What the Order of the Varnamala Is For

The contrast with the alphabets this atlas covers elsewhere is worth drawing out, because it is the single most important thing to understand about the Devanagari series. Greek, Hebrew, Roman and the cipher alphabets derived from them all preserve, in their order, the order of the Phoenician sequence they descend from; their letters carry inherited names that mean ox, house and camel in a Semitic language, and the sequence has no phonetic logic at all. The varnamala has no inherited names, because each letter is called by its own sound, and its order is phonetic throughout. That difference has practical consequences.

A Sanskrit dictionary is alphabetised in an order that groups sounds by articulation, so a reader who knows the mouth knows where to look. A grammatical rule can refer to a whole class of sounds by naming its position in the table, which is what makes Panini's compression possible. And a tradition that wants to treat the alphabet as a model of emanation, as the Tantric schools do when they call the letters matrika and the series a garland, has an ordered system to work with rather than a list. Andre Padoux's study traces how those schools built on it and how differently they arranged the same material. This atlas records the structure and leaves the interpretations to the traditions that hold them.