Devanagari: shape, order and symbolism of the Indian letters

Anyone looking at a text in Devanagari for the first time immediately notices one feature: the letters seem to hang from a continuous horizontal line, like washing hung out to dry. This top bar, called shirorekha, is the most recognisable trait of the script used today for Hindi, Marathi, Nepali and, above all, for printing Sanskrit texts. Its history, however, is much longer than its modern spread might suggest.

From Brahmi to Nagari

Devanagari descends from the Brahmi of Ashoka's edicts through a long series of regional transformations. From the script of the Gupta period, between the fourth and sixth centuries AD, developed forms such as Siddham and then Nagari, attested in the inscriptions of northern India from the end of the first millennium. The form we can call Devanagari gradually stabilised around the eleventh century.

The name has been explained in various ways. Nagari probably means «of the city», and the prefix deva, «divine», seems to be a later addition. The common interpretation as «script of the city of the gods» is evocative, but the exact etymology remains debated. Not by chance, in the oldest manuscripts the script is often simply called Nagari.

An orderly syllabic script

Devanagari is not an alphabet in the strict sense, but a system in which each consonant carries an inherent vowel a. The other vowels are marked with small signs attached to the consonant, above, below or at the sides. When two or more consonants meet without a vowel, they merge into ligatures, sometimes very complex, which make the writing of Sanskrit particularly elaborate.

Even more remarkable is the order of the letters. The vowels come first, followed by the consonants grouped according to their point of articulation: gutturals, palatals, retroflexes, dentals and labials, then semivowels and sibilants. It is the same phonetic classification developed by the ancient scholars of the Veda. The Indian alphabet is, in a sense, a map of the human mouth.

Letters as mothers

In the tantric traditions the letters of the Sanskrit alphabet, called varna or akshara, acquired a cosmic meaning. They were called matrika, «little mothers», because all words and, by extension, all aspects of the manifest world were believed to be born from them. In some texts the set of letters is regarded as the sound body of the goddess, and the word akshara also means «imperishable».

Tradition also interpreted some images of the goddess Kali in this light. The garland of severed heads she wears around her neck, made up of fifty elements in some descriptions, was read by commentators as the garland of the fifty letters of the Sanskrit alphabet. Likewise Siddham, the ancient sister of Devanagari, travelled with Buddhism to China and Japan, where the monk Kukai spread it at the beginning of the ninth century as the sacred script of mantras.

Today Devanagari is one of the most widely used scripts in the world, in newspapers, on screens and on the signs of Indian cities. Yet in every letter drawn beneath its horizontal line survives the ancient conviction that exactly articulated sound is a form of knowledge and, for many traditions, a reflection of the divine order.