Why the Fourth Slot Exists in Every Class

The regularity of the varga is worth stating as a structure rather than as a list, because it is what makes the Devanagari consonant table intelligible at a glance. Two binary features, voicing and aspiration, combine to give four stops at each place of articulation, and the nasal made at that place completes the class as a fifth.

Five places, five members each, twenty-five stops. Nothing in the table is there because a scribe needed a sign; every position follows from the analysis. When a modern phonetician draws a chart of the consonants of a language, the result has this shape, and the fact that Sanskrit grammarians arrived at it more than two thousand years earlier is why the Indian phonetic tradition is recognised as one of the earliest systematic analyses of speech produced anywhere. The consequence for a reader of this atlas is that a Devanagari consonant is best understood by its coordinates. Gha is velar, voiced, aspirated, fourth in the first class; that is nearly the whole of what can be said about it as a letter, and the atlas does not manufacture more. In the Tantric reading of the alphabet as a garland of matrika it is one of the fifty counted in the series, and the schools that build on that count assign further correspondences which differ between traditions and are recorded in the scholarly literature as theirs.