Ranjana Ga

Ga is the third cell of the velar row, the voiced counterpart of Ka. Voicing means that the vocal folds are vibrating during the closure, and it is the second of the two dimensions along which the Indian analysis sorts the stops, the first being aspiration. The two dimensions together produce four kinds of stop at each point in the mouth: voiceless plain, voiceless aspirated, voiced plain, voiced aspirated. Ga is the third of those four, and its place in the row is fixed by that scheme rather than by frequency or by shape. The arrangement is a genuine phonetic classification and one that modern description has largely confirmed, which is why the varnamala is still taught as a working chart rather than only as a historical curiosity.

In writing, Ga behaves as every consonant sign in Ranjana does: it carries the inherent short a unless a vowel mark says otherwise, it hangs from the head stroke, and it may combine with a following consonant into a joined form when no vowel comes between them. Its shape, like every shape in the script, belongs to the Kathmandu Valley rather than to the inherited order it fills. Voicing is also the dimension that a reader of a Latin alphabet already understands without having been taught it, since the difference between p and b, t and d, k and g is exactly this. What the Indian chart adds is the insistence that voicing and aspiration are independent, which produces four cells where a European alphabet expects two, and it is the second dimension rather than the first that a learner has to be shown.

The conjunct is the mechanism that most separates a Brahmic script from an alphabet, and the velar row provides some of its commonest instances. When two consonants meet with no vowel between them, Ranjana does not write them as two independent syllable signs, because each sign would carry an inherent a that is not being spoken. Instead the two are drawn as one form, typically with the first reduced or with the second set beneath it, and the whole cluster hangs from the head stroke as a single unit.

Sanskrit permits a great many such clusters, so a script that writes Sanskrit has to be able to build a great many joined forms, and the number a scribe has to know at sight is one of the harder parts of learning any script in this family. In Ranjana the conjuncts are also what gives a formal page its density, since a stacked form reaches further below the line than a plain letter and breaks the even rhythm of the row. That density is part of the script's character in ornament: a Ranjana panel is compact and heavy in a way that suits a lintel, a book cover or the border of a painting, and it is the main reason the script was taken up for display work far outside the Valley where it was made.