The Letter With the Most Shapes

Of all the consonants, this is the one that develops the largest number of special forms in the scripts descended from Brahmi. Standing as the first member of a cluster it is written in several of them as a mark above the line, placed over the consonant that follows it and read before it; standing as the second member it appears as a stroke beneath. The two positions look nothing alike and neither looks much like the independent letter. A reader of a modern northern Indic script has to learn all three.

Brahmi itself is simpler. The letter is a single upright sign, and its clusters are formed rather than standardised, but the conjuncts it makes are among the shapes that changed most as the script passed into its regional descendants. That is the general pattern: simple letters are conservative and ligatures are not, so a script can look familiar in its alphabet and quite foreign in its clusters.

The consequence for palaeography is that conjuncts are treated as a separate body of evidence from the simple letters, dated on their own terms. A hand can be archaic in one and advanced in the other, and the divergence between the two is itself informative about how a script was learned and transmitted in a particular workshop or region.