Pha and the Script's Name

The name Ranjana is generally understood as connected to a sense of delighting or pleasing, which suits a hand developed for the appearance of a page, and it is the name the script carries in Nepal. In Tibetan settings the same script is known as Lantsa, and a great deal of what a visitor to a Tibetan monastery sees as decorative Sanskrit writing is Ranjana under that name, on lintels, book covers, painted borders and the seed syllables set into images. The two names describe one script viewed from two traditions, and using both is not pedantry: naming only the Tibetan one removes the Newar community that made it and still writes it, and naming only the Nepali one leaves out the route by which most people encounter it.

There is a third name that turns up in modern writing, Lanydza, which is a variant of the Tibetan form. Recording the script's own name alongside the borrowed one is a small piece of accuracy with a real consequence, because a script attributed to the wrong tradition is a script whose living users are made invisible in every account that repeats the error. The point generalises beyond this script. A tradition that borrows a hand tends to name it for itself, and the borrowed name is the one that spreads, so tracing a script back to the community that made it is often a matter of undoing a chain of borrowed names rather than of finding new evidence.