Bha: The Letter That Opens Bhakti

Bha is the twenty-fourth consonant of the varnamala, the voiced aspirated labial and the fourth member of the fifth varga. It opens the word for devotional participation that names one of the major streams of Indian religious practice, and the title of the text in which Krishna instructs Arjuna on the field before the battle, both of which are carried untranslated into English and both of which have entries elsewhere in this atlas. As the fourth member of its class the letter carries breathy voicing, the feature Sanskrit preserved from its Indo-European ancestor where most of the related languages lost or transformed it, and its position immediately before the labial nasal completes the pattern that all five vargas follow. The words are facts about vocabulary rather than about the sign, and this atlas keeps the two apart deliberately.

A Devanagari letter is named by its own sound, so any Sanskrit word beginning with that sound shares the letter's name without lending it a meaning, and in a script with no inherited letter names of the Greek or Semitic kind there is no mechanism by which such a meaning could attach. Sanskrit has no letter for a labial fricative of either kind, so the labial class is exhausted by its four stops and its nasal. That absence is as much a part of the analysis as the presences are, and it is why the ushman class that closes the table holds three sibilants rather than five: the grammarians recorded the sibilants the language has and did not fill out a grid for its own sake.