1. Sanskrit Poetics A Critical and comparative Study Krishna Chaitanya

SANSKRIT

POETICS

A

CRITICAL

AND

COMPARATIVE

STUDY

SANSKRIT POETICS

A CRITICAL AND COMPARATIVE STUDY

KRISHNA CHAITANYA

ASIA PUBLISHING HOUSE

BOMBAY

CALCUTTA

NEW DELHI

MADRAS

LUCKNOW

BANGALORE

LONDON

NEW YORK

© 1965 K K Nair

Kr̥shṇapillai Kr̥shṇan Nair (1918)

PRINTED IN INDIA

BY K. C. PAL AT NABAJIBAN PRESS, 66 GRLY STREET, CALCUTTA-6 AND PUBLISHED BY P. S

JAYASINGH VIA PUBLISHING HOUSE, BOMBAY

TO

VICTOR

MASSUH

All

references

are

given

at

the

end

of

the

book

on

pp

417

ff

Preface

In the concluding lines of A New History of Sanskrit Literature1 I had expressed the hope of following up some day with a volume on Sanskrit poetics.

The preface of the first work had a distinctly apologetic air about it For there were illustrious predecessors who had contributed histories of Sanskrit literature and there was an understandable diffidence about crashing into such an august company I feel less diffident on the present occasion

This, I must hasten to add, is not at all because I underrate the work already done For we do have two works on the subject One is S K De's History of Sanskrit Poetics,2 first published as early as 1923 The other is the work by P V Kane, which first appeared in 1910 as the introduction to a critical edition of three chapters of Visvanatha's Sahitya Darpana, but emerged in the second edition of 1923 as a History of Sanskrit Poetics 3

The greatest contribution of these two pioneers was the clear charting of the contours of the material, the vast corpus of writing on poetics in the Sanskrit tradition, with patiently dug-up data on texts, authorship and dates But the tradition, I am afraid, remained hermetic because the exposition was not made intelligible to readers who knew only English and not Sanskrit as well, though the works were in English and therefore implied an obligation in this respect on the part of the authors

Kane, perhaps, is consistent though uncompromising For he seems to be addressing only those who know Sanskrit in addition to English He gives many quotations, in Devanagari, from the original texts and does not bother to give translations Unfortunate as this is, there is much less self-deception here than in the case of De For he uses so many original Sanskrit terms in his narration that the ultimate result is the same the exposition is unintelligible except to the Sanskrit scholar Here is a specimen "The realisation of Rasa, therefore, is a process of logical inference, and the nushpatti of Bharata's sutra is explained as anumiti, the vibhavas standing to Rasa in the relation of anumapaka or gamaka to anumapya or gamya"4

Take a passage from another writer "Abhinava remarks that in Santa one can see and enjoy the Anubhavas, viz, the slow disappearance of Kama, Krodha and other evils and that though the whole world of Bhavas become Vyabhicharins for the Santa, such Bhavas like Nirveda and Jugupsa for worldly objects, Dhrti, Mati, Utsaha of the type of Dayavira, Rati for God in the form of Bhakti and Sraddha will stand out prominently as more

viii

PREFACE

intimate accessories, Abhyantara Angas"5 I regard the person who wrote

this as the greatest scholar in this field today and I must acknowledge here

that it is his writings that initially stimulated me to explore the fascinating,

but practically lost, world of Sanskrit poetics But I doubt very much if

any one who does not know Sanskrit fairly well can get the meaning of

writing of such density and unfamiliar texture

It does seem worth while, in the circumstances, to make a fresh attempt

to communicate the ideas of the great Indian thinkers to the English-speaking world which is perhaps half the world today I know the enormous

unconscious pressure for the retention of the original technical terms, but

as far as possible I have isolated them in brackets, so that the exposition

will be self-sufficient in the medium used, which is English, not Sanskrit

In view of the extended comparative and interpretative

approach of this work it did not seem desirable to eliminate the original

terms completely, for those who know Sanskrit would like to satisfy them-

selves that I am not twisting meanings In the case of proper names I have

taken some liberties The orthodox scholar may want to disembowel me

for writing "Ananda Vardhana" instead of "Anandavardhana" or even

"Anandavardhanacharya". But the layman will find my approach con-

venient and it is the layman, especially the foreigner, whom I want to help

The pundit is beyond all help

Smooth communication was the first task But other problems opened

up immediately Was the narration to be chronological? Here I preferred

Kane's approach which groups material thematically rather than chrono-

logically But the bulk of his work is taken up with texts, authors and

dates, leaving only seventy pages for a sketchy summation of this type

under a few titles like definition, purpose and divisions of poetry and equip-

ment of the poet I felt, therefore, that it would be better to plan the

structure of the entire work according to the natural thematic divisions of

the subject of poetics, somewhat on the model of Maritain's Creative Intui-

tion in Art and Poetry6 This also enabled me to avoid monotony in

narration by moving from general theory to the viewpoint of Sanskrit

poetics, or from the latter to the former

Maritain's work is a reinterpretation of Thomist philosophy in its bearings

on poetics and aesthetics The method therefore is elaborately critical and

comparative The need for a similar approach became immediately apparent

in the present task too Poetic experience has a universal identity But

the Indian intellectual who is well acquainted with his tradition seems to be

a schizophrenic case today For he applies the critical criteria of the

Sanskrit tradition in evaluating Sanskrit poetry, but switches over to another

set of criteria in appraising English poetry or even poetry in any modern

Indian language This cannot possibly be right, for the nature of poetic

experience has to be fundamentally identical whatever the medium used

But the only way of clarifying this truth was to undertake a sustained

critical and comparative treatment The critical analysis, further, could not

be confined to the purely literary level, but had to penetrate deep into

psychology, for clarifying the profound psychological foundations of Indian

views regarding all aspects of poetic creativity and experience The com-

parative method also helped in bringing out the affinities of Indian thought

in this field with European tradition One of the numerous exciting dis-

coveries here was the astonishing parallelism between the Indian theory

of poetic resonance (Dhvani) and the doctrine, elaborated mostly by

Mallarmé, of the symbolist movement in French poetry Another was the

profound affinity between Indian thought and that of Valéry

Far wider horizons now opened up Here I got a valuable cue from a

paper entitled Aesthetic Values in the East and West7 presented by Van

Meter Ames, head of the department of philosophy of the University of

Cincinnati, at the Third East-West Philosophers' conference held at the

University of Hawai in June-July 1959 His intention was to explore and

identify Western philosophical attitudes towards art, and to lay these

besides the Eastern approach to aesthetics He noted that philosophical

interest in art in the West went back to Plato, but that many Western

philosophers had not taken art seriously When Western thinkers have

found art important, they have often been formalists, seeing the value of

art as divorced from other and ( to them ) lesser values of life Or art has

been considered to have spiritual values, not in its own form, but only as

it serves a religion or an ideology It is only since the rise of modern

aesthetics in the eighteenth century, notably with Kant, that Western philo-

sophy has begun to take art more seriously and to note that the spiritual

value of art may inhere in clarifying and intensifying values which are

already there in human life

This cue encouraged me to attempt to look at the entire Indian tradition

from a new and significant perspective Later Sanskrit poetics gets bogged

down in verbal analysis and purely rhetorical preoccupations But deep

below this cacophony on the brass, there was a continuous melody on the

flute The Vedic vision of life was basically a poetic vision The Vedic

reference to the soul as finally reposing in aesthetic relish (Rasena tiptah)

was a very condensed but profoundly intuitive summation of the aesthetic

attitude, which did not drift away from life but embraced it and integrated

it That vision was obscured by the rise of thought-currents which dis-

trusted the world and saw becoming as an illusion and only withdrawn

static being as real It was Vyasa who reestablished the validity of the

aesthetic attitude This was a many-splendoured achievement Against

the world-denying transcendentalists, he robustly affirmed the authenticity

of being-in-the-world, to use a pregnant expression of Heidegger's Yoga

for him was "skill in action" (Kamasu-kausala) It was also the skill in

discriminating what was of significance to the spirit from what was not

('Atmanatma-viveka-kausala) And, in the last analysis, this significance

was an aesthetic significance, culminating in relish

Much has been written on the magnificent way in which Vyasa managed

λ

PREFACE

a synthesis of many philosophical systems and attitudes But no one today

seems to have noticed that he was engaged in establishing not only the

validity, but also the integrative adequacy, of a poetic vision of life and

man and man's action in the world I noted that the great Abhinava Gupta

had seized the significance of Vyasa's synthesis with a swift intuition Indian

thought had managed a magnificent programmatic ordering of human life

by the definition of the four goals of man - economic security (Artha),

the satisfaction of libidinal and aesthetic urges (Kama), moral living

(Dharma) whose prescription controlled the pursuit of the first two goals;

