Sanskrit prosody
Encyclopedia
Versification in Classical Sanskrit poetry is of three kinds.
Standard traditional works on meter are Pingala
's Chandaḥśāstra and Kedāra's Vṛttaratnākara. The most exhaustive compilations, such as the modern ones by Patwardhan and Velankar contain over 600 metres. This is a substantially larger repertoire than in any other metrical tradition.
" of Western prosody). Meters of the same length are distinguished by the pattern of laghu ("light") and guru ("heavy") syllables in the pāda.
The rules distinguishing laghu and guru syllables are the same as are specified in Vedic texts such as the Pratisakhya
s. They can be summarized as:
For measurement by morae, laghu syllables count as one unit, and guru syllables as two units. The standard unit of grouping, analogous to the "foot" of Western prosody, is four morae (four laghus, two gurus, or a guru and two laghus).
, "group") is the technical term for the pattern of light and heavy syllables in a sequence of three. It is used in treatises on Sanskrit prosody to describe meters, according to a method first propounded in Pingala
's chandaḥśāstra.
Pingala's method described any meter as a sequence of gaṇas, or triplets of syllables, plus the excess, if any, as single units. There being eight possible patterns of light and heavy syllables in a sequence of three, this scheme called for ten descriptive elements in all. With each of these ten, Pingala associated a letter, allowing the meter to be described compactly as an acronym. His encoding scheme was as follows
Pingala's order of the gaṇas, viz. m-y-r-s-t-j-bh-n, corresponds to a standard enumeration in binary
, when the three syllables in each gaṇa are read right-to-left with H=0 and L=1.
which can be decoded as
Note that Kedāra's definition is itself an example of the meter.
for Pingala's gaṇas, using the vowels "a" and "ā" for light and heavy syllables respectively with the letters of his scheme. In the form without a grammatical ending, yamātārājabhānasalagā is self-descriptive, where the structure of each gaṇa is shown by its own syllable and the two following it:
The mnemonic also encodes the light "la" and heavy "gā" unit syllables of the full scheme.
The truncated version obtained by dropping the last two syllables, viz. yamātārājabhānasa, can be read cyclically (i.e., wrapping around to the front). It is an example of a De Bruijn sequence
.
in Greek or Latin poetry, although there is a correspondence (m-y-r-s-t-j-bh-n = molossus, bacchius, cretic, anapest, antibacchius, amphibrach, dactyl, choreus). The difference is that the gaṇas are analytic devices only, and do not indicate internal structure as "feet" do. For instance, a phalaecian verse consisting of a spondee
, a dactyl
and three trochee
s would be analysed as m-s-j-g-l (i.e. a molossus, an anapest, an amphibrach and a trochee); similarly a sapphic
verse as r-t-j-g-l (cretic, antibacchius, amphibrach and trochee).
s of four pādas (verses), with the metrical structure of each pāda completely specified. In some cases, pairs of pādas may be scanned together as the hemistich
s of a couplet
. It is then normal for the pādas comprising a pair to have different structures, to complement each other aesthetically. Otherwise the four pādas of a stanza will have the same structure.
has various types of versification, an overwhelming proportion of the stanzas (all but about 0.2%) are akṣaravṛtta (free syllabic). Within this majority, 95% are shloka
s of the anustubh
type and the rest are tristubh
s.
- Syllabic verse (akṣaravṛtta): meters depend on the number of syllables in a verse, with relative freedom in the distribution of light and heavy syllables. This style is derived from older Vedic forms, and found in the great epics, the MahabharataMahabharataThe Mahabharata is one of the two major Sanskrit epics of ancient India and Nepal, the other being the Ramayana. The epic is part of itihasa....
and the RamayanaRamayanaThe Ramayana is an ancient Sanskrit epic. It is ascribed to the Hindu sage Valmiki and forms an important part of the Hindu canon , considered to be itihāsa. The Ramayana is one of the two great epics of India and Nepal, the other being the Mahabharata...
. - Syllabo-quantitative verse (varṇavṛtta): meters depend on syllable count, but the light-heavy patterns are fixed.
