Ba: The Letter Manuscripts Confuse With Va

Ba is the twenty-third consonant of the varnamala, the voiced unaspirated labial and the third member of the fifth varga, standing to pa as ga stands to ka. Its written form is close enough to that of the labial semivowel va that the two are confused in manuscripts and in some regional writing traditions, and editors of Sanskrit texts routinely have to decide between them on grounds of sense rather than of shape. Certain regional traditions merged the two sounds in pronunciation as well, so that a scribe copying from dictation had no way to tell them apart, and the variation is recorded in the apparatus of critical editions.

The confusion is scribal rather than phonetic. The two sounds are distinct in Sanskrit and the varnamala places them in different parts of the table, the stop among the labials and the semivowel among the four that stand between vowels and consonants. What the confusion shows is something the table cannot: that a writing system in continuous manuscript use for a thousand years accumulates its own history of copying errors, and that reading a classical text means reading through that history as well as through the language. The pair is listed in the standard editorial handbooks alongside several others distinguished only by the presence or absence of a single stroke. An editor who does not know the list will read a scribal slip as a genuine textual variant and record it in the apparatus, and a variant admitted once tends to be inherited by every edition that follows.