and ultimately the liberation of the human spirit (Moksha) Abhinava

claimed that the consummation of all these ends was a poetic relish and,

conversely, poetic experience could achieve the ultimate of all these goals

through its own modality The paramount humanistic significance of such

an integration struck me even more forcefully when I found T S. Eliot, in

the Four Quartets, struggling with the problem of reconciling the demands

of action in this world and of poetic experience He misunderstands the

latter as demanding withdrawal from life and he goes to the extent of claim-

ing that his views are identical with "what Krishna meant"-in the Gita

which is a part of Vyasa's great epic, Maha Bharata

The enormous task of clarifying what Krishna, or more correctly his

creator, Vyasa, really meant now became inescapable Incidentally, in

view of the facts that the Asvalayana Grihya Sutra refers both to the Bharata

and the Maha Bharata and that some people have questioned the historicity

of Vyasa, I may state my views on the matter very briefly These are my

beliefs there was an earlier shorter version of the epic; it was expanded

and creatively rehandled some time between A D 150 and 300 by an extra-

ordinarily brilliant person whose brilliance would continue to be undeniable

even if he were to be called by some name other than Vyasa (which in any

case is a functional appellation), this person added the Gita, no model for

which existed in the earlier version. he was also the creator of the Bhaga-

vata, both texts have been interfered with in the subsequent centuries, but

the basic poetic intentions of Vyasa stand out with massive clarity. I may

also add that if any one chooses to believe that the two works wrote them-

selves or that they were produced by a committee of one hundred people

it would be perfectly all right with me I am concerned with the world-

view presented in the works and I do not mind if some people want to claim

that, whenever I use the name Vyasa, nothing more is meant than a reference

to the two works But I would insist that I should be taken to mean

nothing less either Let us now return to the task, which confronted me,

of clarifying what Krishna or Vyasa (or these two works) meant From

a volume on rhetoric the work was threatening to expand into a book on

an integrative philosophy I must confess that, because of the magnitude

of the task as it now opened up, I was sorely tempted to handle Abhinava's

identification of poetic experience and liberation (Moksha) as implying

nothing more than a rhetorical way of saying that some poetry is "simply

divine" But this is what the teenager would say about the latest dance-tune

and I could not risk that horrible analogy without reaping a bitter harvest

of self-contempt So the task had to be attempted, however inadequate my

mental equipment for it

Poetry cannot be authentic if the world and being-in-the-world are not

authentic Though Sankara expressed himself with extreme subtlety, the

trend of his thought is unmistakable Being-in-the-world has no authenti-

city for him And the immense prestige of Sankara in the Indian tradition

implied that, if this work was to develop further, an encounter with the

formidable giant could not be avoided But I happen to believe that

Vyasa's genius is immeasurably greater than that of Sankara Therefore,

what was required was not a direct encounter with Sankara, which would

have been a quixotic assault on a gigantic windmill, but the recovery of the

true image of Vyasa But even this was a tremendous task, for it meant

clearing the heavy overburden of transcendentalist interpretation which

Sankara had piled up on the works of Vyasa

If orthodox tradition lost the true visage of Vyasa, radical temperaments

today sometimes try to caricature it An egregious instance is the argument

by one writer that since the Gita has "attracted minds of bent entirely

different from each other no question remains of its basic validity if

the meaning be so flexible"8 According to him, the Gita is an interpolation

by a "Brahmin burden upon getting his niti (moral philosophy) revisions

into a popular lay of war"9 Then he wakes up to the fact that Brahminism

and the Brahmin were most unlikely, to put it mildly, to derive any profit

if people began to follow the teaching of the Gita and now argues that the

Anu-gita of the fourteenth canto was the text that was added to extol

Brahminism and the Brahmin10 The writer may probably believe that this

type of contradiction should be pervasive as a cult-feature in his own work,

for he claims to be a Marxist But the precise Karl would be appalled at

this confusion of the Hegelian synthesis of contradictions with confused

self-contradiction and would hastily pass on the disciple to Groucho who

in his turn may have difficulties in accepting him since the Marxism of the

Marx brothers demands witty and inspired, not just pointless, clowning

The distinction would be clear from a few more verdicts of the writer's

By a laboured argument based on estimates of the resources of agricultural

production (here is some materialistic interpretation of history for you ')

he comes to the conclusion that five million people could not have partici-

pated in the Maha Bharata war11 He just cannot forgive the poet for

this exaggerated figure, which incidentally has no particular significance

to the profound message of the epic One can imagine the writer similarly

dismissing Dante's Divine Comedy as balderdash with the simple-

minded argument that Hell and Purgatory and Paradise have no geogra-

phical location and cannot be looked up in an atlas Archaeology is like

Marxism, another field which he has refused to let alone and he undertakes

wild forays into the myths of ancient Sumeria and Greece to seek deriva-

xii

PREFACE

tions of the various features of the Kṛṣṇa figure. The incredibly naive

mistake committed here lies in the failure to distinguish between primitive

racial myth and the myth as creatively rehandled by a poet An ana-

logous piece of obtuseness would be to equate T. S Eliot's mentality with

that of Celtic yokels centuries ago since the Fisher King appears both in

the Waste Land and in Celtic folk lore This is not the only piece of obtuse-

ness The writer sees a contradiction between Kṛṣṇa's dismissal of Yajña,

ritual as unimportant and his claim that Yajña is the generator of rain,

the basis of life He has completely failed to realise that in the latter ins-

tance the word stands for the dedicated act and opens up a vision of the

world as dynamic process, a magnificent teleological orchestration Price-

less is the peroration that immediately follows "This slippery opportunism

characterizes the whole book Naturally, it is not surprising to find so

many Gita lovers imbued therewith Once it is admitted that material

reality is gross illusion, the rest follows quite simply , the world of 'double-

think' is the only that matters"12 Here traditional misunderstanding

finds its complement in modern obtuseness, for Sankarite Advaitins and

modern critics of this type are equally muddled Vyasa never denied the

world's reality No great poet does But if poetry is completely opaque

to a temperament, it can never penetrate to the philosophy of a poet

On each of the many systems of Indian philosophy—Mīmāṃsa, Nyaya,

Sāṃkhya, Dvaita, Advaita—enough books have been published to fill a

shelf The way it has grown, this is probably the first work on Indian

poetics which recognises it as something far more profound than a system

of rhetoric, in fact as an integrative philosophy, to which status Vyasa and

Abhinava raised it And in the clarification of that philosophy the critical

and comparative methods have been applied to the fullest Many inade-

quacies may emerge in the narration as the reader turns the leaves of this

work But I hope he will treat them with some measure of indulgence in

view of the magnitude of the pioneering task, the exhausting compulsion to

fight back on both sides, against traditionalists as well as modernists, and the

earnestness of the writer in this attempt to rescue the great tradition of

Sanskrit poetics from the dusty immortality of the book-shelves of the

antiquarian scholar and to integrate it with world currents in this stream

of thought

KRISHNA CHAITANYA

Contents

PREFACE

VII

I THE POETIC SITUATION

Theory of the Poetic Context 1 , Comparative Evaluation

13 , Poetic Transfer 24

1

II THE POETIC CIRCUIT

The World and the Poet 34 , The Poem and the World

41 , The Relisher 45 , The Concept of Beauty 49

34

III THE POETIC TISSUE

Nuptials of Sound and Sense 57 , The Poetic Organism

62 , Transcendence of Sound and Sense 71

57

IV POETIC FIGURES

The Dispensability of Figures 75 , The Functionalism of

Figures 88

75

V DICTION, STYLE, METRE AND RHYTHM

Diction 100 , Style 105 , Metre and Prose Rhythm 112

100

VI THE DOCTRINE OF SUGGESTION

The Great Controversy 118 , Musical Power and Limits

of Poetry 132 , Synthesis and Restatement 143 ; Towards

Inclusive Horizons 150

118

VII THE SIGNIFICANCE OF STRUCTURE

Plot as the Poet's Metaphor 161 , Literal Narration,

Allegory, Myth 167 , Organic Structure 184 , The Concept

of Propriety 199

161

VIII THE ENDS OF POETRY

Primacy of Poetic Delight 208 , The Transmutation of the

Tragic 222

208

IX AESTHETICS AND ETHICS

The Problem of Ethics 242 , Emotive Cognition and

Belief-Systems 249 , Convergence of Art and Morality 264 ;

The Stirred Sensitivity 281

242

X POETRY AND LIBERATION

Meaning of Liberation 289 , Authenticity of Being-in-the-

World 304 , Convergence of Aesthetics and Metaphysics

314 , A Study in Affinities Valéry 320 , A Study in

Contrasts T S Eliot 327 , The Resolution in Indian

Thought 333

289

XI THE AESTHETIC WORLD-VIEW OF VYASA

"What Krishna Meant " 337 , Transcendence of

337

xiii

xiv

CONTENTS

Mechanism 350 , Activist Engagement and Aesthetic Relishing 362 , The Fulfilment in Relish 377

XII EXPANSION OF EGO-BOUNDARIES 386

Rehabilitation of the Ego 386 , Ego and the Peak of Experience 397 , The Bonded-Liberated State 405

REFERENCES 417

INDEX 457

SANSKRIT POETICS

CHAPTER ONE

The Poetic Situation

I THEORY OF THE POETIC CONTEXT

In India, poetics evolved out of dramaturgy This is due to a remarkable and historically very important accident — the early advent of an aesthetician who felt that the dramatic form was the most perfect fruition of aesthetic creativity, the most generalised definition of the function of which is that it is the embodiment of feeling in sensuous tissue Like Wagner, centuries later, Bharata conceived of the drama as a gesamtkunstwerk, or synthesis of all the arts, and in his great work, Natya Sastra,1 he gave to India a monumental treatise full of detailed suggestions for integrating libretto, stage effects, music, dance and histrionics into an organism, the soul of which is the aesthetically experienced emotion (Rasa)