- Quantitative verse (mātrāvṛtta): meters depend on duration, where each verse-line has a fixed number of moraMora (linguistics)Mora is a unit in phonology that determines syllable weight, which in some languages determines stress or timing. As with many technical linguistic terms, the definition of a mora varies. Perhaps the most succinct working definition was provided by the American linguist James D...
e, usually grouped in sets of four.
Standard traditional works on meter are Pingala
Pingala
Pingala is the traditional name of the author of the ' , the earliest known Sanskrit treatise on prosody.Nothing is known about Piṅgala himself...
's Chandaḥśāstra and Kedāra's Vṛttaratnākara. The most exhaustive compilations, such as the modern ones by Patwardhan and Velankar contain over 600 metres. This is a substantially larger repertoire than in any other metrical tradition.
Light and heavy syllables
In most of Sanskrit poetry the primary determinant of a meter is the number of syllables in a unit of verse, called the pāda ("foot", not to be confused with the "footFoot (prosody)
The foot is the basic metrical unit that generates a line of verse in most Western traditions of poetry, including English accentual-syllabic verse and the quantitative meter of classical ancient Greek and Latin poetry. The unit is composed of syllables, the number of which is limited, with a few...
" of Western prosody). Meters of the same length are distinguished by the pattern of laghu ("light") and guru ("heavy") syllables in the pāda.
The rules distinguishing laghu and guru syllables are the same as are specified in Vedic texts such as the Pratisakhya
Pratisakhya
Pratisakhyas, collectively constituting four treatises, are works dealing with the phonetic aspects of the Sanskrit language used in Vedas. These works mainly pertain to euphonic permutation and combination of letters and special characteristics of their pronunciation as they prevailed in various...
s. They can be summarized as:
- A syllable is laghu only if its vowel is hrasva ("short") and followed by at most one consonant before another vowel is encountered.
- A syllable with an anusvaraAnusvaraAnusvara is the diacritic used to mark a type of nasalization used in a number of Indic languages. Depending on the location of the anusvara in the word and the language within which it is used, its exact pronunciation can vary greatly....
('ṃ') or a visargaVisargaVisarga is a Sanskrit word meaning "sending forth, discharge". In Sanskrit phonology , is the name of a phone, , written as IAST , Harvard-Kyoto , Devanagari . Visarga is an allophone of and in pausa...
('ḥ') is always guru. - All other syllables are guru, either because the vowel is dīrgha ("long"), or because the hrasva vowel is followed by a consonant cluster.
- The hrasva vowels are the short monophthongs: 'a', 'i', 'u', 'ṛ' and 'ḷ'
- All other vowels are dīrgha: 'ā', 'ī', 'ū', 'ṝ', 'e', 'ai', 'o' and 'au'. (Note that, morphologically, the last four vowels are actually the diphthongs 'ai', 'āi', 'au' and 'āu', as the rules of sandhiSandhiSandhi is a cover term for a wide variety of phonological processes that occur at morpheme or word boundaries . Examples include the fusion of sounds across word boundaries and the alteration of sounds due to neighboring sounds or due to the grammatical function of adjacent words...
in Sanskrit make clear. So, while an original 'ai', for example, had been shortened to an 'e' sound in practice, it was still to be treated as long metrically. The original short 'e' and short 'o' sounds had already been assimilated into short 'a' in the Proto-Indo-Iranian period of the language.)
For measurement by morae, laghu syllables count as one unit, and guru syllables as two units. The standard unit of grouping, analogous to the "foot" of Western prosody, is four morae (four laghus, two gurus, or a guru and two laghus).
Gaṇa
Gaṇa (SanskritSanskrit
Sanskrit , is a historical Indo-Aryan language and the primary liturgical language of Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism.Buddhism: besides Pali, see Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit Today, it is listed as one of the 22 scheduled languages of India and is an official language of the state of Uttarakhand...
