Ranjana Ii

Ii is the long palatal vowel and the fourth letter of the Ranjana varnamala, standing to I as Aa stands to A. The mouth does the same thing in both cases, the front of the tongue raised and the lips drawn back, and the difference is duration. In the grammatical tradition that Sanskrit inherited, this pairing is stated as a rule rather than left as a fact about individual words: each of the simple vowels has a short and a long member, and the two behave as one sound for the purposes of the alternations that build the language, differing only in weight. That is why the varnamala teaches them adjacently and why a chart of the script sets them side by side. In writing, the long ii is marked in the same position as the short i, before the consonant it follows, but with a distinct stroke, so the two are told apart by shape rather than by placement.

The independent letter shown here is used only at the head of a word or where no consonant precedes. Because Sanskrit builds a great many of its feminine and derived forms with a final long ii, the mark is among the more frequent on a page of scripture, and a Newar scribe copying Sanskrit would have drawn it a great many times in a day. It is also one of the marks that shows how much of a Brahmic script's difficulty is a matter of small differences carefully kept. The two palatal vowels sit next to each other on the chart, occupy the same position beside the consonant, and are told apart by a detail of stroke, so a script that loses its precision in the small marks loses the distinction between two different words rather than merely looking untidy.

The long and short palatal vowels are exactly the pair that a tired hand confuses, and a manuscript culture that depends on copying has to have an answer to that. In the Kathmandu Valley the answer was the same one found across the Indian manuscript world: the copy is checked against its exemplar, the scribe records the completion of the work at the end, and a text of standing is copied repeatedly rather than once, so that an error in one line of transmission can be caught against another.

Newar Buddhism preserved a large body of Sanskrit Mahayana scripture in the Valley in this way, at a period when the same texts were becoming scarce elsewhere in South Asia, and the survival of that material is one of the reasons the Valley matters to the study of Buddhism at all. Ranjana is bound up with that history without being the whole of it. Much of the running text of Newar manuscripts is written in other hands of the Valley, with Ranjana reserved for what had to be formal: title lines, chapter headings, mantras, and the display writing on a book cover. A vowel mark like the one for ii therefore appears in both registers, drawn quickly in a working hand and drawn with full weight and contrast where the page was meant to be looked at as well as read.