Wide research has been carried out and is still taking place in the field of character recognition of handwritten English characters. Recognizing English characters is much simpler as there are only 26 letters and each letter is quite distinct from others compared to recognition of Indian language characters. Indian language characters have a base character along with vowels attached, forming single characters (raw characters). Origin of Kannada, a language of southern India, is as old as 5/sup th/ century AD. The fonts have evolved over the centuries. The work involved is implemented in two phases. The first phase of the work incorporates an Artificial Neural Network for identifying the base character. The second phase consists of a Probabilistic Neural Network model designed for the identification of age pertaining to the base character. Characters dated from 3/sup rd/ century BC to the present day are used for analysis and experimental results.