Siddham Da 𑖟

Da is the voiced dental stop and one of the most frequent consonants in Sanskrit. It stands in a very large number of roots, in the common demonstrative and relative stems, and in a set of grammatical endings that recur on almost every page, so a scribe writes it more often than most letters of the table.

It carries the inherent short a like every consonant sign, so it is read da standing alone, and a cancelling stroke is needed where the consonant closes a syllable with no vowel after it. It takes the full range of vowel marks and enters conjuncts freely, including several combinations frequent enough to have settled into shapes of their own.

That frequency has a consequence for the study of manuscripts. The letters a scribe writes most often are the ones whose form varies most between hands, periods and copying traditions, because they are written fastest and with the least deliberation, so they carry the clearest signal about where and when a page was produced.

It follows that the commonest letters are the most useful ones to a palaeographer, and this is among the small set that a specialist would look at first when trying to place an undated Siddham page.

It is also among the letters most exposed to the general risk of a copied tradition. A shape written quickly and often can drift a long way across several generations of copying without any single scribe doing anything out of the ordinary, and correcting for that drift is one of the things the letter tables and the manuals existed to do.

Very few Siddham manuscripts announce when or where they were made, so the letters themselves have to do the work. Palaeography proceeds by comparison: a form is dated where it can be tied to something independently datable, and everything else is placed relative to those anchors. Indian epigraphy provides a good many anchors because inscriptions are frequently dated and are cut in the same hands that manuscripts are written in.

For Siddham the picture is complicated by its double life. Its Indian phase can be placed against the inscriptional record. Its East Asian phase cannot be placed the same way, because the script there was learned from exemplars rather than from a living practice, so a form may persist for centuries after it had gone out of use where it came from. A Japanese page can carry a letter shape that looks several hundred years older than the paper.

That makes the East Asian material extremely valuable and awkward to date from internal evidence alone. What it preserves is a snapshot of the transmission rather than a continuous development, and the useful questions to ask of it are which Indian stage it descends from and how faithfully it was copied afterwards.

Both are answerable, and neither is answerable from the letters alone.