Ranjana Tha

Tha is the second cell of the dental row, the aspirated voiceless dental. It is not the th of English, which is a fricative made with the tongue between or against the teeth and continuing rather than stopping; it is a t made at the teeth and released with a puff of breath. The confusion is caused entirely by the romanisation, which uses the same two letters for a quite different sound, and it is one of the standard difficulties in reading Sanskrit words in Latin script. In the chart there is no ambiguity, because the cell is defined by its row and its column: dental, voiceless, aspirated. Ranjana draws the letter in the position the order assigns and writes it as it writes every consonant, carrying the inherent short a and hanging from the head bar.

The lesson generalises. A chart of a Brahmic script is unambiguous in a way that its romanisation is not, and reading the position rather than the transliteration is usually the faster route to understanding what a letter is. The confusion is worth dwelling on because it recurs for every aspirate in the chart. In the romanisation of Sanskrit the letter h after a consonant always marks aspiration and never makes a fricative, so th, ph, kh, ch, dh, bh, gh and jh are all single consonants and none of them is the English sound its spelling suggests.

Ranjana has a compressed form used for writing mantras as a single interlocked figure rather than as a row of separate syllables, known as Kutakshar, in which the syllables are stacked and joined into one dense monogram. It is a display technique rather than a way of writing running text, and it belongs to the same impulse that made Ranjana the hand for covers, lintels and panels: the writing has to fill a shape and be recognised as a unit. Reading such a figure requires knowing what it says beforehand or being able to unpick the stacking, which is part of the point, since the form is meant to be looked at as an emblem as much as read as text. This is where the script's ornamental character and its liturgical use meet most directly, and it is also where an outsider's account should stop.

The syllables written in these figures belong to living practice, in Newar Buddhism and in the Tibetan traditions that took the script up as Lantsa, and their use is transmitted under initiation. What is public and describable is the writing: its shapes, its history and the technique by which a line of syllables is compressed into a single drawn form. The technique also explains why so much Ranjana survives on objects rather than in books. A compressed figure fits a seal, a medallion, a roof boss or the centre of a painting, and objects of that kind outlast paper.