, "group") is the technical term for the pattern of light and heavy syllables in a sequence of three. It is used in treatises on Sanskrit prosody to describe meters, according to a method first propounded in Pingala
Pingala
Pingala is the traditional name of the author of the ' , the earliest known Sanskrit treatise on prosody.Nothing is known about Piṅgala himself...
's chandaḥśāstra.
Pingala's method described any meter as a sequence of gaṇas, or triplets of syllables, plus the excess, if any, as single units. There being eight possible patterns of light and heavy syllables in a sequence of three, this scheme called for ten descriptive elements in all. With each of these ten, Pingala associated a letter, allowing the meter to be described compactly as an acronym. His encoding scheme was as follows
- The units:
- l: a "light" syllable (L), called laghu
- g: a "heavy" syllable (H), called guru
- The gaṇas:
- m : H-H-H, called ma-gaṇa
- y : L-H-H, called ya-gaṇa
- r : H-L-H, called ra-gaṇa
- s : L-L-H, called sa-gaṇa
- t : H-H-L, called ta-gaṇa
- j : L-H-L, called ja-gaṇa
- bh: H-L-L, called bha-gaṇa
- n : L-L-L, called na-gaṇa
Pingala's order of the gaṇas, viz. m-y-r-s-t-j-bh-n, corresponds to a standard enumeration in binary
Binary
- Mathematics :* Binary numeral system, a representation for numbers using only two digits * Binary function, a function in mathematics that takes two arguments- Computing :* Binary file, composed of something other than human-readable text...
, when the three syllables in each gaṇa are read right-to-left with H=0 and L=1.
An example
The definition of the meter Vasantatilakā given by Kedāra in his Vṛttaratnākara is- uktā vasantatilakā tabhajā jagau gaḥ
which can be decoded as
- tabhajā jagau gaḥ = t bh j j g g = H-H-L-H-L-L-L-H-L-L-H-L-H-H
Note that Kedāra's definition is itself an example of the meter.
A mnemonic
The word yamātārājabhānasalagāḥ (or yamātārājabhānasalagaṃ), invented by medieval commentators, is a mnemonicMnemonic
A mnemonic , or mnemonic device, is any learning technique that aids memory. To improve long term memory, mnemonic systems are used to make memorization easier. Commonly encountered mnemonics are often verbal, such as a very short poem or a special word used to help a person remember something,...
for Pingala's gaṇas, using the vowels "a" and "ā" for light and heavy syllables respectively with the letters of his scheme. In the form without a grammatical ending, yamātārājabhānasalagā is self-descriptive, where the structure of each gaṇa is shown by its own syllable and the two following it:
- ya-gaṇa: ya-mā-tā = L-H-H
- ma-gaṇa: mā-tā-rā = H-H-H
- ta-gaṇa: tā-rā-ja = H-H-L
- ra-gaṇa: rā-ja-bhā = H-L-H
- ja-gaṇa: ja-bhā-na = L-H-L
- bha-gaṇa: bhā-na-sa = H-L-L
- na-gaṇa: na-sa-la = L-L-L
- sa-gaṇa: sa-la-gā = L-L-H
The mnemonic also encodes the light "la" and heavy "gā" unit syllables of the full scheme.
The truncated version obtained by dropping the last two syllables, viz. yamātārājabhānasa, can be read cyclically (i.e., wrapping around to the front). It is an example of a De Bruijn sequence
De Bruijn sequence
In combinatorial mathematics, a k-ary De Bruijn sequence B of order n, named after the Dutch mathematician Nicolaas Govert de Bruijn, is a cyclic sequence of a given alphabet A with size k for which every possible subsequence of length n in A appears as a sequence of consecutive characters exactly...
.
Comparison
The gaṇas are not the same as prosodic feetFoot (prosody)
The foot is the basic metrical unit that generates a line of verse in most Western traditions of poetry, including English accentual-syllabic verse and the quantitative meter of classical ancient Greek and Latin poetry. The unit is composed of syllables, the number of which is limited, with a few...
in Greek or Latin poetry, although there is a correspondence (m-y-r-s-t-j-bh-n = molossus, bacchius, cretic, anapest, antibacchius, amphibrach, dactyl, choreus). The difference is that the gaṇas are analytic devices only, and do not indicate internal structure as "feet" do. For instance, a phalaecian verse consisting of a spondee
Spondee
In poetry, a spondee is a metrical foot consisting of two long syllables, as determined by syllable weight in classical meters, or two stressed syllables, as determined by stress in modern meters...
