Babba ਬ

Babba is the twenty-eighth letter of the Gurmukhi painti and the third member of the labial series, a voiced unaspirated b made by closing and releasing the lips with the voice already running. It stands to Pappa exactly as Gagga stands to Kakka, Jajja to Chachcha, Ḍadda to Ṭainka and Dadda to Tatta, and by this point in the alphabet a learner is expecting it: the fifth and last repetition of a relationship the grid has established four times already. That predictability is the whole argument for the Brahmic ordering, and the labial row is where it pays off most obviously, since a learner arriving here can name the properties of every letter in the row before being shown a single shape.

Babba is frequent in Punjabi and in the vocabulary of the Guru Granth Sahib. It takes none of the six dotted extensions, because the voiced labial stop was already shared between the native word stock and the Persian and Arabic borrowings, so nothing had to be added for it. On the page it is a stem from the headline carrying a bowl to the left with a stroke crossing it, and it is distinguished from the voiced aspirate that follows by one further element, which is the kind of minimal difference that makes careful handwriting matter in this script.

Manuscript volumes of the Guru Granth Sahib were not always plain. Copies were produced with illuminated openings, decorated borders and elaborated initial letters, and the making of such a volume was an act of devotion and often of patronage as well as a piece of copying. That tradition sits in tension with an important principle, which is that the text is a Guru rather than an artefact, and that its authority lies in its words and not in the beauty of any particular copy. Sikh practice resolves the tension by treating decoration as permissible around the text and never as an alteration of it: the wording, the spelling and the pagination are fixed, and what a scribe or an illuminator may do is add to the setting rather than to the substance.

The consequence for the letters themselves is that Gurmukhi never developed the range of display hands that some scripts did, since a letter in a scriptural volume has to be the same letter it is everywhere else and cannot be stretched or stylised for effect. A common letter like Babba is therefore remarkably consistent across centuries of manuscript production, which is convenient for palaeography and is one reason Gurmukhi hands are dated more by their proportions and their small habits than by any dramatic change in the shapes.