Ranjana Ca

Ca opens the second row of the consonant grid, the palatal class, and is its plain voiceless member. The palatals are made with the blade of the tongue against the hard palate, one step forward from the velars, and the order of the rows follows that forward movement exactly. In Sanskrit these consonants are affricates, closer to the ch of English church than to a plain t or k, and the row runs through the same four stop types before closing on its own nasal, as every row does. Ca is therefore the second row's anchor in the same way Ka is the first row's, and its name gives the class its name. Ranjana writes it as it writes every consonant, with the inherent short a already present, hanging from the head bar and taking its vowel marks around it. The palatal row also matters beyond itself, because Sanskrit grammar links it to the vowel i and to the semivowel ya, and states rules by which sounds of the velar row shift into it under stated conditions. The chart's rows are not isolated shelves but positions between which the language moves.

Ca is also the letter where the Indian analysis and the English alphabet diverge most visibly in transliteration, since the romanisation c stands here for a sound English writes with two letters and reserves c for something else entirely. Reading the position in the chart rather than the Latin letter is the surer route.

Ranjana was not the only script the Newar community wrote, and understanding its place means understanding what it was used instead of. The Kathmandu Valley developed a family of hands, and Prachalit, the one that Unicode encodes under the name Newa, carried much of the ordinary written work of the community. Ranjana was the formal register: the hand for a title, a chapter heading, a mantra, a dedication, a cover, and for writing that was meant to be seen at a distance or to carry weight. The division is familiar from other manuscript cultures, where a display hand and a working hand coexist and a scribe commands both. It has a specific consequence for anyone reading about the script online.

Because Prachalit has a Unicode block and Ranjana does not, digital text that presents itself as Ranjana is frequently Newa or Devanagari characters shown through a Ranjana typeface, so the letters stored and the letters displayed are different letters of different scripts. That is a workaround forced by the absence of an encoding rather than a claim that the two scripts are the same, and this atlas records the outline of the Ranjana letter rather than borrowing a character from either neighbour. Understanding the pairing also corrects an assumption about endangerment. A community with two scripts is not a community losing one of them by accident; the narrowing of Ranjana's use in the twentieth century is a separate history from the division of labour that preceded it, and the two should not be run together.