In Part One, we explored some striking features of Saṃskṛta, primarily aiming to intrigue you with the language's power, particularly in poetry. While I originally planned a different focus for this second installment, I couldn't resist exploring these interconnected domains further to offer a richer perspective on Saṃskṛta poetry. For those intrigued and ready to venture further, welcome to Part Two. Although this discussion is intended to flow continuously as a single piece, it has been divided into three or more parts for length considerations, picking up where the previous section left off. In this concluding series, we examine the broader context, examine key linguistic mechanisms, and analyze representative examples. Be aware that portions of this discussion are somewhat more technical than the introductory scope of Part One.

What Makes Something Poetry?

At the broadest level, poetry has two things happening simultaneously.

There is what is being said.

And there is the form in which it is said.

We can call these, broadly, artha and śabda. Saṃskṛta poetics develop this distinction into something vastly more sophisticated, but this simple formulation is enough for what we are doing here.

This brings us to a fundamental question:

What makes something poetry?

For many readers, the instinctive understanding of poetry in English is often tied to its visible architecture—the arrangement of lines, the presence of stanzas, and the familiar mechanics of rhythm and rhyme. We are accustomed to a world where a poem announces its identity through its visual departure from prose. Contemporary poetry has since taken several different approaches, and poets now often depart from rhyme, regular metre, and other familiar conventions. But Saṃskṛta, from the outset, does not seem to have relied on these external features in defining what it calls kāvya.

Saṃskṛta has an enormous repertoire of metres, far more extensive and technically sophisticated than most readers might initially imagine. Its metres regulate not only syllable count but also patterns of light and heavy syllables, rhythm, cadence, and movement. Many of them are extraordinarily musical. The architecture of the verse can itself create a remarkable sense of motion and sound.

But metre by itself is not poetry.

Take the Anuṣṭup, for example. Technically, it is a metrical verse form organized into four pādas (quarters), with a highly regulated rhythm. It can certainly function as poetry. But the Anuṣṭup is also extraordinarily versatile and is very often used simply to state things: to narrate, explain, instruct, enumerate, or communicate ideas. A text can therefore consist entirely of metrical verses and yet perform much of the work that prose performs for us. A perfectly constructed Anuṣṭup is still only a metrical composition if it merely performs the work of straightforward communication. Metre gives language form, rhythm, and musicality, but it does not automatically make it kāvya. (We shall return to the subject of metres later in this discussion.)

The reverse can also happen.

Saṃskṛta gadya, prose, can sometimes have extraordinary rhythm, elaborate sound patterning, carefully controlled syntax, imagery, suggestion, and emotional movement. It need not be arranged into lines or stanzas at all. Yet it can perform the work we instinctively associate with poetry.

So the distinction cannot simply be:

verse = poetry
prose = not poetry

This is where rasa and dhvani enter the picture.

Broadly speaking, one influential answer in the Saṃskṛtam theoretical tradition is that a verbal composition becomes truly poetic when its words and meanings open into something beyond straightforward communication: when they suggest, through dhvani, and when that suggestion gives rise to rasa, aesthetic experience. It is far from the only view in Saṃskṛta poetics, but it is certainly one of the most consequential.

(Here, dhvani is a technical term in Saṃskṛta poetics meaning suggestion or resonance beyond the directly expressed meaning. And rasa refers to an aesthetic relish or savour of an emotion as experienced through art.)

Words and meanings are the material of poetry. Poetry is what happens when those words and meanings become capable of suggestion and aesthetic relish.

The poet does not merely tell us that someone is absorbed in austerity. The poet can show us the first whispers of rain lingering on her eyelashes, caressing her lips, scattering upon her body, trickling downwards, and taking its own sweet time to reach the navel.

Nothing needs to announce:

                                   "She was completely absorbed in her austerity."

The scene itself suggests it. And that suggestion allows us to experience something beyond the literal statement.

So, as a simplified way of thinking about the process, we could write:

śabda → artha → dhvani → rasa

The words produce meaning. The meaning, together with the particular arrangement of the language, opens into suggestion. And suggestion allows rasa to arise.

Of course, this isn't unique to Saṃskṛta.

This is, after all, what poets do in every language: they arrange language so that it communicates more than the bare literal statement.

