Sun 12 Nov 2017 10:24:15 AM UTC, comment #1:
To investigate the progression of typography, there is an on-line resource: the Internet Archive <archive.org>. You can search it like this "Malayalam 1930", and get a list of materials from that year, some of them nice PDFs of printed books.
I was interested in what happened to the -ya, so I looked at a few dozen printed materials from the 1920s through the 1970s. Here is how it looks to me.
From early on, there are multiple styles and qualities of type, of course.
The type used in the better earlier works used a rather close-set, kerned (particularly, the i-matra goes over the preceding consonant) type. In this, the -ya usually has a loop that slings beneath the preceding consonant. There are different styles of this too. But the underslung -ya only makes typographic sense if the letters are closely spaced.
Titles of books and chapters is often in a wider-spaced face, not kerned, in which the -ya is a stick with a small curl below, as in the SMC fonts. Likewise, cheap pamphlets and children's books are often printed in wider-set type, and also use the stick-with-curl -ya.
In later publications, starting in the 1940s, I start seeing bigger materials printed in wider type, perhaps simplified a bit, without -ya. But up through the `60s the bigger, better typeset works are close-set and use the underslung -ya. The archive contains few bigger items from the '70s (partly because it only accepts material in the public domain), but by '75 everything I saw was in the reformed orthography.
Now, some people have argued that the reformed orthography was motivated by the limited machine-typesetting technology of the '60s and '70s, more than by what is best for reading and writing. I don't know, but it is a thought -- similar things have happened. And there are currently font projects who aim to show how easy it is for people to do "better" (old-fashioned) typesetting with modern technologies.
Given that 1) FreeSerif is intended for high-density type, such as in newsprint 2) until 50 years ago, dense type usually used the underslung -ya, 3) the stick-and-loop -ya always looked visually out of place to me 4) it is now pretty easy to implement this letter, I think it is something to consider in a future release.
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