The Visarga, and the Count of Fifty

The visarga is not a letter of the varnamala. It is a mark, written as two dots, standing for a voiceless breath that appears chiefly where a word-final sibilant or r has been replaced, and its treatment before a following word is governed by a body of rules. Together with the anusvara, the dot standing for a nasal, it makes up the pair of additional marks that the Sanskrit phonetic tradition groups apart from the letters proper and calls the ayogavaha, the sounds that do not join. The two marks matter to this atlas for a specific reason: the Tantric traditions that treat the alphabet as a garland of matrika generally reckon fifty, and reaching fifty requires counting both of them alongside the fourteen vowels and the thirty-three consonants, with the retroflex lateral sometimes making up the number in schemes that arrange it differently. This atlas seeds the forty-seven letters and does not seed the two marks as letters, since the tradition itself distinguishes them from letters.

The count of fifty is recorded on each letter as a property of the series, and Andre Padoux's study describes how the schools arrive at it and how their arrangements differ. Editions differ over whether to print the mark wherever the rules call for it or to restore the underlying sound for the reader, so a beginner using two editions side by side will meet the same passage in two shapes. Knowing that the mark stands for something recoverable, rather than for a sound of its own, is what makes that difference intelligible instead of alarming.