Sanskrit prosody

Etymology

The term Chanda (Sanskrit: छन्द) 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 meters which, states Peter Scharf, implies that the discipline of Chandas (Sanskrit prosody) emerged in the 2nd-millennium BCE. The Brahmanas layer of Vedic literature, composed between 900 BCE and 700 BCE, contain a complete expression of the Chandas. Panini's treatise on Sanskrit grammar distinguishes Chandas as verses that compose the Vedas, and Bhasya (Sanskrit: भाष्य) to be the speech language used for learned discourse and scholastic discussion of the Vedas.

The Vedic Sanskrit texts employ fifteen meters, of which seven are common, and the most frequent are three (8-, 11- and 12-syllable lines). The post-Vedic texts, such as the epics as well as other classical literature of Hinduism, deploy both linear and non-linear meters, many of which are based on syllables and others based on diligently crafted verses based on repeating numbers of morae (matra per foot). About 150 treatises on Sanskrit prosody from classical era are known, in which some 850 meters 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 bhasya tradition of Hinduism. Of the various commentaries, those widely studied are the three 6th century texts - Jayadevacchandas, Janasrayi Chandoviciti and Ratnamanjusa, the 10th century commentary by Karnataka prosody scholar Halayudha, who also authored the grammatical Sastrakavya and Kavirahasya (literally, The Poet's Secret). Other important historical commentaries include those by 11th-century Yadavaprakasha and 12th-century Bhaskaracharya, as well as Jayakriti's Chandonusasana, 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.

Nomenclature

A syllable (Akshara, अक्षर), in Sanskrit prosody, is a vowel with one or more consonants, or a vowel without any. The short syllable is one with short (hrasva) vowels, which are a (अ), i (इ), u (उ), ṛ (ऋ) and ḷ (ऌ). The long syllable is defined as one with long (dirgha) vowels, which are ā (आ), ī (ई), ū (ऊ), ṝ (ॠ), e (ए), ai (ऐ), o (ओ) and au (औ).

A stanza (pāda) is defined in Sanskrit prosody as a group of four verses, also called as four quarters. Indian prosody studies developed two types of stanzas. Vritta stanza are those that are crafted with precise number syllables, while Jati stanza are those that are designed based on syllabic instants (morae, matra).

The Vritta stanza are further recognized in three forms, with Samavritta where the four quarters are similar in its embedded mathematical pattern, Ardhasamavritta where alternate verses keep 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 verse is less than or equal to 26 syllables, while irregulars contain more. When syllabic instants (matra) is the foundation of the Sanskrit prosody, a short syllable is counted as one instant, and a long syllable is counted as two instants.

Classification

The metres found in classical Sanskrit poetry are sometimes alternatively classified into three kinds.

1. Syllabic verse (akṣaravṛtta or aksharavritta): 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 Mahabharata and the Ramayana.
2. Syllabo-quantitative verse (varṇavṛtta or varnavritta): meters depend on syllable count, but the light-heavy patterns are fixed.
3. Quantitative verse (mātrāvṛtta or matravritta): meters depend on duration, where each verse-line has a fixed number of morae, usually grouped in sets of four.

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" or "quarter"). 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 those for non-metric prose, and these are specified in Vedic Shiksha texts that study the principles and structure of sound, such as the Pratisakhyas. Some of the significant rules are:

1. A syllable is laghu only if its vowel is hrasva ("short") and followed by at most one consonant before another vowel is encountered.
2. A syllable with an anusvara ('ṃ') or a visarga ('ḥ') is always guru.
3. All other syllables are guru, either because the vowel is dīrgha ("long"), or because the hrasva vowel is followed by a consonant cluster.
4. The hrasva vowels are the short monophthongs: 'a', 'i', 'u', 'ṛ' and 'ḷ'
5. All other vowels are dirgha: '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 sandhi in Sanskrit make clear.)
6. 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.

For measurement by mātrā (morae), laghu syllables count as one unit, and guru syllables as two units.

Exceptions

The Hindu 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 meter. Exceptions also apply to special sounds, of the type प्र, ह्र, ब्र and क्र.

Gaṇa

Gaṇa (Sanskrit, "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 chandahsutra. Pingala organizes the meters using two units:

Pingala's method described any meter as a sequence of gaṇas, or triplets of syllables (trisyllabic feet), 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 meter to be described compactly as an acronym. Each of these has its Greek prosody equivalent as listed below.

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 mnemonic

The word yamātārājabhānasalagāḥ (or yamātārājabhānasalagaṃ) 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 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.

Comparison with Greek and Latin prosody

Sanskrit 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 (quantitative meter). Each eight syllable line, for instance in the Rigveda, is almost exactly equivalent to the Greek iambic dimeter. The sacred Gayatri meter of the Hindus consists of three of such iambic dimeter lines, and this embedded meter 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 (line, pada), while in Greek prosody it is the foot. The Sanskrit prosody allows elasticity similar to Latin Saturnian verse, uncustomary in Greek prosody. The roots of the Sanskrit and Greek prosody likely are in Proto-Indo-European times, because the Vedic and Greek metrical principles are found in ancient Persian, Italian, Celtic, Slavonic, Graeco-Aryan and most of the European languages.

The seven birds: major Sanskrit meters

The Vedic Sanskrit prosody included both linear and non-linear systems. The field of Chandas was organized around seven major meters, 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 (aperiodicity) into a four verse polymorphic linear sequence.

