Brahmi Ga 𑀕

One of the most productive roots in Sanskrit begins with this letter, the root meaning to go, and its derivatives run through the language. Used as the final member of a compound it forms adjectives meaning going in, moving through or situated in, so a great many descriptive terms in the religious and technical vocabulary of the subcontinent end in this consonant. The same root supplies the ordinary verb of motion, the noun for a going or a course, and a set of derived stems whose meanings have travelled a long way from movement.

In the writing the letter behaves as every consonant does. It carries the inherent short a, takes a vowel mark when a different vowel follows, and joins a following consonant into a single conjunct where no vowel comes between. Its clusters with the semivowels and with the class nasal are frequent, and in a script that stacks the second element of a cluster beneath the first, a common letter accumulates a large set of standard combined shapes that a reader learns as units rather than assembling each time. Several of the descendant scripts later added a subscript dot to this letter to write the voiced velar fricative of Persian and Arabic loanwords, one of a small family of dotted letters that extended the inherited inventory without disturbing its order.

This is one of the letters a palaeographer is glad to have. It is frequent enough in every period to give plenty of examples, and its Brahmi form is distinct enough from its neighbours that a worn specimen can usually still be told apart from them, which is not true everywhere in the script. Dating an undated inscription in India is done by comparing the shapes of common letters against inscriptions whose date is known from a named ruler or a regnal year, and the method depends entirely on having letters that are both common and unambiguous.

The letter is well attested in the Ashokan edicts and in the donative records of the following centuries at Sanchi, Bharhut and the western cave sites, and it can be followed through the Kushana and Gupta hands into both the northern and the southern branches of the family. That two-branch split is the main structural fact of Indian palaeography after the Mauryan period: the northern line runs through the Gupta script and Siddham towards Nagari, Sharada and the scripts of the Himalayan region, while the southern line produces the Grantha, Tamil, Kannada, Telugu and Sinhala alphabets and, by way of the Pallava chancery script, most of the writing systems of mainland and island Southeast Asia.