We are not in a position to give a precise date for Bharata But his treatise cannot be later than the second century and it may go back to the second century BC If we come down to the level where poetics is distinguished from dramaturgy as a specialised discipline, the sixteenth chapter of the Natya Sastra, which deals with the libretto or the text, can be regarded as laying its foundation It is also interesting to note that the treatise is earlier than the earliest existing Kavya or epic poem However, it must also be remembered that Bharata does not have separate terms for poet and dramatist but uses the expression, Kavi (poet), for both Bharata continuously stresses that the aesthetic creation is a presentation or representation (Abhinaya), the form of which is shaped by the aesthetic emotion which is intended to be communicated Therefore, the stage-craft, music, dance and the poetic text are all representations The libretto, thus, is Vachika-abhinaya, representation through the medium of the word, language Alike in drama and poem, the soul of the creation remains the aesthetic emotion, Rasa

The word Rasa is a fine crystal, secreted by Indian thought over slow centuries, and, like the crystal which can shed a many-coloured radiance according to the angle of incident light, it also reveals many meanings according to the angle of approach In the Atharva Veda,2 the word is first used for the juice of plants It also begins to be used in the sense of savour or taste. "May the strong satisfying Rasa (savour) of the honey-

1

2

SANSKRIT POETICS

mixed libation come to me ! 3 In the transcendental meditation of the

Upaniṣhads,4 there is a combination of both the senses and the word now

stands for essence as well as the highest relish or experience which brings

in its wake ineffable joy. Rasa here stands for the supreme reality of the

universe, the self-luminous consciousness, which the Upaniṣhadic seers

strove to attain, and which, when realised, results in transcendent bliss The

Vedic reference to the soul as enjoying the flavour or essence (Rasa) of

experience,5 seems to be the basis of the elaborations of the concept in

Upaniṣhadic meditation as well as aesthetic speculation The Vedic mind

was richly sensitive to the beauty of the external world, to the loveliness

of dawn and dusk, of forest and flowing river. If the lyric was spontaneous

the beauty of this new creation from within is also immediately noticed

and savoured Upaniṣhadic thought extends this savouring of the world

to the savouring of its transcendental origin Aesthetic theory utilises

both the meanings The aesthetic creation is savoured like a beautiful

object in nature is savoured. At the same time, although the stimulus

belongs to the mundane world, the experience is felt to be almost

transcendental, like the sage's intuitive experience of the self-luminous

consciousness which is the ground of the universe Art thus mediates

between the experience of the world and the experience of the transcendent

We shall take up later the development of the ideas about this specific,

transcendental, significance of aesthetic activity

How does the creative poet organise the aesthetic presentation which

enables the aesthetic emotion to be experienced and relished ? It is in

seeking the answer to this question from Bharata that we realise the

astonishing originality of his mind For what we find is nothing less than

a complete theory—be it ever so condensed—of aesthetic perception and

emotive reaction which matches, in the profundity of its psychological

insight, the definition and appraisal of these processes by the understand-

ing of our own day based on extended research But we have to proceed

very cautiously if we are to make clear beyond the shadow of doubt that

we are not reading too much into Bharata in our enthusiasm

Let us first glance at the famous formula in the Nātya Śāstra—the pillar

on which the whole of subsequent aesthetic theory has been erected—which

deals with the modality of the arousal of poetic emotion by the

organisation of the poetic context. At the risk of being initially unintelli-

gible, but for the sake of utmost caution in analysis, we shall retain the

Sanskrit terms in a first translation, though it may read woefully like a

translation “When the Vibhāvas, Anubhāvas and the Vyabhichāri

Bhāvas unite, Rasa emerges ”6 But since this formula as given after refer-

ring to the very important concept of the Sthāyi Bhāva, a fuller rendering

would be this : “When the Vibhāvas, Anubhāvas and the Vyabhichāri

Bhāvas combine to awaken the Sthāyi Bhāva, the awakened Sthāyi Bhāva

finally develops into Rasa” As this is scarcely helpful, we can attempt

free translation, purely as a provisional formulation, a foothold for

further analysis, not to be accepted if the further argument does not

substantiate it "When the prime stimuli, their congruent behavioural

features and the transient but ancillary emotional reactions they evoke,

combine to activate the sentiment, the sentiment develops into aesthetic

emotion " Again, postponing the very necessary detailed discussion to a

little later, for a preliminary understanding we can take the help of

Bharata's own clarification of the terms The Sthayī Bhava is sentiment

as Shand7 uses the expression It is a potential, complex reactivity It

is potential because it exists prior to the aesthetic situation, as an abyding

reality of our psychological organisation This is the etymological mean-

ing of Sthayī ( continuing, abiding ) Bhava ( existent , from Bhu, to exist )

It is complex because, even if its basis is the instinct or drive, it is the

result of further evolutionary development over centuries of humanised,

socialised living If we take the erotic sentiment as the Sthayī Bhava in

an example, the Vībhavas are the prime stimuli which activate it woman

and the spring season The Anubhavas are woman's suggestive or res-

ponsive glances and gestures. The Vyabhicharī Bhavas are the transient

feelings, joy in proximity, melancholy in separation, hopes or misgivings

about winning, all of which are genetically related to the basic emotive

orientation Activated and developed in this manner in an aesthetic

presentation, the latent sentiment emerges as emotion which can be

consciously savoured.

It is clear that the aesthetic situation is a recreation of the pattern of

emotive experience in life and a theory about the psychology of emo-

tional experience, valid both in life and art, is implicit Our analysis now

should proceed in two stages We should first have a clearer conception

of the psychological theory as Indian aesthetics outlines it We should

then critically evaluate it in the light of our own understanding of the

psychology of emotive reactions and experience

First of all, when we seek the precise meaning of the term Sthayī Bhava,

we find a certain nebulous quality which is reflected in the great variety

of terms used by writers of our own day in translating the Sanskrit

expression Thus, De8 translates it variously as the principal or permanent

mood, more or less permanent mental state, permanent mood or sentiment,

dominant emotion, dominant feeling, etc Sastri9 uses the expressions,

potential condition of mind, a permanent mental condition, etc Naidu

says "The Sthayī Bhavas are the propensities of Western psychology "10

Watave11 has earned the gratitude of everyone interested in Sanskrit

poetics by patiently compiling all the relevant passages scattered through-

out the various texts Vadekar12 summarises the broad upshot of the

passages thus "The Sthayī Bhavas are the innate, predominant, prevail-

ing, uneclipsable, assimilative, enduring and permeating, enjoyable, cona-

tive-dispositional factors in human nature In brief, the Sthayī Bhavas are

the prevailing, innate, conative-dispositional factors in human nature "

Watave's own summing up is this "The Sthayī Bhava is the 'sentiment'

4

SANṢKRIT POETICS

Our Sanskrit Sthāyi Bhava is neither an instinct nor an emotion, nor a mood, although it has got an instinctive base and is a primary emotion in character."13

If absolute precision is not fully gained even now, we feel nevertheless justified in making two remarks : that the verbalisations, in spite of their inadequacies, are sufficient to point to certain realities of psychological processes, and that today's attack on the problem cannot be said to have fared very much better in gaining absolute precision. Let us clarify the latter remark first, though it makes unavoidable a plunge into rather technical analysis.

Struggling to define and classify the stable affective states of the human personality which genetically explain the emotional reactivities in specific situations, Descartes14 distinguished six basic states which he called the passions These are admiration, love, hate, desire, joy and sorrow All other reactivities were derivatives of these Bain,15 likewise, outlined eleven categories, which, however, were called emotions Mercier16 outlined six groups of sentiments. Ribot17 undertook a more penetrating analysis, which sought to establish a genetic relation between primitive instincts and simple, primary emotions and to trace the conscious and unconscious process by which composite and derived emotions emerged Thus, according to him, the instinct of self-preservation leads to fear in its defensive aspect and anger in its offensive orientation The surplus of affective energy seeks outlet in adventure, play and aesthetic creativity.

In recent years, theory has coalesced around broadly three concepts, the drive, the Freudian instinct and instinct as understood by McDougall. Ladd and Woodworth18 formulated the concept of the drive as early as 1911 The drive is the tendency to action which is aroused by a need, being its complementary and its expression 19 Basic drives are generated by the primary needs of the organism like hunger, self-preservation, the urge to reproduce and perpetuate the species This suggests a convenient distinction between deficit needs like hunger, which lead to explorative behaviour, and protective needs, which generally make the organism withdraw from unfavourable situations Holt20 has given the name “adient” and “abient” respectively to these two classes of drives The concept of Elliott22 and Wada23 have shown through their experimental studies that modifiability and adaptability, on which learning ability depends, are also considerably increased, under the influence of strong drives The operative action of a drive does not become complete till it links up with an external stimulus, which, in fact, releases the drive 24 Lashley25 and Konrad Lorenz25 undertook a closer study of the internal processes in the operation of the drive The essential elements of Lorenz's formulation include a flexible appetitive behaviour, an innate releasing mechanism and a consummatory act The appetitive behaviour is the variable introductory phase of a behaviour pattern or sequence. The concept of the innate

