Bha: The Ranjana Letter

Bha is the fourth cell of the labial row, the voiced aspirate labial, made with the lips closed, the vocal folds vibrating through the closure and a breathy release after it. It is the last of the five voiced aspirates, one at each point of articulation, and it is reasonably common in Sanskrit, appearing in a number of frequent roots. With it the fourth column of the grid is complete. The romanisation bh attracts the same misreading as the other aspirates, since English uses h to make a fricative and here it marks a manner of release.

In Ranjana the letter is written as any consonant, with the inherent short a and the head bar, and it takes vowel marks and enters conjuncts on the same terms as its neighbours. Its position closes the pattern of voiced aspirates that runs down the fourth column of the chart, and a reciter reaching it has said all five and is one letter from the end of the twenty five stops. The letter also appears in a good deal of religious vocabulary, so it is among the shapes a reader will meet early when looking at Ranjana in the settings where the script is most often found, on covers, in title lines and in the writing set apart from a text. Its position is also the last that can be reached by the simple rule of counting columns, because the fifth column of the grid holds the nasals and the letters after the grid are not arranged in columns at all. Bha is therefore the end of the part of the chart a learner can derive rather than memorise.