Sanskrit prosody
Sanskrit prosody or Chandas refers to one of the six Vedangas, or limbs of Vedic studies. It is the study of poetic metres and verse in Sanskrit. This field of study was central to the composition of the Vedas, the scriptural canons of Hinduism, so central that some later Hindu and Buddhist texts refer to the Vedas as Chandas.
The Chandas, as developed by the Vedic schools, were organized around seven major metres, and each had its own rhythm, movements and aesthetics. Sanskrit metres include those based on a fixed number of syllables per verse, and those based on fixed number of morae per verse.
Extant ancient manuals on Chandas include Pingala's Chandah Sutra, while an example of a medieval Sanskrit prosody manual is Kedara Bhatta's Vrittaratnakara. The most exhaustive compilations of Sanskrit prosody describe over 600 metres. This is a substantially larger repertoire than in any other metrical tradition.
Etymology
The term Chanda means "pleasing, alluring, lovely, delightful or charming", and is based on the root chad which means "esteemed to please, to seem good, feel pleasant and/or something that nourishes, gratifies or is celebrated". The term also refers to "any metrical part of the Vedas or other composition".History
The hymns of Rigveda include the names of metres, which implies that the discipline of Chandas emerged in the 2nd-millennium BCE. The Brahmanas layer of Vedic literature, composed between 900 BCE and 700 BCE, contains a complete expression of the Chandas. Panini's treatise on Sanskrit grammar distinguishes Chandas as the verses that compose the Vedas, from Bhashya, the language used for learned discourse and scholastic discussion of the Vedas.The Vedic Sanskrit texts employ fifteen metres, of which seven are common, and the most frequent are three. The post-Vedic texts, such as the epics as well as other classical literature of Hinduism, deploy both linear and non-linear metres, many of which are based on syllables and others based on diligently crafted verses based on repeating numbers of morae. About 150 treatises on Sanskrit prosody from the classical era are known, in which some 850 metres were defined and studied by the ancient and medieval Hindu scholars.
The ancient Chandahsutra of Pingala, also called Pingala Sutras, is the oldest Sanskrit prosody text that has survived into the modern age, and it is dated to between 600 and 200 BCE. Like all Sutras, the Pingala text is distilled information in the form of aphorisms, and these were widely commented on through the bhashya tradition of Hinduism. Of the various commentaries, those widely studied are the three 6th century texts - Jayadevacchandas, Janashrayi-Chhandovichiti and Ratnamanjusha, the 10th century commentary by Karnataka prosody scholar Halayudha, who also authored the grammatical Shastrakavya and Kavirahasya. Other important historical commentaries include those by the 11th-century Yadavaprakasha and 12th-century Bhaskaracharya, as well as Jayakriti's Chandonushasana, and Chandomanjari by Gangadasa.
Major encyclopedic and arts-related Hindu texts from the 1st and 2nd millennium CE contain sections on Chandas. For example, the chapters 328 to 335 of the Agni Purana, chapter 15 of the Natya Shastra, chapter 104 of the Brihat Samhita, the Pramodajanaka section of the Manasollasa contain embedded treatises on Chandas.
Elements
Nomenclature
A syllable, in Sanskrit prosody, is a vowel following one or more consonants, or a vowel without any. A short syllable is one ending with one of the short vowels, which are a, i, u, ṛ and ḷ. The long syllable is defined as one with one of the long vowels, which are ā, ī, ū, ṝ, e, ai, o and au, or one with a short vowel followed by two consonants.A stanza is defined in Sanskrit prosody as a group of four quarters. Indian prosody studies recognise two types of stanzas. Vritta stanzas are those that have a precise number of syllables, while jati stanzas are those that are based on syllabic time-lengths and can contain varying numbers of syllables.
The vritta stanzas have three forms: Samavritta, where the four quarters are similar in pattern, Ardhasamavritta, where alternate verses have a similar syllabic structure, and Vishamavritta where all four quarters are different. A regular Vritta is defined as that where the total number of syllables in each line is less than or equal to 26 syllables, while irregulars contain more. When the metre is based on morae, a short syllable is counted as one mora, and a long syllable is counted as two morae.
Classification
The metres found in classical Sanskrit poetry are sometimes alternatively classified into three kinds.- Syllabic verse : metres 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 Mahabharata and the Ramayana.
- Syllabo-quantitative verse : metres depend on syllable count, but the light-heavy patterns are fixed.
- Quantitative verse : metres depend on duration, where each verse-line has a fixed number of morae, usually grouped in sets of four.
Light and heavy syllables
- A syllable is laghu only if its vowel is hrasva and followed by at most one consonant before another vowel is encountered.
- A syllable with an anusvara or a visarga is always guru.
