Ka: The Ranjana Letter

The consonant half of the Ranjana varnamala is a grid rather than a list, and Ka is the cell in its top left corner. The grid has five rows, one for each point in the mouth at which a stop can be made, running from the back of the throat forward to the lips, and five columns describing what the voice and the breath are doing: voiceless without a following puff of breath, voiceless with one, voiced without one, voiced with one, and then the nasal made at that same point. Ka occupies the first row and the first column, the velar made with no voice and no aspiration, which is the simplest thing a speaker can do with a stop.

Everything else in the twenty five cells is described as a departure from it. That is why the classes are named after their first members, so the velars are the ka class, and why a learner who has understood the first row can predict the other four without being told. The four way distinction among stops is not common among the world's languages, and a script built for a language that has it needs four separate letters where many writing systems need one or two. The size of the Brahmic consonant chart follows from that requirement rather than from any love of completeness.