In this paper we present a system towards the recognition of off-line handwritten characters of Devnagari, the most popular script in India. The features used for recognition purpose are mainly based on directional information obtained from the arc tangent of the gradient. To get the feature, at first, a 2? 2 mean filtering is applied 4 times on the gray level image and a non-linear size normalization is done on the image. The normalized image is then segmented to 49 x 49 blocks and a Roberts filter is applied to obtain gradient image. Next, the arc tangent of the gradient (direction of gradient) is initially quantized into 32 directions and the strength of the gradient is accumulated with each of the quantized direction. Finally, the blocks and the directions are down sampled using Gaussian filter to get 392 dimensional feature vector. A modified quadratic classifier is applied on these features for recognition. We used 36172 handwritten data for testing our system and obtained 94.24% accuracy using 5-fold cross-validation scheme.