- All other syllables are guru, either because the vowel is dīrgha, 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 dirgha: 'ā', 'ī', 'ū', 'ṝ', 'e', 'ai', 'o' and 'au'.
- Gangadasa Pandita states that the last syllable in each pāda may be considered guru, but a guru at the end of a pāda is never counted as laghu.
Exceptions
The Indian prosody treatises crafted exceptions to these rules based on their study of sound, which apply in Sanskrit and Prakrit prosody. For example, the last vowel of a verse, regardless of its natural length, may be considered short or long according to the requirement of the metre. Exceptions also apply to special sounds, of the type प्र, ह्र, ब्र and क्र.Gaṇa
Gaṇa 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 metres, according to a method first propounded in Pingala's chandahsutra. Pingala organizes the metres using two units:Pingala's method described any metre 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, Pingala associated a letter, allowing the metre to be described compactly as an acronym. Each of these has its Greek prosody equivalent as listed below.
| Sanskrit prosody | Weight | Symbol | Style | Greek equivalent | - | - | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Na-gaṇa | L-L-L | u u u | 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. A mnemonicThe word yamātārājabhānasalagāḥ is a mnemonic for Pingala's gaṇas, developed by ancient commentators, 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 truncated version obtained by dropping the last two syllables, viz. yamātārājabhānasa, can be read cyclically. It is an example of a De Bruijn sequence. Comparison with Greek and Latin prosodySanskrit prosody shares similarities with Greek and Latin prosody. For example, in all three, rhythm is determined from the amount of time needed to pronounce a syllable, and not on stress. Each eight-syllable line, for instance in the Rigveda, is approximately equivalent to the Greek iambic dimeter. The sacred Gayatri metre of the Hindus consists of three of such iambic dimeter lines, and this embedded metre alone is at the heart of about 25% of the entire Rigveda.The gaṇas are, however, not the same as the foot in Greek prosody. The metrical unit in Sanskrit prosody is the verse, while in Greek prosody it is the foot. Sanskrit prosody allows elasticity similar to Latin Saturnian verse, uncustomary in Greek prosody. The principles of both Sanskrit and Greek prosody probably go back to Proto-Indo-European times, because similar principles are found in ancient Persian, Italian, Celtic, and Slavonic branches of Indo-European. The seven birds: major Sanskrit metresThe Vedic Sanskrit prosody included both linear and non-linear systems. The field of Chandas was organized around seven major metres, state Annette Wilke and Oliver Moebus, called the "seven birds" or "seven mouths of Brihaspati", and each had its own rhythm, movements and aesthetics. The system mapped a non-linear structure into a four verse polymorphic linear sequence.The seven major ancient Sanskrit metres are the three 8-syllable Gāyatrī, the four 8-syllable Anustubh, the four 11-syllable Tristubh, the four 12-syllable Jagati, and the mixed pāda metres named Ushnih, Brihati and Pankti.
Other syllable-based metresBeyond these seven metres, ancient and medieval era Sanskrit scholars developed numerous other syllable-based metres. Examples include Atijagati, Sakkari, Atisakkari, Ashti, Atyashti, Dhriti, Atidhriti, Kriti and so on.Morae-based metresIn addition to the syllable-based metres, Hindu scholars in their prosody studies, developed Gana-chandas or Gana-vritta, that is metres based on mātrās. The metric foot in these are designed from laghu morae or their equivalents. Sixteen classes of these instants-based metres are enumerated in Sanskrit prosody, each class has sixteen sub-species. Examples include Arya, Udgiti, Upagiti, Giti and Aryagiti. This style of composition is less common than syllable-based metric texts, but found in important texts of Hindu philosophy, drama, lyrical works and Prakrit poetry. The entire Samkhyakarika text of the Samkhya school of Hindu philosophy is composed in Arya metre, as are many chapters in the mathematical treatises of Aryabhata, and some texts of Kalidasa.Hybrid metresIndian scholars also developed a hybrid class of Sanskrit metres, which combined features of the syllable-based metres and morae-based metres. These were called Matra-chandas. Examples of this group of metres include Vaitaliya, Matrasamaka and Gityarya. The Hindu texts Kirātārjunīya and Naishadha Charita, for instance, feature complete cantos that are entirely crafted in the Vaitaliya metre. The Hanuman Chalisa, a 40-verse hymn of praise to Hanuman, is composed in Matra-chanda.Metres as tools for literary architectureThe Vedic texts, and later Sanskrit literature, were composed in a manner where a change in metres was an embedded code to inform the reciter and audience that it marks the end of a section or chapter. Each section or chapter of these texts uses identical metres, rhythmically presenting their ideas and making it easier to remember, recall and check for accuracy.Similarly, the authors of Sanskrit hymns used metres as tools of literary architecture, wherein they coded a hymn's end by frequently using a verse of a metre different than that used in the hymn's body. However, they never used Gayatri metre to end a hymn or