Ra is a consonant of Indic abugidas. In modern Indic scripts, Ra is derived from the early "Ashoka" Brahmi letter after having gone through the Gupta letter . Most Indic scripts have differing forms of Ra when used in combination with other consonants, including subjoined and repha forms. Some of these are encoded in computer text as separate characters, while others are generated dynamically using conjunct shaping with a virama.

Aryabhata used Devanagari letters for numbers, very similar to the Greek numerals, even after the invention of Indian numerals. The values of the different forms of र are:

There are three different general early historic scripts - Brahmi and its variants, Kharoṣṭhī, and Tocharian, the so-called slanting Brahmi. Ra as found in standard Brahmi, , was a simple geometric shape, with variations toward more flowing forms by the Gupta . The Tocharian Ra had an alternate Fremdzeichen form, . The third form of ra, in Kharoshthi (), was probably derived from Aramaic separately from the Brahmi letter.

The Brahmi letter , Ra, is probably derived from the Aramaic Resh , and is thus related to the modern Latin R and Greek Rho. Several identifiable styles of writing the Brahmi Ra can be found, most associated with a specific set of inscriptions from an artifact or diverse records from an historic period. As the earliest and most geometric style of Brahmi, the letters found on the Edicts of Ashoka and other records from around that time are normally the reference form for Brahmi letters, with vowel marks not attested until later forms of Brahmi back-formed to match the geometric writing style.

The Tocharian letter is derived from the Brahmi , and has an alternate Fremdzeichen form used in conjuncts and as an alternate representation of Rä. The use of repha forms in modern Indic scripts is similar to the Fremdzeichen Ra in Tocharian.

The Kharoṣṭhī letter is generally accepted as being derived from the Aramaic Resh , and is thus related to R and Rho, in addition to the Brahmi Ra.

Ra (र) is a consonant of the Devanagari abugida. It ultimately arose from the Brahmi letter , after having gone through the Gupta letter . Letters that derive from it are the Gujarati letter ર, and the Modi letter 𑘨. Ra, along with the Latin capital letter R, is the basis of the currency symbol ₹, which represents the Indian rupee.

In all languages, र is pronounced as [ɾə] or [ɾ] when appropriate. Like all Indic scripts, Devanagari uses vowel marks attached to the base consonant to override the inherent /ə/ vowel: