The metrical organization of Classical Sanskrit verse

In generative metrics, a meter is taken to be an abstract periodic template with a set of constraints mapping linguistic material onto it. Such templates, constrained by periodicity and line length, are usually limited in number. The repertoire of Classical Sanskrit verse meters is characterized by three features which contradict each of the above properties – (a) templates constituted by arbitrary syllable sequences without any overtly discernible periodic repetition: APERIODICITY, (b) absolute faithfulness of linguistic material to a given metrical template: INVARIANCE, and (c) a vast number of templates, ranging between 600–700: RICH REPERTOIRE. In this paper, I claim that in spite of apparent incompatibility, Sanskrit meters are based on the same principles of temporal organization as other versification traditions, and can be accounted for without significant alterations to existing assumptions about metrical structure. I demonstrate that a majority of aperiodic meters are, in fact, surface instantiations of a small set of underlying quantity-based periodic templates and that aperiodicity emerges from the complex mappings of linguistic material to these templates. Further, I argue that the appearance of a rich repertoire is an effect of nomenclatural choices and poetic convention and not variation at the level of underlying structure.

The Dṛkpakṣasāraṇī: A Sanskrit Version of de la Hire’s Tabulae Astronomicae

In November of 1730 the Portuguese astronomer Pedro da Silva arrived in Jayasiṃha’s court bearing, among other books, a copy of the second edition of Philippe de La Hire’s Tabulae Astro-nomicae, published in Paris in 1727. The choice of this text as the representative of contemporary European astronomy being sent to the Maharaja was apparently due to the fact that de La Hire, finding fault with the Rudolphine Tables, whose alleged errors he attributes to Kepler’s hypotheses, claims: Quamobrem id statui Tabulas meas nulli hypothesi, sed observationibus tantummodò superstruere, nulla cuius vis Systematis habita ratione. This abjuring of adhesion to an “heretical” astronomy must have pleased the Jesuits who chose the book. This aspect of the Tabulae Astronomicae (though in fact de La Hire does adhere to an astronomical hypothesis, the heliocentric) appealed also to Jospeh Dubois, who wrote at the beginning of the Jayapura copy on September 1732: Tabulae Astronomicae in quibus Solis, Lunae, reliquorum planetarum motus ex ipsis observationibus nulla adhibita hypotesi traduntur. This same propaganda explains the title, Drkpaksasâranï, given to the adaption of the Tabulae Astronomicae written in Sanskrit verse by Kevalarama, Jayasimha’s jyotisarãja, in or after 1733 when the new city of Jayapura, to which he refers, began to be occupied, and the astonishing fact that Kevalrarãma nowhere in this work mentions the heliocentric theory though the computations that he prescribes are based upon it.

A Propos Sanskrit Mālākanda

In 1970 I was privileged to hear in the rooms of the Linnaean Society the Burkill Memorial Lecture delivered by J. R. Marr. His discursive but interesting paper “An examination of some plant-names and identities in India” has now appeared in JRAS, 1972, 40–56. On the last page of that paper the Sanskrit word mālākanda is discussed, and its properties are described in a Sanskrit verse quoted from a “Malayāḷam ‘herbal’”, which apparently was published in Trivandrum in 1950. Marr provides a translation of the verse. I was, on reading it, immediately struck by the odd property attributed to mālākanda of “destroying perfumed garlands”, not at all the sort of property one normally finds in Indian medical sources.