composition, possibly because it enjoyed a special level of reverence in Hindu texts. In general, all metres were sacred and the Vedic chants and hymns attribute the perfection and beauty of the metres to divine origins, referring to them as mythological characters or equivalent to gods. Use of metre to identify corrupt textsThe verse perfection in the Vedic texts, verse Upanishads and Smriti texts has led some Indologists from the 19th century onwards to identify suspected portions of texts where a line or sections are off the expected metre.Some editors have controversially used this metri causa principle to emend Sanskrit verses, assuming that their creative conjectural rewriting with similar-sounding words will restore the metre. This practice has been criticized, states Patrick Olivelle, because such modern corrections may be changing the meaning, adding to corruption, and imposing the modern pronunciation of words on ancient times when the same syllable or morae may have been pronounced differently. Large and significant changes in metre, wherein the metre of succeeding sections return to earlier sections, are sometimes thought to be an indication of later interpolations and insertion of text into a Sanskrit manuscript, or that the text is a compilation of works of different authors and time periods. However, some metres are easy to preserve and a consistent metre does not mean an authentic manuscript. This practice has also been questioned when applied to certain texts such as ancient and medieval era Buddhist manuscripts, in view of the fact that this may reflect versatility of the author or changing styles over author's lifetime. TextsChandah SutraThe Chandah Sutra is also known as Chandah sastra, or Pingala Sutras after its author Pingala. It is the oldest Hindu treatise on prosody to have survived into the modern era. This text is structured in 8 books, with a cumulative total of 310 sutras. It is a collection of aphorisms predominantly focussed on the art of poetic metres, and presents some mathematics in the service of music.BhashyasThe 11th-century bhashya on Pingala's Chandah Sutra by Ratnakarashanti, called Chandoratnakara, added new ideas to Prakrit poetry, and this was influential to prosody in Nepal, and to the Buddhist prosody culture in Tibet where the field was also known as chandas or sdeb sbyor.UsagePost-vedic poetry, epicsThe Hindu epics and the post-Vedic classical Sanskrit poetry is typically structured as quatrains of four pādas, with the metrical structure of each pāda completely specified. In some cases, pairs of pādas may be scanned together as the hemistichs of a couplet. This is typical for the shloka used in epic. It is then normal for the pādas comprising a pair to have different structures, to complement each other aesthetically. In other metres, the four pādas of a stanza have the same structure.The Anushtubh Vedic metre became the most popular in classical and post-classical Sanskrit works. It is octosyllabic, like the Gayatri metre that is sacred to the Hindus. The Anushtubh is present in Vedic texts, but its presence is minor, and Trishtubh and Gayatri metres dominate in the Rigveda for example. A dominating presence of the Anushtubh metre in a text is a marker that the text is likely post-Vedic. The Mahabharata, for example, features many verse metres in its chapters, but an overwhelming proportion of the stanzas, 95% are shlokas of the anustubh type, and most of the rest are tristubhs. Chandas and mathematicsThe attempt to identify the most pleasing sounds and perfect compositions led ancient Indian scholars to study permutations and combinatorial methods of enumerating musical metres. The Pingala Sutras includes a discussion of binary system rules to calculate permutations of Vedic metres. Pingala, and more particularly the classical Sanskrit prosody period scholars, developed the art of Matrameru, which is the field of counting sequences such as 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8 and so on, in their prosody studies.on Pingala. The 10th-century Halāyudha's commentary on Pingala Sutras, developed meruprastāra, which mirrors the Pascal's triangle in the west, and now also called as the Halayudha's triangle in books on mathematics. The 11th-century Ratnakarashanti's Chandoratnakara describes algorithms to enumerate binomial combinations of metres through pratyaya. For a given class, the six pratyaya were:
InfluenceIn IndiaThe Chandas are considered one of the five categories of literary knowledge in Hindu traditions. The other four, according to Sheldon Pollock, are Gunas or expression forms, Riti, Marga or the ways or styles of writing, Alankara or tropology, and Rasa, Bhava or aesthetic moods and feelings.The Chandas are revered in Hindu texts for their perfection and resonance, with the Gayatri metre treated as the most refined and sacred, and one that continues to be part of modern Hindu culture as part of Yoga and hymns of meditation at sunrise. Outside IndiaThe Sanskrit Chanda has influenced southeast Asian prosody and poetry, such as Thai Chan. Its influence, as evidenced in the 14th-century Thai texts such as the Mahachat kham luang, is thought to have come either through Cambodia or Sri Lanka. Evidence of the influence of Sanskrit prosody in 6th-century Chinese literature is found in the works of Shen Yueh and his followers, probably introduced through Buddhist monks who visited India. |