Since ancient times, across civilizations, various scripts have been developed and have continued to be in use even today. This proves that the practice to learn and write is ancient. However, evidences of scientific research on handwriting can be traced only since 19th century AD and most of it is Roman/Latin centric. Surprisingly, in a multi-script country like India, no trace of scientific research has been found on the process of teaching and learning handwriting. Each script is unique and has different graphical and morphological aspects. Hence, it is necessary to study every script individually. The skill of handwriting is acquired through regular and step-by-step practice. And it starts with learning some basic strokes. Traditionally, various learning aids also known as primers were used to teach handwriting. These basic strokes didn’t seem to be of much relevance for a complex script like Devanagari. How important are the basic strokes for handwriting acquisition, hasn’t been researched yet. Therefore, to confirm the conventions, instructional theories of academicians were studied. Further, we shed light upon what can be Devanagari’s basic strokes and, how to extract them. The session on extraction, was conducted with two groups of people. The first, with six random participants who were given general instructions to cull out the various basic strokes of Devanagari. The second group comprised five expert participants who were given pointed instructions to perform the same task. Clustering these strokes as per form and movement similarity, led us to find primitives for Devanagari handwriting. The primitives were classified into ‘unidirectional’ and ‘multi-directional’. Now, to test the efficiency of these primitives, final experiment was designed. The results of statistical analysis of the jury evaluation proved that the basic stroke practice is effective for correct handwriting acquisition. Moreover, it was also proved that script specific practice is necessary for correct acquisition. The newly extracted Devanagari primitives for handwriting have shown significant impact on handwriting acquisition by new learners. The manual method for extracting handwriting primitives are proposed, which will surely help many other Indian scripts in the future.