Nasals, the Anusvara, and What a Dot Stands For

Sanskrit writes a nasal in more than one way, and the choice carries information. Where the nasal is followed by a stop, its quality is fixed by the class of that stop, so the script offers the anusvara, a dot above the headline, as a shorthand: the dot says a nasal is present and leaves the reader to supply the one the following letter requires. Where the nasal is not so conditioned, it is written out as a letter. Manuscripts and printed editions differ in how far they use the dot, and editors have to adopt a policy, which is one of the small ways in which two editions of the same Sanskrit text can differ on the page without differing in the text.

The anusvara is counted separately from the five nasal letters in the Tantric reckoning of the alphabet as a garland of matrika, and it is one of the two additional marks that bring that count to fifty alongside the visarga. This atlas records the dental nasal's place in the varnamala, its articulation, its distribution and its role as the source of the retroflex nasal, and records its membership of the fifty-letter series. What individual schools attribute to it beyond that belongs to those schools and is described in the scholarly literature as theirs.