Ranjana U

U is the short labial vowel, made with the back of the tongue raised and the lips rounded, and it is the fifth letter of the Ranjana varnamala. It completes the movement the vowel series describes. Beginning at rest with a, the analysis moved forward in the mouth to the palatal i, and now moves back and adds the lips, which is the last of the simple positions available. What follows in the order is not a new position but the vocalic liquids and then the compound vowels, so u is the end of the plain vowels proper.

Sanskrit grammar pairs it with the semivowel va in the way it pairs i with ya, and the alternation between the two is stated as a rule that runs through the formation of words. In writing, the mark for u is placed beneath the consonant it follows rather than before or after it, which is the third of the positions the script uses for vowel marks and the one that makes a syllable tall rather than wide. The independent letter shown here appears only where a word or a syllable opens with the vowel. Because the script hangs from a heavy head stroke, a mark written below the line of letters is well separated from its neighbours and is easy to read even in the compressed writing of a mantra.

Ranjana builds a syllable in four directions at once, and u is the letter that shows the downward one. A consonant hangs from the head stroke; a mark for i or e may stand to its left, a mark for aa or o to its right, a mark for the nasal above, and the marks for u and uu below. A syllable can therefore occupy space on all sides of its own consonant, and a line of Ranjana is not a row of letters but a row of clusters. To that the script adds the conjunct, in which two consonants meeting without a vowel between them are written as a single joined form, often with the second reduced and set beneath the first.

A conjunct that also carries a u mark stacks two things below the head stroke, and the result is the tall, dense sign that gives formal Ranjana its character on a page. This is the writing that Tibetan tradition adopted for ornament, where the script is known as Lantsa and appears on temple lintels, book covers and the inscriptions of paintings, chosen precisely because a Ranjana syllable is a compact block that fills a panel well. What is being reproduced in those settings is the shape of the writing; the practice attached to the syllables is transmitted separately and under initiation, and is not described here.