Ranjana Kha

Kha is the second cell of the velar row, the aspirated counterpart of Ka. Aspiration is the small puff of breath that follows the release of a stop, and in Sanskrit it distinguishes words rather than colouring them: ka and kha are two consonants, not one consonant said two ways. That is worth stating because English aspirates the k at the beginning of a word without noticing it and does not aspirate the one after an s, so an English speaker produces both sounds daily and hears them as the same letter. A script written for a language where the difference carries meaning cannot afford that. It needs a separate sign, and the varnamala gives one to each of the ten aspirated stops.

In Ranjana as in every script of the family, the aspirated letter is a distinct shape rather than the plain letter with a mark added, which is a design decision the family made early and kept. It has a cost in the number of letters to be learnt and a benefit in the clarity of a syllable at speed, since an aspirate is recognised as a whole shape rather than by inspecting a small addition to a neighbouring one. The aspirate is also where a reader can test whether they have understood the chart rather than merely memorised it. Asked to find the aspirated voiceless labial, someone who knows the scheme counts four rows down and one column across and arrives at the right cell without having seen it before. Kha is the first place that test can be applied, because it is the first departure from the plainest cell in the grid.

Every distinction a writing system makes has to be paid for, in letters to be learnt, in sorts to be cut and in shapes to be told apart at small sizes, and the aspirates are the largest single bill the Brahmic scripts pay. Ten of the thirty three consonants exist only to mark aspiration. A script that dropped them would lose a third of its inventory and would misspell a great deal of Sanskrit, so no script of the family has ever tried.

What varies between the relatives is how the shapes are managed, and Ranjana manages them as a formal hand: heavy vertical stems, fine connecting strokes, a strong head bar and the wedge shaped terminals that make its letters read as carved even when they are written. The result is a script that distinguishes its aspirates clearly at display size, which is the size at which Ranjana was chiefly used. It was the prestige hand of the Kathmandu Valley for titles, headings, mantras and the display writing on manuscript covers, while the running text of a Newar manuscript was more often set down in one of the Valley's plainer hands. A script kept for the places where a page is looked at as well as read can afford weight that a working hand cannot. The distinction is also what makes the script hard to abbreviate. A hand that simplifies its aspirates towards their plain partners saves effort and destroys meaning, so the ornamental care Ranjana takes over each shape is not only a matter of taste.