Ranjana Pa

Pa opens the fifth and last row of the consonant grid, the labial class, made with the two lips together. The labials are the furthest forward of the five points of articulation, which is why they come last in an order that begins at the back of the throat and moves outwards. Pa is the plain voiceless member, the simplest cell of the row, and stands in the same relation to its four companions as Ka does in the first row and Ta in the fourth. With this row the twenty five stops are complete, and what follows in the chart is of a different kind: the semivowels, the sibilants and the aspirate, which are not stops and are listed after the grid rather than inside it. Ranjana writes Pa as any consonant sign, with the inherent short a, hanging from the head stroke and taking its vowel marks in the four positions.

The letter is common in Sanskrit and appears in a great many words of Buddhist vocabulary, so it is one of the shapes a scribe of the Valley would have drawn constantly. The row also closes the loop the chart opened. Having begun at the back of the throat with the velars, the description ends at the lips with nothing further forward to describe, so the labial row is the natural end of the grid rather than an arbitrary stopping point.

The five rows of the consonant grid are a map of the mouth read from back to front, and the labial row is the end of the journey. Velar at the soft palate, palatal at the hard palate, retroflex with the tongue curled back behind the ridge, dental at the teeth, labial at the lips: a reciter of the chart moves the point of closure steadily forward through five stations and closes each one with its own nasal. Described that way the order stops looking like a convention and starts looking like what it is, a physical description turned into a sequence. It is one of the reasons the arrangement has been stable for more than two thousand years across dozens of scripts and many languages, since a convention can drift and a description cannot without becoming wrong.

Ranjana, developed in the Kathmandu Valley from about the eleventh century, inherits the sequence entire. Nothing in the order is a Newar innovation, and nothing needed to be. What the Valley added was a hand: heavy stems, fine joins, a strong head bar and wedge terminals, applied to a chart that arrived already complete. The map is also why the order can be recited by someone who has never seen the chart written down. A reciter is describing a movement rather than recalling a list, and a movement is far harder to forget the middle of.