brahmi script and possibly dating as far back as the 3rd century BCE, though this remains a disputed, unusually early claim rather than settled fact.

The First Confirmed Inscription, 1005 CE

The script’s first securely dated appearance comes from an inscription commissioned by King Nirbhayadeva at Taumadhi in Bhaktapur, dated to 1005 CE, giving Bhujimol a documented history stretching back roughly a thousand years with genuine archaeological confirmation behind it.

The Telltale Squiggle

According to specialists studying Nepali manuscript paleography, Bhujimol’s most reliable identifying feature is how it marks the vowel e when it follows a consonant, with a small squiggle or flourish resembling a winged creature, distinct from the plain curved parenthesis mark used in an earlier, unnamed Nepalese script it eventually displaced. Manuscript scholars generally place Bhujimol’s period of dominant use between roughly 1250 and 1700, most commonly on palm-leaf manuscripts, though bilingual Sanskrit-Tibetan manuscripts produced in Tibet also used a related form of the script.

Nepal’s Foundational Texts Were Written in It

Bhujimol isn’t a minor footnote script, it carried some of the most historically important Newar texts ever written: the Haramekhala from 1374, the Manava Nyaya Shastra from 1380, and, most significantly, the Gopal Raj Vamshavali of 1389, a foundational chronicle of Nepal’s own royal history, all recorded in this script rather than in Ranjana or its rivals.

One of Several ‘Curve-Headed’ Scripts

Within the broader Nepal script family, scholars group Bhujimol among the curve-headed styles, alongside lesser-known relatives Golmol, Kwenmol, and Litumol, distinct from the flat-headed group that includes Prachalit, Pachumol, Himmol, and Kummol, and separate again from Ranjana’s own distinct calligraphic style entirely. Of this whole family, only Ranjana, Bhujimol, and Prachalit remain widely recognised today.

Why Ranjana Gets All the Attention

One meaningful distinction explains Bhujimol’s lower profile: Ranjana was, by scholarly account, a strictly calligraphic script never used to record ordinary handwritten manuscript text, reserved instead for titles, mantras, and ornamental inscription on metalwork and temple architecture, exactly the kind of visible, photogenic use that made it Nepal’s default symbol of calligraphic beauty. Bhujimol, by contrast, did the unglamorous work, actually recording the bulk of Nepal’s palm-leaf manuscript literature, useful rather than ornamental, and consequently far less visible to anyone not actually reading the manuscripts themselves.

Conclusion

If Ranjana is the script Nepal put on display and Prachalit the one it used to get through an ordinary day, Bhujimol is the one that quietly recorded the country’s actual foundational literature, a royal chronicle, a book of law, a book of charms, all in a script whose defining feature is a squiggle shaped like a fly’s wing. It deserves better than its current obscurity, if only because so much of what’s known about early Nepal was written down, letter by curved letter, in it.