Rara ਰ

Rara is the thirty-second letter of the Gurmukhi painti and writes an r. Beyond its ordinary use as a full letter, it is one of only three letters in the entire script that keep a reduced subjoined form, written beneath the consonant it follows rather than after it on the line; the others are Haha and Vava. That reduction is one of the most consequential differences between Gurmukhi and the Indic scripts to its east. Devanagari and its relatives carry a large repertoire of stacked conjunct forms, in which two or three consonants meeting without a vowel between them are written as a single combined shape, and a reader has to learn those combinations as units.

Gurmukhi abandoned almost all of them. Keeping only three subjoined letters means a Gurmukhi page is nearly flat, with the letters hanging in a single row from the headline and very little written below the line, and that flatness is why the script sets easily, reads at small sizes and can be written quickly. The subjoined Rara is common in the older orthography of the Guru Granth Sahib and appears in modern Punjabi too. It does not closely resemble the full letter, so a reader has to learn it as a shape in its own right rather than recognising it by analogy.

A subjoined letter in Gurmukhi is not an abbreviation and not an ornament. It records that two consonants meet with no vowel between them, which in an abugida is information that has to be written explicitly, because the default assumption is that every consonant carries an inherent a. Without some device to say otherwise, a sequence of two consonant signs would be read as two syllables. Devanagari solves the problem with stacked conjuncts and with a mark that cancels the inherent vowel; Gurmukhi solves it with three subjoined forms and, in modern usage, largely by convention and context. The narrowing is a genuine loss of precision that Punjabi absorbs because its phonology tolerates it, and the older scriptural orthography is noticeably more explicit than modern spelling on exactly this point.

For a reader of the Guru Granth Sahib, the subjoined Rara is therefore one of the marks that distinguishes the page of the scripture from an ordinary page of Punjabi, in the same way the subjoined Haha does. Anyone building type or fonts for the scripture has to implement those forms correctly, and a font that renders modern Punjabi acceptably may still fail on a scriptural text without any obvious sign that something has gone wrong.