Ranjana Pha

Pha is the second cell of the labial row, the aspirated voiceless labial, a p released with a following puff of breath. As with the aspirated dental, the romanisation misleads, because ph in English spells a fricative and the Sanskrit letter is a stop with aspiration. In the chart the cell is unambiguous, defined by its row and column. The letter completes the pattern for the last of the five classes, and by this point in the recitation the pattern is doing all the work: a learner reaching the labial row knows what each of its five cells will contain before hearing them.

Ranjana draws the letter in the position assigned and writes it as it writes every consonant, with the inherent short a and the head bar. That regularity is what makes a chart of an unfamiliar Brahmic script readable in a few minutes by anyone who knows the order, and it is the reason the correspondence between Ranjana and its better known relatives can be set out letter by letter rather than approximated. The letter is also where a modern reader of Nepali or Hindi meets a divergence, because in several modern languages the sound this cell writes has shifted towards a fricative, so a letter that names an aspirated stop is now often read as an f. The chart records the classical value, and the modern reading is a change on top of it.

The name Ranjana is generally understood as connected to a sense of delighting or pleasing, which suits a hand developed for the appearance of a page, and it is the name the script carries in Nepal. In Tibetan settings the same script is known as Lantsa, and a great deal of what a visitor to a Tibetan monastery sees as decorative Sanskrit writing is Ranjana under that name, on lintels, book covers, painted borders and the seed syllables set into images. The two names describe one script viewed from two traditions, and using both is not pedantry: naming only the Tibetan one removes the Newar community that made it and still writes it, and naming only the Nepali one leaves out the route by which most people encounter it.

There is a third name that turns up in modern writing, Lanydza, which is a variant of the Tibetan form. Recording the script's own name alongside the borrowed one is a small piece of accuracy with a real consequence, because a script attributed to the wrong tradition is a script whose living users are made invisible in every account that repeats the error. The point generalises beyond this script. A tradition that borrows a hand tends to name it for itself, and the borrowed name is the one that spreads, so tracing a script back to the community that made it is often a matter of undoing a chain of borrowed names rather than of finding new evidence.