Gha and the Phonetics Written Into a Chart

The Indian grammatical tradition did not merely list the sounds of its language; it described how each was made, in terms of the place of contact, the manner of closure, the state of the glottis and the presence or absence of breath, and it arranged the letters so that the arrangement itself carried the description. The chart is the theory. That is why the voiced aspirates occupy a single column across all five rows rather than being scattered, and why the nasals close each row rather than being grouped together at the end. A reader of the chart is reading an analysis, and a scribe drawing it is copying one. This matters for how Ranjana should be understood. It is an ornamental hand, developed in the Kathmandu Valley from about the eleventh century and used with great care for the appearance of a page, but it is not a decorative script in the sense of being free with its content. The inventory, the order and the classification were fixed long before Ranjana existed and were not the Valley's to change.

What the Newar scribes contributed was a way of drawing that inheritance, and the drawing is where their invention went. It also explains why an atlas can state the correspondences between these scripts letter by letter with confidence. The cell is the fact, and the cell is the same in every descendant. Only the drawing has to be checked against a particular hand.