A and the Order That Is Recited

The varnamala is not a chart to be consulted but a sequence to be said aloud, and a is where the saying starts. Learning a Brahmic script has traditionally meant learning the order by recitation before learning the shapes, so that the letters arrive already grouped: the vowels in their pairs of short and long, then the five classes of stops, then the semivowels and the sibilants. That is why a reader who knows one script of the family can find their way around another quickly. The inventory is the same and the sequence is the same, and only the drawing changes.

For Ranjana this matters more than it does for scripts with a settled printed tradition, because Ranjana has been taught by hand and by copying far longer than it has been taught from type. In Newar Buddhist practice the script is the prestige hand of the Kathmandu Valley, used for the Sanskrit of manuscripts and for the titles and mantras that had to look formal, while everyday writing in the Valley used other Newar hands. A letter learnt in recitation is therefore also learnt as an ornament, with a heavy head stroke and the thick and thin contrast that gives Ranjana its name among calligraphers. The vowel a sits at the head of that inheritance, first in the order that is spoken and first in the order that is written on a chart, which is the same order.