releasing mechanism assumes there to be within the central nervous system

a series of mechanisms which effectively inhibit all discharge of activity

unless the organism encounters the right environmental situation or

stimulus The stable appetitive tendency is the Sthayi Bhava and the

stimulus which triggers the innate releasing mechanism is the Vibhava

But we have to keep in mind one caution The schematisation that the

unsatisfied drive leads to restlessness and explorative behaviour and the

consummation leads to relaxation and pleasure may be broadly acceptable,

but if we interpret the drive as basically a biodynamic disequilibrium,

action would, in terms of origin, be the result of literal dis-ease 27 But

only the activity of animals and of man at the lowest cultural level can,

thus be exhaustively described as motivated by the desire to gain and

maintain equilibrium at all costs An experience of profound upheaval or

disequilibrium is often most essential and beneficial in order to bring

about reorganisation and integration at a higher level 28 Man may thus

seek states of tension As Woodworth29 pointed out, habits may become

drives and the quality of the habit will depend upon the culture of the

individual and the society in which he lives Therefore, when we equate

the Sthayi Bhava with the stable appetitive tendency, we should not con-

fuse the latter with the crude primitive equipment, but its profound

transformation by the socio-cultural process

If broad affinities can be established between the concept of the Sthayi

Bhava in Sanskrit poetics and the theory of drives, no similar rapproche-

ment is possible with the theory of instincts as developed by Freud Like

Hobbes, Freud builds up a heavy super-structure of theory on a tenuous

abstraction - the "natural" or "instinct-motivated" man, in complete iso-

lation from society,30 In the context of social living, according to his

view, the instincts do not grow in varied directions but remain as a basic

layer, always distinct from the strata of behaviour brought into being by

social and cultural life To Freud, socialised behaviour is a thin veneer

which can peel off any moment to reveal the savage within If he made

a great contribution by revealing the extensive operation of the rationalis-

ing tendency, he annulled it by reducing all rationality as rationalising,

since behaviour, according to him, is determined far below the level of the

deliberating consciousness by the instinctual urges This determinism is

absolute "Any one," he wrote, "thus breaking away from the determinism

of natural phenomena, at any single point, has thrown over the whole

scientific outlook on the world31 You have an illusion of psychic

freedom within you which you do not want to give up I regret to say

that on this point I find myself in sharpest opposition to your views

His associate Jekels33 puts it thus "This being, prostrate by the burden

of heredity and constitution, driven either by his urges or by tormenting

anxiety, nailed to his ego by his narcissism seems unlikely to promise

much changeability, and there is little chance for him to become the

demurge of an entirely new world " Character traits, claims Fenichel,31

6

SANSKRIT POETICS

are not at all adaptations made by the ego, but things that happen to the

ego, against its will, by instinctual forces which return from the repressed

Since our primary purpose here is to clarify the basic concept in Sanskrit

poetics by comparison with current theories, a detailed critique of

Freudian assumptions cannot be offered here We can only indicate here

that if there is a wide gulf between the psychological assumptions of

Sanskrit poetics and psychoanalysis, the gulf is equally wide between

responsible concepts of living, post-Freudian psychoanalytic theory and the

outlook of great literature respectively and the Freudian assumptions

Juridical thought has indicated the utter anarchy that would result

if Freud's doctrines are accepted The Report of the Special Com-

mittee of the American Bar Association on the Rights of the Mentally

Ill35 neatly sums up the social situation "So far as your Committee can

discover, the doctrines of psychoanalysis tend towards determinism , free

will does not exist, but human conduct is or may be determined in any

given case by long past events in the life of the individual, the very memory

of which has long passed from his mind and the significance of which he

may not have recognised even at the time of their occurrence Unless there

is a reversal in the trend of the development and exploitation of psycho-

analysis as a means of diagnosis and treatment, the courts will be called -

not " As for post-Freudian developments in psychoanalysis itself, they

have kept in mind the caution of Ernest Jones36 who once said that we

would be forsaking science for theology if we accepted the first conclusions

of psychoanalysis as sacrosanct and eternal Revisionism37 has been

gaining increasing momentum and has been radical, as can be seen from

the works of Erich Fromm,38 Karen Horney39 and Sullivan40 As for the

outlook of literature, no work of humanistic significance in the entire

world heritage has surrendered faith in man's responsibility We do see

a paradox in existentialist literature Sartre identifies himself with astonish-

ing completeness with Freud's negation of psychic 'freedom "Conscious

deliberation," he writes, "is always faked When I deliberate, the die is

already cast The decision has been taken by the time the will

intervenes, and the latter's function is simply to announce it "41 I have

no comment to make on this statement except to point out that it has

come from a thinker and creative writer who has built up a sombre, ultra-

romantic, Promethean theory of freedom depicting man with his immense

burden of responsibility, outlined against the flare of the twilight of the

gods As for Sanskrit poetics, its steady movement towards the detach-

ment and liberation which come from aesthetic experience, to be studied

in detail later, precludes any visualisation of instincts as fetters and sees

them as the seeds which can grow into the fullest psychological and

spiritual autonomy.

