I spent the monsoon of 2016 redrawing the matras for our flagship text family. The horizontal headline — the शिरोरेखा — had to anchor every consonant and vowel sign in one rhythm, but the inherited Latin grid had no room for it.
The Shirorekha Is Not a Serif
Designers often mistake the shirorekha for a decorative serif or a headline bar. It is neither. In Devanagari, the headline is structural: it holds consonants, vowel signs, and half-forms in one rhythm.