, a dactyl
Dactyl
Dactyl may refer to:* Dactyl , a creature in Greek mythology* Dactyl , a metrical foot consisting of one long syllable and two short* Dactyl , the small natural satellite orbiting the asteroid Ida...
and three trochee
Trochee
A trochee or choree, choreus, is a metrical foot used in formal poetry consisting of a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed one...
s would be analysed as m-s-j-g-l (i.e. a molossus, an anapest, an amphibrach and a trochee); similarly a sapphic
Sapphic stanza
The Sapphic stanza, named after Sappho, is an Aeolic verse form spanning four lines ....
verse as r-t-j-g-l (cretic, antibacchius, amphibrach and trochee).
Akṣarachanda
Most of classical Sanskrit poetry is of the varṇavṛtta type, also called akṣarachanda. Stanzas are quatrainQuatrain
A quatrain is a stanza, or a complete poem, consisting of four lines of verse. Existing in various forms, the quatrain appears in poems from the poetic traditions of various ancient civilizations including Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome, and China; and, continues into the 21st century, where it is...
s of four pādas (verses), with the metrical structure of each pāda completely specified. In some cases, pairs of pādas may be scanned together as the hemistich
Hemistich
A hemistich is a half-line of verse, followed and preceded by a caesura, that makes up a single overall prosodic or verse unit. In Classical poetry, the hemistich is generally confined to drama. In Greek tragedy, characters exchanging clipped dialogue to suggest rapidity and drama would speak in...
s of a couplet
Couplet
A couplet is a pair of lines of meter in poetry. It usually consists of two lines that rhyme and have the same meter.While traditionally couplets rhyme, not all do. A poem may use white space to mark out couplets if they do not rhyme. Couplets with a meter of iambic pentameter are called heroic...
. It is then normal for the pādas comprising a pair to have different structures, to complement each other aesthetically. Otherwise the four pādas of a stanza will have the same structure.
Epic poetry
While the MahabharataMahabharata
The Mahabharata is one of the two major Sanskrit epics of ancient India and Nepal, the other being the Ramayana. The epic is part of itihasa....
has various types of versification, an overwhelming proportion of the stanzas (all but about 0.2%) are akṣaravṛtta (free syllabic). Within this majority, 95% are shloka
Shloka
A ' is a category of verse line developed from the Vedic Anuṣṭubh. It is the basis for Indian Epic verse, and may be considered the Indian verse form par excellence, occurring, as it does, far more frequently than any other meter in classical Sanskrit poetry. The Mahabharata and Ramayana, for...
s of the anustubh
Anuṣṭubh
' is the name of a meter and a metrical unit, found in both Vedic and Classical Sanskrit poetry, but with significant differences.By origin, an anuṣṭup stanza is a quatrain of four lines. Each line, called a pāda ' is the name of a meter and a metrical unit, found in both Vedic and Classical...
type and the rest are tristubh
Tristubh
Tristubh is the name of a Vedic meter of 44 syllables , or any hymn composed in this meter. It is the most prevalent meter of the Rigveda, accounting for roughly 40% of its verses....
s.
Moraic poetry
- mātrāchanda:
- puṣpitāgrā
- aparavaktra
- vaitālīya
- mātrāsamaka
- gaṇachanda:
- āryā
- āryāgīti
- upagīti
External links
- Sanskrit metre recognizer ("This is a test version. Only varNa-vRttas are now recognized.")
- Recordings of recitation: H. V. Nagaraja Rao (ORI, Mysore), Ashwini Deo, Ram Karan Sharma
- "Al-Biruni and the Arithmetical Sequence of the Sanskrit Gaṇas"