More sober than the Freudian formulation, although still needing cauti-

ous handling is McDougall's definition of instinct as an "inherited or

THE POETIC SITUATION

7

innate psychological disposition which determines its possessor to perceive,

and pay attention, to objects of a certain class, to experience an emotional

excitement of a particular quality upon perceiving such an object, and to

act in regard to it in a particular manner, or, at least, to experience an

impulse to such an action" 42 Under the sharp attack of writers like

Dunlop,43 Faris,44 Allport,45 Kuo46 and Bernard,47 the instinct theory

could not survive in its old formulation and McDougall later adopted the

term, "propensity", 48 But serious difficulties were created when McDougall

wrote : "We may say, then, directly or indirectly the instincts are the

prime movers of all human activity By the conative or impulse force of

some instinct ( or of some habit derived from some instinct ) every train

of thought, however cold and passionless it may seem, is borne along

towards its end, and every bodily activity is initiated and sustained The

instinctive impulses determine the ends of all activities and supply the

driving power by which all mental activities are sustained And all the

complex intellectual apparatus of the most highly developed mind is but

a means towards these ends, is but the instrument by which these impulses

seek their satisfactions, while pleasure and pain do but serve to guide them

in their choice of the means "49

We seem to have regressed to the fallacy of reductionism which vitiates

not only Freudian thought but the attempts by Hull50 to derive entire

learning from the conditioned response, of Holt51 and Warden52 to rely

solely on the concept of drives, of Murray53 to lean heavily on viscerogenic

needs, of Carr54 to theorise extensively on a vaguely defined concept of

motivating conditions, of Hobbes55 and Bentham56 to make hedonism the

fundamental and 'total principle of motivation Lloyd Morgan57 was

essentially right when he warned us that "in no case may we interpret an

action as the outcome of the exercise of a higher psychical faculty if it can

be interpreted as the outcome of the exercise of one which stands lower

in the psychological scale" But this is a principle of caution in analysis

not a dogma of reductionism We have to balance it with Baudouin's

reference to the misunderstanding by which psychoanalysis seeks an

explanation of the superior by the inferior and ends up as a reduction of

man to the animalistic element in his nature 58 This reductionist fallacy

is evident in all the approaches mentioned above They peg man down to

the level of the animal and deny the tremendous growth of the instinctual

heritage throughout the long socio-cultural evolution Because of their

serious inadequacy, psychologists have sought to attempt more broad-

based theories which can take in wider horizons of growth Woodworth59

and Klineberg60 referred to dependable motives, Thomas61 postulated

wishes, and Dewey62 introduced the concept of dynamic habit

Among these concepts which give due recognition to evolutionary

reality, the most significant seems to be that of sentiment French psycho-

logists like Ribot and Binet used it as a general term for the entire field of

affective life The evolution of the concept in the writings of Shand, from

8

SANSCRIT POETICS

his articles in the Mind of 1896 and 1907 to his mature work of 1914,

has made a great contribution by bringing out the distinction between

sentiments and emotions Shand pointed out that the sentiment, as a

product of social experience, is an organisation of emotions around the idea

of an object McDougall adopted the concept, adding his own contribution

Here he is able to exorcise the reductionism that clings to his earlier

thought, for he recognises the reality of growth and the significance of that

growth These are his views, in a very brief summary. The organisation

of the sentiment in the developing mind, is determined by the course of

experience That is to say, the sentiment is a growth in the structure of the

mind that is not natively given in the inherited constitution. The growth

of the sentiment is of the utmost importance for the character and conduct

of individuals and of societies It is the organisation of the affective and

conative life It is only through the systematic organisation of the emo-

tional dispositions in sentiments that the volitional control of the immediate

promptings of the emotions is rendered possible Again, our judgments of

value and of merit are rooted in our sentiments And our moral principles

have the same source, for they are formed by our judgments of moral

value The sentiments may be classified according to the nature of their

objects They then fall into three main classes . the concrete particular,

the concrete general, and the abstract sentiments-for example, the senti-

ment of love for a child, of love for children in general, of love for justice

or virtue

Here we have a formulation which perfectly harmonises with that of

Sanskrit poetics The Sthayi Bhava is not activated emotion, but the

abiding sentiment which can develop into emotion when confronted by

appropriate stimuli Gopinatha (seventeenth century) points out that,

although the erotic emotion (Rati) may be transient as a palpable state

of the sensibility, it ever endures as a latent reactivity and manifests itself

in the contexts which spark the relishable emotion The Sthayin (Sthayi

Bhava) is not pure instinctual legacy, but the result of its further develop-

ment by the cultural process For the Sanskrit theoreticians speak both

of inborn tendency or disposition (Naisargika Vasana) and also of acqui-

sitions through experience and study (Samskara) The crude emotion

associated with primary instincts is discounted in art, for it is stressed that

the delectability of an emotion depends on the fineness and complexity

that it attains in the course of evolution For instance, in the analysis

of the comic spirit, Bharata distinguishes between "laughing with" and

"laughing at" He also outlines a broad three-fold classification of laughter

according as men are refined, moderately refined or unrefined

The Sthayin is not Rasa, sentiment is not emotion, but the possibility

and promise of it Both Abhinava Gupta, the great philosopher

aesthetician of the tenth century and Bhoja, the king-turned-aestheti-

cian of the eleventh century, make it very clear that the Rasa is

different from the Sthayin The Sthayin is unmanifested Rasa The

aesthetic attitude is that in which the emotion, instead of being a nascent

dynamism generated for immediate motor expression in a practical encoun-

ter, is contemplated, relished, savoured The expressions used ( Rasana,

Chavvana, Asvadana ) are boldly borrowed from the physiology of taste,

especially the tasting of a liqueur of fine vintage Now, Sanskrit aesthetics

posits right from the beginning that a descriptive verbalisation cannot

communicate the flavour of feeling "Between the sweetness of the sugar-

cane juice, that of milk and that of palm sugar, etc there is great differ-

ence, and yet that difference it is quite impossible even for Sarasvati (the

goddess of learning ) to explain," wrote Dandin70 of the eighth century

The solution of the aesthetic task is brilliant in its psychological insight

Only sympathetic induction can communicate emotion Hema Chandra,71

the twelfth century polymath, uses the significant comparison of the sali-

vation produced automatically in one man who witnesses another relishing

a fruit with gusto The stimulus situation of ordinary life, therefore, has

to be transposed to art Bharata explains that just as a beverage is com-

pounded by various spices and herbs, so the sentiment is activated by the

significant organisation of the stimulus situation, whose focal stimuli,

supporting environmental pattern and depiction of ancillary emotions and

moods, compound the emotional flavour The metaphor of the beverage

is particularly apposite because of its plural significations If it is com-

pounded by various ingredients, its final flavour is unitary Likewise, says

Abhinava,72 the Sthayin is harmoniously mixed with the features of the

situation and the final Rasa is unique in its flavour, just as the beverage

is distinct in taste from each of its ingredients in isolation Govinda73 of

the fifteenth century says the same thing when he asserts that the Sthayi

Bhava is not Rasa but has to be brought to the relishable condition

( chaivanopayogi ) by organising a specific concretisation ( vyakt visista )

with the help of the stimulus and other elements ( Vibhavadi melaka )

Emotion cannot be communicated by information The witness of the

aesthetic presentation should experience a Longinian transport This can

only be done if the spectator confronts a situation identical to those in

real life which excite his emotion, but of course more idealised, far more

sensitively organised Here begins the careful work of transposing to art

the stimulus-situation which is valid in real life

The Vibhava is the prime stimulus which activates the sentiment More

accurately, it is the equivalent, in the creatively devised aesthetic situation,

of the stimulus in real life For Indian poetics never forgets to lay stress on

the continuous transitive action of the poet, the shaping of the material by

him for the ultimate end which is enabling the witness to experience the

inducted emotion Bhava is sentiment and the etymological variation

Vibhava, is deliberate, because the stimulus arouses emotion in a manner

which in its ultimate import is quite different from that in which emotion

is aroused in real life Abhinava Gupta,74 who makes this point, clarifies

it by pointing out that the causal relation which holds valid in real life is

10

SANSKRIT POETICS

significantly altered in the transposition to art The erotic sentiment may

be triggered into nascent erotic feeling by the sight of a pretty girl

in real life But, in the dramatic situation which is created by the poet,

everything becomes a medium rather than cause The spectator experiences

the erotic emotion by sympathetic induction from the actor, who is there-

fore a medium for the spectator The Vibhāva, the heroine, likewise, is

the medium, not the cause, through which the emotion arises in the actor

himself The Vibhāva has been further defined as the focus of the cogni-

tion which is preliminary to emotional reaction and which can make the

three kinds of representation, through words, significant bodily behaviour

and emotional display, capable of being sensed Thus, if love is the

aesthetic emotion which is intended to be ultimately communicated, the

introduction of a woman presents a stimulus, easily cognised as a stimulus

by the spectator, who settles down to react to the further shaping by which

the stimulus leads to the gradual transformation of the sentiment into

nascent emotion The dramatist uses the Vibhāva as a centre of condensa-

tion for the sentiment whereby it loses its opacity and hidden nature and

becomes visible and relishable

Emotion has an objective reference It arises in the presence of an

external stimulus As everything exists in some place at a certain time,

spatial and temporal factors form, with the primary stimulus, an integral

pattern Thus Sanskrit poetics distinguishes two types of Vibhāvas. The

basic stimulus (Ālambana Vibhāva) is the object which is primarily

responsible for the arousal of emotion, on which emotion depends for its

very being and which is its mainstay This is the stimulus of Konard

Lorenz's schematisation The enhancing stimulus (Uddīpana Vibhāva)

is the environment, the entire surrounding, which enhances the emotive

effect of the focal point of the object which primarily stimulates emotion

This is the right environmental situation of Lorenz which triggers the

innate releasing mechanism till then blocked The instances which the

Sanskrit texts give are, in the case of the erotic sentiment, woman as the

basic stimulus and a garden or the spring season as the enhancing stimulus

If Vibhāva is the basic stimulus, the centre of condensation, Anubhāva

is its behaviour which progressively achieves this condensation In the

erotic sentiment, the glance is the example most frequently cited by the

texts Quantitatively also, poetic descriptions of lovers' glances occur so

frequently in Sanskrit that they often become routine tricks of rhetoric

But the original insight into the physiology and psychology of emotional

experience should not be forgotten Here, what Simmel75 has written about

the sociology of the senses, especially of visual interaction, is relevant

enough to be briefly cited It is through the medium of the senses that

we perceive our fellowmen Sense impressions may induce in us affective

responses of pleasure or pain, of excitement or calm, of tension or relaxa-

tion, produced by the features of a person, or by the tone of his voice Of

the special sense-organs, the eye has a uniquely sociological function The

union and interaction of individuals are based upon mutual glances This

is perhaps the most direct and purest reciprocity which exists anywhere

The mutual glance between persons, as distinguished from the simple

sight or observation of the other, signifies a wholly new and unique union

between them The significant fact here is that the glance by which one

seeks to perceive the other is itself expressive. By the glance by which

one seeks to perceive the other, one discloses oneself By the same

act in which the observer seeks to know the observed, he surrenders

himself to be understood by the observer The eye cannot take unless

at the same time it gives The eye of a person discloses his own

soul when he seeks to uncover that of another These very interesting

observations of Simmel were cited to indicate that the concept of the

Anubhava, especially of visual interaction, was informed by insight on the

part of the founders of the theory In Katha Kali, the dance drama of

Kerala, which, like any other traditional dramatic or dance form in India,

goes back to Bharata for its original inspiration, the training of the eye

and its movements is one of the most difficult and thorough elements of

the discipline and its luminosity and colour are enhanced by artificial

means to make it the most conspicuous feature of the visage

The Anubhavas are the results of the excitation produced in the Vibhava,

say the heroine, as the dramatic situation develops The perception of the

excitation transfers it to the spectator by sympathetic induction, in a

parallel movement Here Bharata also mentions a new category, the

Sattvika Bhavas These are involuntary expressions and the brilliant ana-

lysis of the expression of emotions by Charles Darwin76 will enable us

to understand the significance of the concept He points out that actions

of all kinds, if regularly accompanying any state of the mind, are at once

recognised as expressive Though every true or inherited movement of

expression seems to have had some natural or independent origin, when

once acquired, some of these movements may be voluntarily and consciously

employed as a means of communication Thus the glance may be an

unconscious revelation of longing or a deliberate invitation (I remember

reading this smart performance by a publicity man “In Elizabeth

Taylor's gaze their lurks an intimate caress ”) The Anubhavas are,

properly, this class of voluntary expressions In terms of the physiology

of the processes, these are directed mostly by the rolandic motor region of

the nervous system But, in excitement, there are unconscious changes,

brought about by hormonic or endocrinal action, glandular discharges.

created by the action of the autonomic nervous system As Darwin has

pointed out, we can cause laughing by tickling the skin, but we cannot

cause a blush by any physical means, that is, by any external action on the

body It is the mind which must be affected, when it emerges as a smooth,

involuntary expression Such expressions constitute the Sattvika Bhavas

and Bharata includes in them blushing, change of colour, horripilation, the

breaking out of perspiration

12

SANḰRIT POĒTICS

Like Darwın, Bharata⁷⁷ also emphasises that these tokens of inward feeling cannot be induced by the action of another mind on oneself ( na sakyateʼnya manasa kartum ) They emerge only when one's own mind is stirred How can sorrow, he asks, which must be manifested by weeping, or joy which must be expressed by laughter, be delineated except by these spontaneous, involuntary tokens ?

And how can these spontaneous expressions arise, unless the mind is moved ?

They arise directly from the movement of the mind or sensibility ( manah-prabhavam ).

Bhoja⁷³ stresses that all forms of emotional expression ( Bhava ) are, in a generalised sense, Sattvika if you take Satva to mean mind, but he also distinguishes the involuntary expressions we are discussing as Bahya Vyabhicarı Bahya means external and the Vyabhicarı is the derived emotion that is the reflection of the enduring Sthayin as modified in specific contexts

Bhoja is thus emphasising the unity of the psychophysical organism and reading the involuntary expression of the body as the direct, spontaneous expression of inward feeling Bhanu Datta⁷⁹ ( fifteenth century ) proceeds further along the same lines He defines emotional states and expressions ( Bhavas ) in the poetic or dramatic presentation as modifications of feeling-reactivity appropriate to the emotion which is sought to be raised to the relishable state ( Rasanukula Vikara ).

He then classifies the Bhavas as internal ( Abhyantara ) and external ( Bahya ).

The latent reactivity ( Sthayin ) as well as the derived emotions ( Vyabhıcharins ) belong to the first group while the involuntary expressions under discussion belong to the latter group He agrees that they are physical manifestations ( Sarrastu sattvikabhavadı ) But he wants to distinguish voluntary emotive expression ( Chesta ) from inward feeling spontaneously emerging in expressive changes of the body ( Vikara ).

He makes his meaning very clear by arguing that a Chesta like an erotically provocative glance ( akshu madana ) is a willed gesture, while a Vikara like a tear cannot be made to appear at will

In Patanjali we read that by his time—second century B C—drama had emerged and there were men who specialised in feminine roles But Bharata insisted that feminine roles should be played by women and not by men and the reason he gives is very interesting No training can enable a man to acquire that psychic frame which is natural to woman in certain situations ⁸⁰ Here he has glimpsed the specificity of the endocrinal organisation which sex differentiation implies, for the involuntary Sattvika Bhavas of woman cannot be expressed by man According to Abhinava in his commentary on Bharata, a person is qualified to become an actor in proportion to his capacity, not so much for reproducing the physical conditions of an emotion in an emotive situation, as for orienting his sensitiveness in such a manner as to have the necessary mental states, from which the physical expressions would automatically follow ⁸¹

The last of these important concepts is that of the Vyabhıcharı ( or Sancharı ) Bhavas They stand for transient, but ancillary emotions Thus,

in love, joy in union and anxiety in separation are ancillary emotions They

are determined in their feeling-tone by the basic emotion and in turn

reinforce it. The action of the drama is not over in one situation or

episode It is extended into a plot with its changes, reversals, crises It

is necessary that the basic emotion should persist throughout all the

stages and it is equally necessary that it should modulate responsively to

each change in the situation This modulation takes colour from the

features of the changed situation but what primarily determines it is the

persisting basic emotion The modulations are the refractions of the basic

emotion when the perspective and the light and shade change The tran-

sient shades arise with their specific feeling-tones just because the basic

emotion is there, and it is what it is It is worth while recalling here

Grierson's characterisation of Donne's poetry as the "imaginative appre-

hension of emotional identity in diverse experiences, which is the poet's

counterpart to the scientific discovery of a common law controlling the

most divergent phenomena" 82 The dramatist, likewise, preserves the

emotional identity in the diverse experiences of the character and the law

here is the genetic relation between the basic emotion and the transient

feelings McDougall has stated that the sentiment, when once formed,

is the 'enduring basis of a considerable range of emotions and desires

which he calls derived emotions 83 These are the Vyabhichari Bhavas

McDougall clarifies the distinction between the primary and derived

emotions and classifies the latter into two groups the prospective emo-

tions of desire such as hope, anxiety, despondency, and the retrospective

emotions of desire such as sorrow, regret, remorse

II COMPARATIVE EVALUATION

It would be worthwhile now to attempt a comparative evaluation of the

fundamental theory of Sanskrit poetics which has been outlined above

For it will show that there is astonishing congruence between Indian

thought and world thought, although it may not be possible to find a

parallel elsewhere for the complete, integrated statement of the whole

theory as a precise and detailed formulation that we find in the Sanskrit

tradition

John Dewey is probably the thinker who has stressed most the conti-

nuity of the aesthetic with other experiences "In order to understand the

meaning of artistic products, we have to forget them for a time, to turn

aside from them and have recourse to the ordinary forces and conditions

of experience that we do not usually regard as aesthetic"84 For Dewey,

the relevant phenomena are basically biological "In life that is truly life,

everything overlaps and merges To grasp the sources of aesthetic

experience it is, therefore, necessary to have recourse to animal life below

the human scale "85 The mention of animal life below the human scale

is unfortunate, because it suggests reductionism But in view of the great

14

SANṢKRIT POĒTICS

stress laid on evolution by Dewey in all his writings, we have no difficulty

in interpreting the expression to mean that the modality of experience is

basically the same in animals and man, the essential processes being bio-

logical The work of art is treated, finally, in terms of experience. "The

real work of art is the building up of an integral experience out of the

integration of organic and environmental conditions and energies '86 The

work of art is not to be identified, except potentially, with a physical

object "It has been repeatedly intimated that there is a difference between

the art product (statue, painting, or whatever) and the work of art The

first is physical and potential, the latter is active and experienced."87

Dewey's views are identical with those of Sanskrit poetics Both see an

identity in the modality of experience, in life as well as art , both see aes-

thetic experience as an integration of organic energies and the environ-

mental stimuli that activate them As we shall see later, Sanskrit poetics

also stresses that art is activity (Vapāra) and not the physical art object

Drinkwater is referring to the Sthāyin of Sanskrit poetics when he writes

"We are brought back to the trite assertion that poetry is primarily and

immutably concerned with the emotions that do not change in a changing

world But truth, however trite, needs ever new witnesses "88 He also

relates aesthetic experience to experience in life "And all the time this marvel

of experience is related, more or less patently as the case may be, to the

common experience of life The poet is the most uncompromising of realists,

but his poem is 'reality transfigured'89 Because poetry deals with emotions

that do not change in a changing world, Sanskrit poets and dramatists have

had no difference in handling the same story or theme, mostly drawn from

the great epics, Rāmāyana and Mahā Bhārata, over and over again. The

attention of the creative spirit is transferred from the search for new stories

and plots to new and subtly varying treatments for arousing emotion This

has had the advantage of anchoring the bulk of poetry to what Dobrée90

calls "public themes" It is worth while mentioning here that Dobrée has

put forward the view that the poetry that is most widely loved and remem-

bered is so, precisely because it concerns itself with these great shared

emotions and that the decline in the power of universal communication of

today's poetry is due to the fault of poets who have abandoned public

themes

Now that we have seen the congruence in the approaches of both Sanskrit

poetics and Western thought in the identification of aesthetic and life

experience, we can proceed to the detailed morphology of the experience.

Throughout his many works, I A Richards91 has endeavoured to esta-

blish the identity of the neural and psychological processes in both ordinary

experience and aesthetic experience Take these varied instances ·

Pavlov's dog hearing a bell from a distant part of the mansion and there-

upon rushing incontinently to the drawing room , a man expecting a flame

when he hears the scratch of a match , a scientist in a laboratory observing

through an instrument and writing down a formula , a scholar expounding

a passage in Plato The only principles we need to interpret any of these

examples of the universal “sign situation” are, first, the fact that any res-

ponse of an organism to a stimulus from its environment involves at once,

though in varying proportions on different occasions, an appropriation of

the stimulus and a reaction to it and, secondly, the fact that the immediate

experience interacts with remembered experiences of like character in the

past to yield the final flavour of the experience 92 This analysis is identical

with that of Sanskrit poetics which sees the individual, alike in life and

art, reacting to the Vibhava or stimulus, the total reaction being com-

pounded by the basic reactivity (Naisargika Vasana) and the accrual to

the immediate experience of the funded similar experience of the past, the

acquisitions through experience and study mentioned by the Sanskrit

writers

The “sign-situation” mentioned by Richards can lead us now to the issue

of fundamental importance how the creative artist moulds his work as

a sign-situation which can transfer the experience to another Here

Mannheim’s analysis 93 of sign and form and the various strata of meaning

proves very helpful Every cultural product in its entirety will display

three distinct strata of meaning its objective meaning, its expressive

meaning, its documentary or evidential meaning The objective meaning

of a Greek statue is that it is a physical object sculptured out of marble to

represent a hero or a god Its documentary meaning refers to the cultural

and mythological background In both these levels, the artistic object func-

tions strictly as a sign But, when we come to the expressive meaning, we

begin to feel the need for distinguishing between meaning realised by sign

and by form respectively In one sense form is also a sign, but of such a

higher order of functioning that it is less dangerous to use a different word

altogether Expressive meaning is indeed embodied in the stratum of

objective meaning, but as a form within a form In theoretical discourse the

word is merely a sign of the expressive content, it only names it, the verbal

designation merely referring to it without being able to express it adequately

Sanskrit poetics has always resisted the attempts by grammarians to annex

poetic evocation as a form of the denotative power (abhidha) of words

Expressive meaning has to do with a cross-section of the individual’s

experiential stream, with the embodying of a psychic process which took

place at a certain time True expression is characterised by the fact that

some psychic content is captured within a sensuously formed medium,

endowing it with a second dimension of meaning And this capturing of

the psychic content is possible, concludes Mannheim, only if the sensuous

medium is not treated as something secondary and exchangeable, but is

given its individual form valuable on its own right As Whitehead 91 has

pointed out, each occasion of experience has its own individual pattern

And therefore, its expression, in an aesthetic representation, has to

acquire its specific form Medium and expressive meaning cannot be

separated here because the medium is moulded as the form of expression

16

SANSKRIT POETICS

Thus form, as Gurrey 95 has put it so well, is the shape which the poet's experience takes under the stress of words as well as the shape which the words take when subjected by the poet to a significant design As Ker 96 has luminously analysed the situation, poetry in one sense is all form , not properly the artistic treatment of the subject, but the subject so translated into form that the mind does not need anything else Contemplation of the form then becomes also contemplation of what is expressed, and is in fact the process of bringing about a combination of idea and expression , is, in fact, the process of becoming aware of the experience which is evoked by the words and at the same time of becoming aware that the words express that experience Therefore, in reading poetry one is not only receiving new impressions, but one is also receiving at the same time words to express those experiences And the two complex acts of impassioned, imaginative cognition and of full, precise expression of that activity are one the words both evoke experiences in us and express them for us

The true moment of appreciation, concludes Ker, is that in which we recognise the "form" of the imaginative creation

What is made clear in all this is that the language of discourse is a sign while the language of poetry is the spirit incarnated as sound and image, the Rasa taking form as the body of sound and meaning ( Sabdartha Sariia ) The aim of the poet, says Herbert Read, 97 "should be to get away from the tyranny of medieval logic—to return to the original processes of language formation The way back lies through the concrete image, the thing . . ."

The object in poetry and the objective situation in drama become expressive because, in reality, what we confront is not the object in solid neutrality but the effect it has created "Describe not the object itself," wrote Mallarmé, "but the effect it produces Therefore, a verse must not be composed of words, but of intentions All words must yield to sensation " 98 Kandinsky lays down a similar, relevant dictum "The choice of object must be decided only by the corresponding vibration of the human soul " 99 Malevich meant the same thing when he wrote : "The appearances of natural objects are in themselves meaningless, the essential thing is feeling " 100 Robert Henri gives a generalised formula valid for all art forms "The object, which is back of every true work of art, is the attain-ment of a state of being, a state of high functioning, a more than ordinary moment of existence In such moments, activity is inevitable, and whether this activity is with brush, pen, chisel, or tongue, its result is but a by-product of the state, a trace, the footprint of the state." 101 Chirico emphasises that art is the concretisation of the immaterial reality "A work of art must narrate something that does not appear within its outline The objects and figures presented in it must likewise poetically tell you of something that is far away from them and also of what their shapes materially hide from us " 102 The Chinese artist Li Juh-hua put the same thing more profoundly when he said "The brush comes to a stop, but the idea is without limit " 103

THE POETIC SITUATION

17

In poetry we are dealing with the universe of intuitivity, the creative intuition or Pratibha and the receptive intuition or Samvedana of Sanskrit poetics Poetic intuition intuits its expressive form and the transfer of the experience to another depends on the intuition of the latter As Ransom puts it, though rather wordily, a poem is really “an ontological and meta-physical manoeuvre” 104 The poet enshrines his own being in his work It is dangerous to forget even for a moment the inwardness of the whole reality we are dealing with here Writing on Ibsen, Rilke says “Farther in than any one has yet been, a door had sprung open before you, and now you were among the alembics in the firelight” Ibsen had passed through the world of action and appearance “as one crosses a vestibule” until he came to the place “where our becoming seethes and changes colour inside”105 Erich Heller, likewise, wrote “The Discovery and Colonization of Inwardness—this might be a fitting title for the story of poetry from the Renaissance to our day” But the inward experience has to precipitate its own form with such justness that intuition can recover from the original experience Form and spirit thus become a unity “The music of poetry,” wrote Eliot, “is not something which exists apart from its meaning ” Poetry does not refer to a material object closed in itself, but to the universality of being and beauty, perceived each time in a singular existence “It is not in order to ‘communicate ideas’, it is in order to keep contact with the universe of intuitivity ”106 Susanne Langer107 also has repeatedly insisted that art is not discursive but shows, it does not communicate but reveals Sanskrit poetics would query even the expressions “shows” and “reveals” and insist that emotion is not revealed so much as transferred by induction

This leads us to the profound nature of the concretisation of inwardness, of the Rasa into the complex of Vibhavas, etc The artist has to mobilise the logic of the visible at the service of the invisible, as Odilon Redon108 once said An utterance by a European poet which immediately forges a link with the outlook of Sanskrit poetics is that of Pierre Reverdy “Je suis obscur comme le sentiment” (I am obscure as feeling is ) Reverdy here should not be interpreted to mean that feeling remains eternally private, obscure and incommunicable He is stressing, like the Sanskrit aesthe-ticians, that feeling is the primary reality in art, that it is incommunicable by discourse, that it has to precipitate a transparent form through poetic intuition Eric Gill109 helps us here to proceed further “What is a work of art? A word made flesh a word, that which emanates from the mind Made flesh , a thing, a thing seen, a thing known, the immeasurable translated into terms of the measurable From the highest to the lowest that is the substance of works of art” This is the probing towards Clive Bell’s “significant form” which can be defined as form expressing and embodying an emotional experience The creative intuition is successful, if the emotion has its life in the poem and not in the history of the artist, as T S Eliot110 has stressed The meaning of this has to be

3

18

SANKSRIT POETICS

carefully understood as misunderstandings are possible. As the donated emotion was first experienced by the poet, it is an integral part of the history of his spurt But the objectification should be complete without requiring cues beyond the bounds of the presentation for effective transfer of emotion to others, the only demand on whom is the possession of the capacity for intuitive response

Bharata's pregnant, condensed formula for the transfer of the emotional experience, with its exacting requirement of building up an integral pattern of stimuli, corresponds to the requirements of concretisation indicated by Western thought on the subject which we briefly reviewed just now In fact it can be claimed to be a fuller and more precisely scientific statement Bharata's dictum indicates that in Sanskrit poetics the poet has to be a craftsman who has to feel first and then plastically shape and concretise that feeling Emotion has to be recollected in tranquillity, as Wordsworth said, in order to yield the poem Diderot had stressed this before him "Do you compose a poem about death the moment after you have lost your friend or mistress? No When the great pain has passed, when one is remote from the catastrophe, when the soul is calm, when the memory unites with the imagination, then one can speak well One says that one weeps, but one no longer weeps when one chases a striking epithet, when one is occupied in making the verse harmonious When the tears flow, the pen drops from one's hands , one surrenders to feeling and one stops composing"111 Schiller, who insisted on strict reciprocity of form and content, on "an actual union and interpenetration of matter and form", for which he used the term "living shape", also stressed the objectivity in creative craftsmanship which alone could concretise the subjectivity The poet must beware of "singing his pain in the midst of pain" He must write "from the milder and more distancing memory", never from present emotion "He must become a stranger to himself, must extricate the object of his fervour from his individuality"112

Since art is beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh, we here inevitably move in the direction of the sensually palpable context insisted upon by Sanskrit poetics, of what Diderot called a rhetoric of sensation, where sensation and emotion fuse and ideas become emotions rather than concepts Alexander Baumgarten defined aesthetics as the science of perception, the word being used in a special sense. To Baumgarten, art and poetry are "cognition", but not thought They are non-intellectual knowledge, "perception" The poem is defined as a "perfect sensuous discourse" Discourse, language, is the material of poetic art, and perfection means, as Baumgarten explains in detail, two things clarity ( which must not be confused with logical distinctness ) or vividness in representation ( the perfect Abhinaya of Sanskrit poetics ), and what we would call organisation, totality, wholeness 113 The change in meaning of the expression "sensuous" from "pertaining to the senses" to "pertaining to

THE POETIC SITUATION

19

beauty and art", effected by Baumgarten, is of far deeper significance

than an academic innovation 114 Kant also related the aesthetic

function to sensuousness understood in this sense The nature of sensuous-

ness is "receptivity", cognition through being affected by given objects 115

"Poetry, painting, music," wrote Herbert Read, "all these arts are skills

for raising the senses to that condition of insight, in which the world is

not transfigured but in which for the first time some aspect of it is revealed,

or made real and thereby, for human eyes newly created, newly

communicated "116 In poetry, thought also is transmuted and rendered,

as George Eliot has said in Middlemarch, "with that distinctness which is

no longer reflection but feeling—an idea wrought back to the directness of

sense, like the solidity of objects" Abstract words endowed with sensory

qualities—of sound, of texture, of feeling—make a "thought" which is not

logic but Poetic "Within these thought-images," George Whalley points

out, "the interplay of sensory and abstract can establish exquisite inter-

faces which, like the lips, transmit tingling shocks of acute sensation "117

What Whalley says about the linguistic tissue—Vachika-abhinaya—is valid

for the Abhinaya as a whole, the aesthetic presentation in its integrated

complexity, as conceived by Bharata For the sentiment (Sthayin), as

latent reactivity, is really an abstract, remote reality, which has to be raised

to the relishable condition through a sensuously palpable concretisation

Here, a voluntary expressive gesture (Anubhava) like a meaningful glance

and an involuntary expression (Sattvika Bhava) like a tear or a blush are

exquisite interfaces of the abstract and the sensory, for it is the activated

sentiment that leads to these sensory expressions and, in turn, is brought

to the relishable state by them. It is because these expressions transmit

tingling shocks of acute sensation that the Rasa experience is transferred

to the spectator by sympathetic induction

Though slightly archaic in flavour, Sidney Lanier's schematisation of the

process of aesthetic creativity is not unhelpful in clarifying the responsi-

bility of the artist in achieving a sensuous incarnation Seeking a very

generalised formula for all arts and using the terms in a very special sense,

Lanier says that every poem, from a sonnet to Macbeth, has substantially

these elements Hero, Plot, Crisis The Hero is the Ruling Idea, Plot

is the Idea's involution in complexities related to or clustering about it

and Crisis is the unity of impression sealed or confirmed or climaxed by

the last connected sentence, or sentiment, or verse of the poem The per-

fection of the work of art will consist in the simplicity and the completeness

with which the first is involved in the second and illustrated in the third 118

This schematisation is in harmony with the outlook of Sanskrit poetics,

which insists on a dominant Rasa for a poetic composition and its involu-

tion in the objective presentations that form the stuff of the work Bharata's

insistence on the significant pattern of concrete stimuli has similar

affinities with T S Eliot's insistence on "objective correlatives" The poem is the objective correlative of a state of feeling . " a set of

