Devanagari Ma म

Ma is the twenty-fifth consonant of the varnamala, the labial nasal and the closing member of the fifth varga, and with it the twenty-five stops come to an end. It is made by closing the lips while the soft palate is lowered so the air escapes through the nose, and it is the most frequent of the five nasals after the dental. It behaves more freely than the velar, palatal and retroflex nasals, beginning words and standing at their ends, though less freely than the dental. The letter has a further role in the writing system.

A nasal at the end of a word before a pause is realised as this sound, and the anusvara, the dot written above the headline that marks a nasal whose quality is otherwise determined by what follows, is read as this sound in that position. So a reader meets the letter both written out and standing behind the dot, and knowing when the dot means this nasal rather than another is part of reading the script. Its written form descends through the Nagari hands from a Brahmi original of the same value. Because a word-final nasal becomes this sound before a pause, it also ends a very large number of Sanskrit words as they are actually recited, including the accusative singular of a major noun class and the nominative and accusative of the neuter. A reciter therefore produces the sound far more often than a count of the written letter would suggest, since much of that frequency is carried by the nasal mark rather than by the letter itself.

The letter is the sound that closes Om when that syllable is taken apart into three. The Mandukya Upanishad develops the analysis furthest, correlating a with the waking state, u with dream and m with deep sleep, and the silence that follows the three with a fourth state it names only as the fourth. Later commentary built extensively on that scheme, and it is the source of most of the further correspondences attached to the syllable in the Vedantic literature. The correlation belongs to that text and to its long commentarial tradition, and this atlas records it as theirs rather than as a property of the letter. Grammar supplies the reason the analysis is possible at all. Om is written with the vowel o and a nasal, and o is what results when a and u combine under the ordinary rules of sandhi that Sanskrit applies everywhere; taking the syllable apart into three sounds is therefore reading it back through the rule that produced it.

In the Tantric arrangement of the alphabet as a garland of matrika this letter is one of the fifty counted in the series, and the anusvara is counted separately as one of the two additional marks that complete the fifty. Andre Padoux's study of the concept of the word in the Hindu Tantras sets out how the schools order and interpret that series and how far their arrangements differ from one another; what any one school attributes to this letter belongs to that school.