Ga in the Conjuncts, and How Devanagari Joins Consonants

Devanagari does not write a sequence of consonants as a row of separate letters. When two or more consonants come together with no vowel between them, the script joins them into a conjunct, a single compound sign in which the earlier members are usually reduced, most often by dropping the vertical stem that most letters carry on their right. Ga is one of the letters that reduces that way, so in a cluster it appears as its own shape with the stem removed and the following consonant attached.

A page of Sanskrit is full of these compounds, and learning to read them is a distinct stage after learning the letters themselves, since a conjunct can look considerably unlike either of its parts. The system is a direct consequence of the inherent vowel. Because every consonant sign is read with a short a unless something says otherwise, the script needs a way to write a consonant with no vowel at all, and joining it to the next one is the solution it adopted; the cancelling stroke, the virama, is used mainly at the end of a word and in modern typesetting where a conjunct is unavailable. The whole arrangement descends from Brahmi, which already worked this way, and the inscriptional record that Richard Salomon's guide surveys shows the conjuncts developing alongside the letters through the intervening centuries.