Devanagari Ka क

Ka opens the consonant half of the varnamala and heads the first of the five vargas, the classes of five stops that form the core of the table. It is voiceless and unaspirated, made by closing the back of the tongue against the soft palate, and its class stands first because the whole consonant series is arranged by the place of the closure, running from the furthest back point in the mouth forwards to the lips.

The Sanskrit phoneticians named the class kanthya, from the word for throat, the same term they applied to the vowel a. Like every consonant sign in Devanagari the letter carries an inherent short a, so it is read ka rather than k, and a writer who needs the bare consonant adds a small stroke beneath it called the virama.

In practice a bare consonant inside a word is not written that way at all but is joined to the following consonant into a conjunct, a single compound sign in which one or both of the parts may be reduced. Ka is involved in one of the best known of those: with the retroflex sibilant it forms a conjunct so distinctive that it is often taught as though it were a letter in its own right, and it appears at the head of the alphabet chart in many schoolbooks for that reason. The form of the letter descends through the Nagari and Siddhamatrika hands from a Brahmi original of the same value, a line of descent that Richard Salomon's guide to Indian epigraphy traces through the inscriptional record.

The syllable ka is also an ordinary Sanskrit word, the interrogative meaning who or what, and that word has an unusual history in the religious literature. A hymn of the tenth book of the Rigveda describes the establishing of the world and returns at the end of each verse to a question: to which god should we offer our oblation. The hymn poses the question rather than answering it, and the later ritual literature took the interrogative itself as a name, so that Ka came to be used as a title of Prajapati, the lord of creatures who stands as a creator figure in the Brahmana texts. The move is a striking one, turning an unanswered question into a divine name, and it is discussed in the scholarly literature on Vedic religion as an instance of how the later tradition read the older hymns. What is recorded here is that usage and its source, not a claim that the letter itself carries the meaning.

The distinction matters for this atlas. Devanagari letter names are simply the sounds themselves, so a letter and a word can be homophones without the word's meaning attaching to the letter, and in a script whose signs have no inherited names of the kind Greek and Hebrew letters carry, there is nothing to which such a meaning could attach. Ka the letter is the first consonant of the varnamala. Ka the word is an interrogative pronoun that a tradition made into a name. This atlas keeps them apart.