Devanagari Ha ह

Ha is the thirty-third and last consonant of the varnamala. It is a voiced breath, and the grammarians grouped it with the three sibilants in the ushman class, the sounds made with continuous air rather than with a closure, even though it is not a sibilant itself. Its place at the end of the table is not an afterthought: the stops have been laid out by their five places of articulation, the semivowels by the vowels they answer to, and the sibilants by their three places, and what remains is the one sound made with the vocal folds themselves rather than anywhere in the mouth. It is therefore the natural close of a table ordered from the back of the vocal tract forwards.

In conjuncts the letter combines with the semivowels and nasals in forms that are among the more distinctive in the script, and it takes a subscript form beneath certain letters that a learner has to recognise separately. Like every other letter in this alphabet it carries the inherent short a and is named by its own sound, with no inherited word name of the kind Greek and Hebrew letters carry. Sanskrit treats the letter as voiced, which distinguishes it from the breath written by the visarga, and the two are not variants of one another. One is a letter of the varnamala with a settled place in the ushman class; the other is a mark standing for a voiceless breath produced by rule at the end of a word. Charts that set them side by side as a pair of h sounds obscure a difference the tradition is careful about.

Because a stands at the head of the varnamala and ha at its end, the series can be read as an arc running from the first sound to the last, and the non-dual Shaiva traditions of Kashmir do read it that way. In their treatment the two letters joined by the nasal point spell the word aham, the ordinary Sanskrit word for I, and the whole alphabet enclosed between them is understood as the self-utterance of consciousness rather than as a writing convention: the letters are the matrika, the little mothers, and the series is the garland from which the manifest world proceeds.

Andre Padoux's study of the concept of the word in the Hindu Tantras sets out how those schools developed the reading and how much their arrangements of the same fifty letters differ from one another and from other Tantric traditions. This atlas records the reading as belonging to those schools and does not assert it in its own voice. What it does assert about the letter is what the grammarians state: that it is the thirty-third consonant, that it is a voiced breath grouped with the sibilants in the ushman class, that it closes the table, and that its written form descends through the Nagari hands from a Brahmi original. With this letter the seeding of the Devanagari varnamala in this atlas is complete at forty-seven letters, fourteen vowels and thirty-three consonants.