Ca and the Script Beside the Script

Ranjana was not the only script the Newar community wrote, and understanding its place means understanding what it was used instead of. The Kathmandu Valley developed a family of hands, and Prachalit, the one that Unicode encodes under the name Newa, carried much of the ordinary written work of the community. Ranjana was the formal register: the hand for a title, a chapter heading, a mantra, a dedication, a cover, and for writing that was meant to be seen at a distance or to carry weight. The division is familiar from other manuscript cultures, where a display hand and a working hand coexist and a scribe commands both. It has a specific consequence for anyone reading about the script online.

Because Prachalit has a Unicode block and Ranjana does not, digital text that presents itself as Ranjana is frequently Newa or Devanagari characters shown through a Ranjana typeface, so the letters stored and the letters displayed are different letters of different scripts. That is a workaround forced by the absence of an encoding rather than a claim that the two scripts are the same, and this atlas records the outline of the Ranjana letter rather than borrowing a character from either neighbour. Understanding the pairing also corrects an assumption about endangerment. A community with two scripts is not a community losing one of them by accident; the narrowing of Ranjana's use in the twentieth century is a separate history from the division of labour that preceded it, and the two should not be run together.