The seven major ancient Sanskrit meters are the three 8-syllable Gayatri, the four 8-syllable Anustubh, the four 11-syllable Tristubh, the four 12-syllable Jagati, and the mixed padas meters named Ushnih, Brihati and Pankti.

Other syllable-based meters

Beyond these seven meters, ancient and medieval era Sanskrit scholars developed numerous other syllable-based meters (Akshara-chandas). Examples include Atijagati (13x4, in 16 varieties), Sakkari (14x4, in 20 varieties), Atisakkari (15x4, in 18 varieties), Ashti (16x4, in 12 varieties), Atyashti (17x4, in 17 varieties), Dhriti (18x4, in 17 varieties), Atidhriti (19x4, in 13 varieties), Kriti (20x4, in 4 varieties) and so on.

Morae-based meters

In addition to the syllable-based meters, Hindu scholars in their prosody studies, developed Gana-chandas or Gana-vritta, that is meters based on mātrās (morae, instants). The metric foot in these are designed from laghu (short) morae or their equivalents. Sixteen classes of these instants-based meters 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 meter, as are many chapters in the mathematical treatises of Aryabhata, and some texts of Kalidasa.

Hybrid meters

Hindu scholars developed hybrid class of Sanskrit meters, which combined features of the syllable-based meters and morae-based meters. These were called Matra-chandas. Examples of this group of meters include Vaitaliya, Matrasamaka and Gityarya. The Hindu texts Kirātārjunīya and Naishadha Charita, for instance, feature complete cantos that are entirely crafted in the Vaitaliya meter. The Hanuman Chalisa, a 40-verse hymn of praise to Hanuman, is composed in Matra-chanda.

Meters as tools for literary architecture

The Vedic texts, and later Sanskrit literature, were composed in a manner where a change in meters was an embedded code to inform the reciter and audience that it marks the end of a section or chapter. A stanza in these texts feature identical meters within, rhythmically presenting their ideas through common rules of composition.

Similarly, the authors of Sanskrit hymns, used meters as tools of literary architecture, wherein they coded a hymn's end by frequently using a verse of a meter different than that used in the hymn's body. However, they never used Gayatri meter to end a hymn or composition, possibly because it enjoyed a special level of reverence in Hindu texts. In general, all meters were sacred and the Vedic chants and hymns attribute the perfection and beauty of the meters to divine origins, referring them as mythological characters or equivalent to gods.

Screen to identify corrupt texts, correct texts

The verse perfection in the Vedic texts, verse Upanishads and Smriti texts have led some Indologists from the 19th century onwards to identify suspect portions of texts where a line or sections are off the expected meter.

Some manuscripts editors have controversially used this "metri causa" principle to emend Sanskrit verses, with similar-sounding words, assuming that their creative conjectural rewriting will restore the meter. This practice has been criticized, states Patrick Olivelle, because such modern corrections may be changing the meaning, adding to corruption, and imposing modern pronunciation of words or prejudice to ancient times when the same syllable or morae may have been pronounced differently.

Large and significant changes in meter, wherein the meter of succeeding sections return to earlier sections, is an indication of likely 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 meters are easy to preserve and consistent meter 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, with the assertion that this may reflect versatility of the author or changing styles over author's life time.

Chandah Sutra

The 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 meters, and presents some mathematics in the service of music.

Bhasyas

The 11th-century bhasya 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.

Post-vedic poetry, epics

The Anushtubh Vedic meter has been the most popular in classical and post-classical Sanskrit works. It is also octosyllabic, next harmonic to Gayatri meter that is sacred to the Hindus, and it appears either in free verse or fixed syllabic form (shloka). It has a rhythm, offers flexibility and creative space, but has embedded rules such as its sixth syllable is always long, the fifth syllable is always short; often, the seventh syllable in even numbered lines of a stanza is short (iambic) as well. The Anushtubh is present in Vedic texts, but its presence is minor, and Trishtubh and Gayatri meters dominate in the Rigveda for example. A dominating presence of the Anushtubh meter in a text is a marker that the text is likely post-Vedic.

The Mahabharata, for example, features many verse meters in its chapters, but an overwhelming proportion of the stanzas, 95% are shlokas of the anustubh type, and most of the rest are tristubhs.

The Hindu epics and the post-Vedic classical Sanskrit poetry is typically structured as quatrains 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 hemistichs 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 have the same structure.

Chandas and mathematics

The attempt to identify the most pleasing sounds and perfect compositions led ancient Indian scholars to study permutations and combinatorial methods of enumerating musical meters. The Pingala Sutras includes a discussion of binary system rules to calculate permutations of Vedic meters. 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 (Fibonacci numbers), in their prosody studies.

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 meters through pratyaya. For a given class (length), the six pratyaya were:

Some authors also considered, for a given metre, (A) the number of guru syllables, (B) the number of laghu syllables, (C) the total number of syllables, and (D) the total number of mātras, giving expressions for each of these in terms of any two of the other three. (The basic relations being that C=A+B and D=2A+B.)

In India

Chandas have been one of the five categories of literary knowledge in Hindu traditions. The other four are, states Sheldon Pollock, 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 have been revered in Hindu texts for their perfection and resonance, with Gayatri meter 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 India

The influence of Sanskrit Chanda has been found in 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, has been proposed 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, likely introduced through Buddhist monks who visited India.