Ka as a Name for the God the Hymn Would Not Name

The syllable ka is also an ordinary Sanskrit word, the interrogative meaning who or what, and that word has an unusual history in the religious literature. A hymn of the tenth book of the Rigveda describes the establishing of the world and returns at the end of each verse to a question: to which god should we offer our oblation. The hymn poses the question rather than answering it, and the later ritual literature took the interrogative itself as a name, so that Ka came to be used as a title of Prajapati, the lord of creatures who stands as a creator figure in the Brahmana texts. The move is a striking one, turning an unanswered question into a divine name, and it is discussed in the scholarly literature on Vedic religion as an instance of how the later tradition read the older hymns. What is recorded here is that usage and its source, not a claim that the letter itself carries the meaning.

The distinction matters for this atlas. Devanagari letter names are simply the sounds themselves, so a letter and a word can be homophones without the word's meaning attaching to the letter, and in a script whose signs have no inherited names of the kind Greek and Hebrew letters carry, there is nothing to which such a meaning could attach. Ka the letter is the first consonant of the varnamala. Ka the word is an interrogative pronoun that a tradition made into a name. This atlas keeps them apart.