New Delhi, Oct. 24 -- A page of schoolwork is hardly an unusual thing to find circulating online. But when photographs of Prakriti Malla's handwriting began spreading across social media in 2017, people struggled to believe that the words had been written by hand.

Malla was just 14 years old and studying in Grade 8 at Birendra Sainik Awasiya Mahavidyalaya, a school in Nepal, when her exceptionally neat English handwriting attracted widespread attention. The letters were remarkably consistent, the spacing was precise, and each line appeared so uniform that many viewers mistook the page for digitally printed text.

What began as an ordinary school assignment soon became an international talking point. Images of the work circulated on Faceb...