Handwritten character recognition plays an important role in the modern world. It can solve more complex problems and make the human's job easier. The present work portrays a novel approach in recognizing handwritten cursive character using Hidden Markov Model (HMM) . The method exploits the HMM formalism to capture the dynamics of input patterns, by applying a Gabor filter to a character image, observation feature vector is obtained, and used to form feature vectors for recognition. The HMM model is proposed to recognize a character image. All the experiments are conducted by using the Matlab tool kit.