Rādhā: canonical, contested, and the false forms on record
A letter to a colleague, 31 July 2026 — on the name Rādhā, and on the forms that keep failing it.
Your note said, roughly: surely the marks are a nicety. Permit me to use Rādhā to show they are not.
First, the attestation. The attested form is राधा, from the tradition's own record. The canonical transliteration is Rādhā.
And the marks themselves: a → ā (Long vowel); a → ā (Long vowel). Remove any one of them and you have not simplified the name — you have told a small lie about it, and small lies in references have long consequences.
Say it aloud as the sources heard it: rAH-dhah — both a's are long; the dh is a single aspirated sound, not two letters. The marks are what carry that sound to a reader who has never heard it spoken.
On the plain form — and I want to be precise, because you pushed on this. The plain form radha is not false — it is a fallback, and the register is exact about what that means. In systems that cannot carry diacritics (legacy databases, older tooling, parts of the address-bar pipeline) the flattened form is the accepted vehicle, and the rulebook names it explicitly as the final rung of the fallback hierarchy: full restoration first, circumflex where attested, macron-only by the academic standard, an attested variant, and only then plain ASCII.
What the fallback status forbids is promotion: radha may carry the name where marks are impossible, but it may not represent the name where marks are possible. Every mark it drops — a → ā, a → ā — is a fact the sources recorded. A fallback is a vehicle, never the primary.
Now to the forms that provoked your letter. As for Radha: it comes from the publisher compromise — older books and hurried websites that print the "English equivalent" as if it were the name itself, and it fails because every substitution here (ā→a) is a romanization of convenience, not an attested spelling — it teaches the reader to guess, not to read As for rada: it comes from the anglicized respelling — the name written the way English guesses it sounds, and it fails because rewrites attested consonant clusters to fit English spelling habits; every cluster simplified this way erases a letter the sources write
One more thing, because it always surprises: the name did not stay home. Her worship organizes whole sampradāyas: the Nimbārkas adore the yugala, the divine couple, as one; the Rādhā-vallabhīs of Hita Harivaṃśa's line put her name first and her temple at the center of Vrindavan; the Gauḍīyas approach Krishna through her maidservants. Comparatists have set the Gītagovinda beside the Song of Songs as bridal mysticism's two great poems, and the parallel holds better than most: both traditions insist that longing is a form of knowledge.
And it never stopped working. Rādhā is one of the most-spoken divine names on earth: "Rādhe Rādhe" is the everyday greeting of Braj, her Rādhāṣṭamī fills Varṣāṇā's lanes, and the spring Holi of Barsana — the Lāthmār Holi where the women playfully beat the men of Krishna's village — is broadcast worldwide. Kangra and Pahari painters made her longing the face of Indian miniature art; Sūrdās and the bhakti poets sang her in every northern tongue.
The Convention's Own History
Long before IAST was formalized in 1912, Sanskrit had Pāṇini — the fourth-century-BCE grammarian whose rules describe the language's sounds with a precision no other ancient tradition matched. That heritage is why the convention is so exact: retroflexes (ṭ, ḍ, ṇ, ṣ) are not accented dentals but separate phonemes with separate meanings; long and short vowels (ā/a, ī/i, ū/u) change words, not just timing. IAST writes those distinctions down with underdots and macrons so that a reader who has never heard Sanskrit can still read it correctly. Dropping the marks is not transliteration at a lower resolution — it is a different, lesser claim.
Where Protocol Meets Practice
The technical answer is simple: the canonical marks are legal IDNA 2008 characters, encoded as punycode under `xn--`. The practical answer is messier: legal does not mean stocked (registrar inventory is partial), and stocked does not mean typeable (stacked diacritics defeat mobile keyboards).
So the register's rule is a hierarchy of attested forms — full restoration, circumflex, macron-only, attested variant, and finally plain ASCII for the systems that cannot carry marks. Every rung is defensible because every rung is attested. The forms this register rules against are not rungs; they are errors, and errors do not get rungs.
Write back when you have checked the sources; they are better company than I am.
— The Register
The Verdict
Rādhā is the canonical form: attested, checkable, and enforced across the temple, the lexicon, the cards, the APIs, and this register. The plain form radha is sanctioned as the fallback vehicle and nothing more. The false forms above are documented so that no reader has to take the temple's word on faith — the violations are stated, the sources are named, and the register stands open to challenge on every line.
The temple of Rādhā stands at /sites/radha/.
The docket for this ruling: 2 false forms ruled against, Radha first on the docket; 2 preserved marks verified: a → ā, a → ā; no contested forms attested; the attestation rests on 5 cited sources — Gītagovinda, Bhāgavata Purāṇa, Brahma-vaivarta Purāṇa.
The Register Continues
Entry 219 of 287 in the Canonical Register. Around it: the temple's founding dispatch, the Restoration File on the marks themselves, the Resonance File on the archetype at work, and the Rulebook behind all of it.
Continue the register — previous entry: Rꜥ (read it) · next entry: Ragnarǫk (read it).
The Canonical Register is written from the same canonical record as the lexicon itself. If a false form is missing from this page, it is because the evidence does not support calling it false — or because we have not seen it yet. Show us, with a citation, and the register will answer.