The Five Nasals, and the Dot That Can Replace Them

Taking the five nasals together shows how much work the varnamala's arrangement does. Sanskrit has a nasal at every one of its five points of closure, and in a cluster the nasal that appears is normally the one belonging to the class of the following stop, so the choice is predictable from the consonant that comes after. Because it is predictable, the script offers a shorthand: the anusvara, a dot written above the headline, marks that a nasal is present and leaves its quality to be read off the following letter. Manuscripts and printed editions differ in how far they use the dot rather than writing the nasal out, and editors of Sanskrit texts have to make a policy about it.

The one nasal that behaves independently is the dental, which begins words freely and appears in positions where no following stop determines it. The velar, palatal and retroflex nasals are largely positional, and the labial nasal sits between the two behaviours. Understanding that distribution is what makes the five letters usable, and it is not something a reader can infer from a chart that presents them as five equal signs. In the Tantric count of fifty matrika all five are included, and the anusvara is counted separately from them as one of the two additional marks that bring the total to fifty.