Ranjana A

The Indian analysis that Ranjana inherits does not order its letters by shape or by frequency but by the mouth itself. It begins with the vowels, because a vowel is the one sound that can be made with the vocal tract open and needs no consonant to release it, and it begins the vowels with a, the sound produced with the least effort of all: the tongue at rest, the lips neither spread nor rounded, the jaw barely open. Every other vowel in the series is then described against that neutral position, which is why the order of the varnamala is a description of anatomy rather than a convention that could have been otherwise. The consequence for writing is the feature that separates an abugida from an alphabet. Because a is the default, it is not drawn. A Ranjana consonant sign is already a syllable, and a scribe marks a vowel only when it is something other than a. The independent letter shown here therefore has a narrow job: it is needed where a word or a syllable opens with the vowel and there is no consonant for a mark to sit on.

In Sanskrit that happens often enough to make the sign familiar and seldom enough that a page of Ranjana is mostly consonant signs with marks arranged around them. A learner has to hold both facts at once, that the first letter of the series is the sound most often present in the language, and that it is the sound least often written.

The varnamala is not a chart to be consulted but a sequence to be said aloud, and a is where the saying starts. Learning a Brahmic script has traditionally meant learning the order by recitation before learning the shapes, so that the letters arrive already grouped: the vowels in their pairs of short and long, then the five classes of stops, then the semivowels and the sibilants. That is why a reader who knows one script of the family can find their way around another quickly. The inventory is the same and the sequence is the same, and only the drawing changes.

For Ranjana this matters more than it does for scripts with a settled printed tradition, because Ranjana has been taught by hand and by copying far longer than it has been taught from type. In Newar Buddhist practice the script is the prestige hand of the Kathmandu Valley, used for the Sanskrit of manuscripts and for the titles and mantras that had to look formal, while everyday writing in the Valley used other Newar hands. A letter learnt in recitation is therefore also learnt as an ornament, with a heavy head stroke and the thick and thin contrast that gives Ranjana its name among calligraphers. The vowel a sits at the head of that inheritance, first in the order that is spoken and first in the order that is written on a chart, which is the same order.