Saṃskṛta poetics has an enormous vocabulary for discussing the ways in which meaning can be beautified or made poetically effective. Upamā (simile), rūpaka (metaphor), utprekṣā (poetic fancy or imaginative supposition), and many other alaṅkāras (figures of speech or poetic ornaments) describe different kinds of poetic construction. Most of these can probably be replicated in other languages too.

The speciality of Saṃskṛtam we are exploring, lies in its provision of an extraordinarily expansive grammatical and lexical repertoire, allowing the poet to meticulously engineer the very śabda—the linguistic surface—where suggestion resides and from which rasa eventually blossoms. 

And now we enter the world of śabda. 

Towards the end of this article, we will ask a simple question about śabda.

A rather ridiculous question, actually.

Can a poet impose an almost absurdly complicated constraint on language and still produce output that actually    means something?

Yes.

Very much yes.

In fact, Saṃskṛtam literature contains examples in which the constraints themselves become part of the achievement. We will see some of them at the end.

Before we get there, though, we need to get a sense of several pieces of the puzzle.

A Brief Sense of the Saṃskṛta Lexicon

At the broadest level, Saṃskṛta words can be divided into three categories: verbs, nouns, and what are called avyayas (indeclinables).

Nouns are distinguished by their vibhaktis, the case endings that define their role. For instance, in the form rāme (“in Rāma”), the locative ending immediately identifies the word as a noun. Verbs, by contrast, are governed by lakāras, which articulate tense, mood, and modality. A form such as avadat (“he said”) unmistakably signals a past action and the presence of a lakāra. Then there are the avyayas, or indeclinables, which possess neither vibhaktis nor lakāras. Words like paktum (“to cook”) or api (“also”) remain immutable across all contexts. While a verb fluctuates with time and person, and a noun shifts according to its gender and syntactical relationship, the avyaya stands as a constant. This provides an elegant first approximation of the vast Saṃskṛta lexicon, as nearly every word resides within one of these three domains.

From a Root to a World of Verbs

If we look at the categories of Saṃskṛta verbs, one important distinction is between ātmanepada, parasmaipada, and ubhaya-pada. These refer to different sets of verbal endings and therefore produce different forms. Take the verbal root पच् (pac), "to cook”. In the present tense, for example, parasmaipada gives forms such as pacati, while ātmanepada gives forms such as pacate. An ubhaya-pada root can take both sets of forms.

From this single root, Saṃskṛtam can generate an enormous number of related forms.

First, we can apply the lakāras, the various verbal forms. Remember the basic association:

lakāras → verbs
vibhaktis → nouns
neither → avyayas

From pac we get the ordinary verbal forms associated with cooking. In the past tense, for example, we have apacat in parasmaipada and apacata in ātmanepada. There are forms corresponding to different past tenses, futures, imperatives, and other verbal categories.

Now suppose we want to say "make someone cook", that is, the causative.

A grammatical derivational process gives us the causative stem, and we can then apply the relevant lakāras to it. We get forms such as pācayati and pācayate, meaning "causes or makes [someone] cook."

Suppose instead that we want to express the idea "wants to cook”. Another derivational process gives us a desiderative form, pipakṣati: "he wants to cook”.

And we don't have to stop with verbs.

If we want to talk about things connected with the action of cooking rather than express the action itself, Saṃskṛta has another set of derivational processes that can produce nouns and avyayas. We can get forms such as pakvam (cooked), paktum (to cook), pacanam (cooking), and others, each expressing a different grammatical relationship to the original action.

These processes also apply to derived forms. From the desiderative pipakṣati ("wants to cook"), we can generate pipakṣā ("desire to cook") and pipakṣu ("one who wants to cook"). Further derivations exist to refer to intensive or repeated actions. Each of them is capable of active and passive forms and producing associated nouns, allowing nearly any action to be expressed with immense flexibility and equal validity.

The important point isn't to memorise all these forms. It is to notice what is happening.

From a single root, with a relatively systematic set of grammatical and derivational processes, Saṃskṛtam gives us a huge number of possibilities for talking about an action, its causes, its repetition, its completion, the desire to perform it, the person who performs it, the thing acted upon, and the various concepts associated with it.

That gives us a first glimpse into the world of Saṃskṛta verbs.

But what about nouns? We will see more about the World of Nouns in the next part of this series. You can read Part One of this series here.