Ranjana Dha

Dha is the fourth cell of the dental row, the voiced aspirate dental, made with the tongue at the teeth, the vocal folds vibrating through the closure and a breathy release following it. It is common in Sanskrit, appearing in a number of the most frequent roots and in a good deal of religious vocabulary, so unlike some of the voiced aspirates of other rows it is a letter a scribe draws often. The romanisation dh is a source of the same confusion the aspirated voiceless dental attracts, since English has no comparable sound and reads the h as though it made a fricative.

In the chart the cell is unambiguous. Ranjana writes the letter as it writes every consonant, carrying the inherent short a, hanging from the head stroke, taking vowel marks in the four positions and entering joined forms with a following consonant. Its place is fixed by the same two dimensions that fix the rest of the grid, and it can be found by counting from any other cell. The letter also appears in a good many words that a Newar scribe copying Buddhist scripture would have written daily, so it is one of the shapes where a hand's individual habits show most clearly, and one of the letters by which a manuscript's script can be dated and placed.

A tradition that keeps more than one script has reasons for each, and the reasons are usually about what a piece of writing is doing rather than about what it says. The Newar community of the Kathmandu Valley wrote Ranjana for the parts of a manuscript that had to carry weight, the title, the heading, the mantra set apart from the text, the dedication, the cover, and wrote the running body of a text in plainer hands. The choice is the same one a modern designer makes between a display face and a text face, and it is made for the same reasons: a formal hand is slower to write, takes more space and is harder to read at length, and in exchange it signals that what it writes is important. Understanding that division corrects a common impression.

Ranjana is not the everyday script of the Newars, and a page entirely in Ranjana is not the typical Newar manuscript page. It is the script that was chosen when appearance was part of the message, which is precisely why it travelled: the Tibetan use of it as an ornamental hand for Sanskrit syllables took over the register along with the letters. The division also tells a reader where to look for the script. Covers, headings, seals, carved panels and inscriptions carry more Ranjana than the bodies of manuscripts do, which is a useful thing to know before hunting for examples.