Devanagari A अ

Devanagari is an abugida rather than an alphabet, and A is the reason the distinction matters. Every consonant sign in the script is read as that consonant plus a short a, so the letter for the sound k is pronounced ka on its own, and a scribe who wants the bare consonant must add a small stroke beneath it called the virama or halanta to cancel the vowel that is otherwise assumed. All the other vowels are written as attached signs, the matra, hung above, below, before or after the consonant they follow. Short a alone has no matra, because it needs none: it is what the consonant already says. The independent letter shown on this page is therefore written in only two positions, at the start of a word and after another vowel, which is why it appears far less often on a page than its status as the first and commonest sound would suggest.

The Sanskrit phoneticians placed it first in the varnamala for a reason they set out explicitly. Their ordering is articulatory, running from the sounds made deepest in the throat outwards to the lips, and a is the sound produced with the vocal tract at rest, requiring no closure, no rounding and no raising of the tongue. It is the vowel of the throat, kanthya in their terms, and the ancestor from which the grammarians derived the diphthongs by combination.

Panini's Ashtadhyayi opens with the Shivasutras, fourteen short lines listing the sounds of the language in an order engineered so that any needed class of sounds can be named by a two-letter abbreviation, and the very first of those lines begins with a. The Devanagari form itself descends through the Nagari and Siddhamatrika hands from a Brahmi letter of the same value, and behind that from the earliest attested Indian writing.

The letter carries more weight in religious usage than any other sound in the script, and for a reason that is grammatical before it is mystical: because a is inherent in every consonant, it is present in every syllable that is not explicitly given another vowel, so it underlies the whole of speech in a literal sense. Om is written as a single ligature but is analysed in the Mandukya Upanishad as a, u and m, with a silent fourth beyond them; that text correlates a with the waking state, u with dream and m with deep sleep, and the silence after them with the state it calls the fourth.

The Bhagavad Gita, at the point where Krishna names himself the foremost member of each class of things, says that of letters he is the letter A, a claim that reads as a statement about primacy rather than about sound. In the Tantric traditions the letters of Sanskrit are the matrika, the little mothers, and the varnamala is the garland of letters, a series understood as the sonic matrix out of which the manifest world proceeds rather than as a writing convention. Andre Padoux's study of the concept of the word in the Hindu Tantras traces how that scheme developed and how differently its schools arranged the same letters.

Within the non-dual Shaiva thought of Kashmir the alphabet is read as an arc from a, the first sound, to ha, the last, with the two joined by the nasal point to spell aham, the word for I, taken there as the self-utterance of consciousness. These are readings held within specific traditions and described here as theirs, not asserted by this atlas as facts about the letter.