Ranjana Ja

Ja is the third cell of the palatal row, the plain voiced member, standing to Ca as Ga stands to Ka. Its place is fixed by the same two dimensional scheme that fixes every stop in the grid: the row gives the point of articulation, here the hard palate, and the column gives the state of voice and breath, here voiced and unaspirated.

In Sanskrit it is a voiced affricate, close to the j of English judge. Ranjana writes it as it writes every consonant sign, carrying the inherent short a, hanging from the head bar and taking its vowel marks in the four positions the script uses. Ja is a common letter in Sanskrit and appears in a great many words of religious vocabulary, so a Newar scribe copying Buddhist scripture would have drawn it constantly. The regularity of the grid is what makes such a letter easy to place. A reader who knows the row and the column knows the sound before knowing the shape, and can check a doubtful reading against the position rather than against memory alone. The letter also carries a piece of the chart's internal logic. The palatal row is linked by rule to the vowel i and to the semivowel ya, and voiced palatal stops alternate with those sounds under stated conditions, so a reader who meets an unexpected j in a word can often account for it by the grammar rather than by the spelling.

The Kathmandu Valley matters to the study of Buddhism out of proportion to its size, because Newar communities there continued to copy and preserve Sanskrit Mahayana texts through periods when the same material became scarce or disappeared elsewhere in South Asia. Manuscripts survived on palm leaf and later on paper, kept in monastic and household collections, recopied when they decayed, and it is from that tradition that a considerable body of Sanskrit Buddhist literature is known at all. Ranjana belongs to this history as the formal hand of it. It is the script of title lines and headings, of mantras set apart from the running text, of dedications and covers, while the body of a manuscript was frequently written in a plainer hand of the Valley.

Understanding that division prevents a common error, which is to imagine every Newar Buddhist manuscript as a page of Ranjana. The truth is more interesting, because it shows a community using more than one script deliberately and choosing between them by register, in the way a printer chooses between a display face and a text face rather than in the way a person chooses a favourite. The manuscripts also carry the evidence for the script's own history. Dated colophons and the styles of successive hands are how the development of Ranjana is traced at all, so the tradition of copying is both the reason the texts survive and the reason the script can be studied.