Ranjana Nya

Nya is the fifth and last cell of the palatal row, the nasal formed at the same point as the four stops before it. Like the velar nasal it occurs in Sanskrit chiefly before consonants of its own class rather than standing alone, because a nasal takes its quality from what follows it. The letter therefore appears most often as the first element of a joined form, and a reader meets it in clusters more than in isolation. Its place in the chart is nonetheless exactly parallel to that of the other four class nasals, closing its row and taking its name from the row's own vowel pattern. Ranjana writes it as any consonant, carrying the inherent short a and hanging from the head stroke.

With Nya the second row of the grid is complete, and a learner who has now seen two rows has seen the whole pattern twice and can predict the remaining three, which is the point at which the Indian order stops feeling like a list to be memorised and starts working as a system. Its behaviour also shows why the chart classifies by place rather than by manner. A nasal that assimilates to the consonant after it belongs, functionally, with the sounds it assimilates to, and the order puts it there. A chart that grouped all the nasals together would separate this letter from precisely the consonants it patterns with.

The varnamala is taught aloud before it is taught by hand, and that fact shapes everything about how these scripts have survived. A learner recites the vowels as a block, then each consonant class as a block, and acquires the sequence as a rhythm rather than as a table. The shapes are attached to positions already known. One consequence is that the order is extremely stable across the family, since it is carried by the voice and not only by the page, and a change in the sequence would be audible immediately to anyone who had learnt it. Another is that the order survives even where the script does not.

For Ranjana this has been the difference between a script at risk and a script recoverable. The Newar community's use of Ranjana narrowed over the twentieth century, and in recent decades it has been deliberately taught and revived, appearing again on signs and shopfronts in the Kathmandu Valley and in the work of Newar language activists. A revival of that kind needs the shapes, which survive in manuscripts and in the memory of practitioners, but it also needs the order, which survives because it is recited. The recitation has one further advantage that is easy to miss. It is transmissible without materials. A teacher and a learner need nothing but voices, so an order learnt this way survives the loss of every chart, every font and every manuscript, which is not a hypothetical consideration for a script in Ranjana's position.