Devanagari Ya य

Ya is the twenty-sixth consonant of the varnamala and the first of the four the grammarians call antahstha, a name meaning standing between. The name records two things at once: the four sit between the stops and the sibilants in the table, and they stand between vowels and consonants in their nature, having the free airflow of a vowel and the consonantal function of occupying a position beside one. Each of the four corresponds to a vowel made at the same place. Ya answers to the palatal i, ra to vocalic r, la to vocalic l, and va to the labial u, so the four semivowels and four of the vowels are the same articulations used in different roles. That correspondence is a working part of the grammar and not an observation added afterwards.

Sanskrit converts each of those vowels into its matching semivowel whenever a dissimilar vowel follows, a rule applied constantly at word joins and inside words, so a reader of a recited or written text meets ya standing where the underlying form had i. Undoing the conversion is part of reading the language, and it is one of the places where the arrangement of the alphabet by articulation directly serves the grammar. The class name antahstha is itself built from ordinary Sanskrit words meaning within and standing, and almost all the grammarians' class names are of that kind, describing either the part of the mouth involved or the way the sounds behave. An alphabet whose class names are descriptions is a different object from one whose letter names are borrowed nouns, and the difference shows in what each can be used for.

Several of the semivowels appear in the Tantric traditions as bija, the seed syllables formed by adding a nasal to a single consonant, and in the widely circulated scheme that associates the lower chakras with the five gross elements the seeds built on ya, ra, la and va are assigned to air, fire, earth and water respectively, with a seed built on ha assigned to space. That scheme is genuinely attested and is described in the scholarly literature on Tantric practice, Andre Padoux's study among it.

Two things need saying about it plainly. The first is that the correspondence belongs to particular traditions and to particular texts within them, and other Tantric arrangements assign the letters differently; this atlas records it as one tradition's scheme rather than as a fact about the letters. The second is that this material belongs to living initiatory practice. Describing what a tradition holds is proper to a reference work; setting out how to use a seed syllable is not, and this atlas does not do it. What is recorded here is that the letter is used as the base of a seed syllable in these traditions, that the association exists, and where the scholarship on it can be found. The letter itself is the palatal semivowel, twenty-sixth in the varnamala, corresponding to the vowel i.