Nya: The Ranjana Letter

Nya is the fifth and last cell of the palatal row, the nasal formed at the same point as the four stops before it. Like the velar nasal it occurs in Sanskrit chiefly before consonants of its own class rather than standing alone, because a nasal takes its quality from what follows it. The letter therefore appears most often as the first element of a joined form, and a reader meets it in clusters more than in isolation. Its place in the chart is nonetheless exactly parallel to that of the other four class nasals, closing its row and taking its name from the row's own vowel pattern. Ranjana writes it as any consonant, carrying the inherent short a and hanging from the head stroke.

With Nya the second row of the grid is complete, and a learner who has now seen two rows has seen the whole pattern twice and can predict the remaining three, which is the point at which the Indian order stops feeling like a list to be memorised and starts working as a system. Its behaviour also shows why the chart classifies by place rather than by manner. A nasal that assimilates to the consonant after it belongs, functionally, with the sounds it assimilates to, and the order puts it there. A chart that grouped all the nasals together would separate this letter from precisely the consonants it patterns with.