Ranjana arose around the eleventh century CE among the Newars of the Kathmandu Valley, at the meeting point of Indian and Tibetan Buddhist worlds. It belongs to the Brahmi family, a cousin of the scripts that produced Devanagari, but it developed under the calligrapher's hand rather than the clerk's: its letters are built from thick and thin strokes with flourished heads, and the script's name, from ranjana, delighting or colouring, advertises its ornamental intent. Newar scribes used it as the prestige script for Sanskrit and Newar manuscripts, above all Buddhist ones, and the illuminated Prajnaparamita manuscripts of Nepal, written in gold or silver on blue-black paper, are among the masterpieces of Himalayan book art.
The script travelled north with Nepalese artisans and Buddhist teachers into Tibet, where a form of it, generally called Lantsa, became the standard decorative script for Sanskrit, used for the titles of Tibetan books, for mantras on temple friezes and prayer wheels, and in monastic seals. In the Valley itself Ranjana remained in use for religious and ceremonial writing through the medieval and modern periods, and it is enjoying a deliberate revival among Newars today as a marker of cultural and religious identity.