20

SANSKRIT POETICS

objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be a formula of that

particular emotion, such that when the external facts, which must

terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately

evoked"119 The emotion here is the Rasa of Sanskrit poetics, the set of

objects the Vibhavas, the situation their patterned, organised presentation

and the chain of events include not only the episodic stream but also the

stream of the emotive reactions of the characters to them, the Anubhavas

and the Sanchari Bhavas

A dim intuition of the complex psychological doctrine of Bharata is

latent in the preference of Keats120 for "a Life of Sensations rather than

of Thoughts" For art has to be sensuously palpable concretisation of

the inward state—in the complex of Vibhava, Anubhava, etc which

becomes the objective constellation of stimuli that will arouse the same

state in the relisher also Aesthetic theory in Europe shows a steady

intuition of this truth, though the thoroughness, precision and clarity of

Bharata's analysis are lacking Abercrombie121 wrote "The whole

purpose of a poet's technique is to make a moment of his experience come

to life in other minds than his " C P E Bach122 emphasises the need

for the musician to have experience himself before he can stimulate others

"Since a musician cannot otherwise move people, but he be moved him-

self, so he must necessarily be able to induce in himself all those effects

which he would arouse in his auditors, he conveys his feelings to them,

and thus most readily moves them to sympathetic emotions " I A

Richards123 moves closer to the mediate process in this transfer "Com-

munication takes place when one mind so acts upon its environment

that another mind is influenced, and in that other mind an experience

occurs which is like the experience in the first mind, and is caused in

part by that experience" Goethe124 clarifies the mediate processes further

"It was not, on the whole, my way, as a poet, to strive after the embodiment

of something abstract I received within myself impressions—impressions

of a hundred sorts, sensuous, lively, lovely, many-hued—as an alert

imaginative energy presented them And I had as poet nothing else to do

but to mould and fashion within me such observations and impressions,

and through a vivid representation to bring it about that others should

receive the same impression, when what I had written was read or

heard "

The immense prestige of Poe in France is intriguing, since his poetic

achievement is not very distinguished But it is also true that his analytical

writings have some valuable intuitions which were further developed by

Baudelaire and Valéry Poe125 follows the creative mind in the process

of externalising experience "I prefer commencing with the consideration

of an effect I say to myself, in the first place, 'Of the innumerable

effects or impressions of which the heart, the intellect, or ( more generally )

the soul is susceptible, what one shall I, on the present occasion, select?' "

This is the selection of the Sthavin whose Rasa shall dominate the com-

position

The next task is the conception of the complex of Vibhāva, etc

which will concretise the feeling "Having chosen a novel first, and

secondly, a vivid effect, I consider whether it can best be wrought by

incident or tone—whether by ordinary incidents and peculiar tone, or the

converse, or by peculiarity both of incident and tone—afterwards looking

about me ( or rather within ) for such combinations of events or tone as

shall best aid me in the construction of the effect " Baudelaire126 endorses

this approach "The artist, after having conceived the effect to be produced

in leisurely deliberation, must invent the incidents, and combine the

episodes most suitable for leading to the intended effect " Valéry paid a

very high tribute to Poe by claiming him to be the first to have examined

and reduced the problem of literary creation as a problem of psychology

and deliberately employed the logic and mechan.cs of effects "For the

first time, the relations between the work and the reader were elucidated

and given as the positive bases of art "127 Valéry defined the poem "as a

sort of machine for engendering the poetic state through the medium of

words" 128 He declared that experiencing the poetic state is not the

primary function of the poet, that is his own private affair His function

is to create that state in others , he has to inspire the reader 129 Eluard130

also affirms that the poet is he who inspires far more than he is inspired

"The poetic word induces us to become, rather than exciting us to

understand," wrote Valéry 131 "Poetry is not concerned with transmitting

to another what happens in one that is comprehensible by the intellect It

is concerned with creating in him a state, the expression of which ( in him )

will be precisely the same as that ( expiession ) which communicates the

state to him "132

Pirandello133 elucidates this with reference to the role of the actor, the

analysis thus coming much closer to Bharata "The image already

expressed ( in the dramatic text ) must return to organize itself in him

( the actor ) and tends to become the movement that brings it about and

makes it real on the stage For him, too, in sum, the execution must

spring alive from the conception, and only by virtue of it, by movements

thus set in motion by the image itself, alive and active, existing not only

inside of him but having become soul and body with him and in him "

In Claudel's analysis of these realities, the physiology of the sensation of

taste is used as analogy and more than analogy, exactly as in the Indian

tradition, especially Hemca Chandra The word can be used towards two

ends, says Claudel for producing in the reader a state of awareness or

knowledge, or a state of joy In the latter case, the poet is really trying

to create, through the medium of words, some sort of equivalent of an

emotion, which is "soluble" in the sensibility, exactly as the painter and

musician seek to create such equivalents with colours and sounds Here

expression becomes more important than the object The poet here makes

the reader participate in the creative, poetic action He places "in the

hidden mouth of his sensibility" an enunciation of the object or feeling

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SANSKRĪT POETICS

which is congenial to his intellect as well as his organs of physical

expression A series of complexes (constellated poetic stimuli) is released,

deployed in such a way that the reader is enabled to experience their

structure and "savour" simultaneously 131

Whilc Bharata is thus clearly endorsed by Western thinking in this field,

he still remains unique for the precision and penetration of his analysis

and the completeness of his statement Even in Eliot, many ambiguities

linger and precisely because the matter has not been thought out to its

depths For instance, the meaning of the distinction he makes between

emotions and feelings is not clear in terms of his own analysis. "The

business of the poet," he says, "is not to find new emotions, but to use

the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings

which are not in actual emotions at all " Emotions and feelings, he says

elsewhere, are the experience, the elements which enter the transforming

catalyst, the mind of the poet This statement would seem to suggest that

both emotions and feelings are the initially given realities which are further

processed by poetic action But the earlier statement suggests that emotions

are some sort of raw material which are refined into feelings by the aesthe-

tic process But this final feeling is also called a "new art emotion" and

aesthetic experience is completely separated from life experience in a

statement like this "The effect of a work of art upon the person who

enjoys it is an experience different in kind from any experience not of art."

Ambiguities pile up in the further elaboration "It (the effect of a work

of art) may be formed out of one emotion, or may be a combination of

several, and various feelings, inhering for the writer in particular words

or phrases or images, may be added to compose the final result Or

great poetry may be made without the direct use of any emotion whatever,

composed out of feelings solely. Canto XV of the Inferno (Brunetto

Latini) is a working up of the emotion evident in the situation, but the

effect, though single as that of any work of art, is obtained by considerable

complexity of detail "135 Trying to clarify the meaning of all this,

Williamson136 writes "If the business of the poet is to use the ordinary

emotions 'and in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which

are not in actual emotions at all', it is to be done by associating with

the basic or structural emotion a number of floating feelings which will

transmute or transform it into a new art emotion " Here the ordinary,

basic or structural emotion seems to correspond loosely to the Sthayin or

sentiment (though strictly it is not an emotion but a latent emotive

reactivity, as Bharata and Shand have clarified), the floating feelings to

the ancillary and derived feelings (Anubhava and Vyabhicarin) and the

new art emotion to the unitary Rasa, which is the Sthayin raised to the

relishable state within and through the matrix of all these various kinds

of stimuli patterned as an organic whole But Eliot's exposition is not

clear or definitive and is full of ambiguities

This comparative evaluation, even if it might have seemed a trifle wearı-

some to some readers, was necessary to rescue Sanskrit poetics from the

dusty immortality of the book-shelves and reveal its affinity with world

currents in aesthetic thought A cross-fertilisation, which would have

been immensely beneficent, has till now been blocked because Sanskrit

poetics has continued to remain a rather hermetic tradition

We may conclude this section by citing the views of two writers with

which Sanskrit poetics would be in complete agreement Tolstoy137 wrote

"To evoke in oneself a feeling one has experienced, and having evoked

it in oneself, then, by means of movements, lines, colours, sounds, or forms

expressed in words, so to transmit that feeling that others may experience

the same feeling-this is the activity of art It is a means of union

among men, joining them together in the same feelings, and indispensable

for the life and progress towards well-being of individuals and of

humanity " This reads like a summary of the general position of Sanskrit

poetics Ducasse138 writes in detail about the objectification and transfer

of the emotion and the affinity with Sanskrit poetics is so great that this

writer found it difficult to exorcise the feeling that he was reading a trans-

lated passage from one of the Sanskrit texts "An aesthetic symbol of

anger, i e an aesthetic object embodying anger, would be, among the

sorts of things which are evidences of anger, any situation allowing, or

still better, inviting aesthetic contemplation, and such as to yield through

it to us the 'taste' of anger-not the mere intellectual information that

some one is angry Such a situation might consist merely in the represen-

tation of behaviour emphatically evidencing anger (rather than in the

actual presentation of such behaviour, which might make impossible the

contemplative attitude) For instance, it might consist in the representa-

tion of a scowling face, or of the speeches of an angry man, such as those

of Achilles in his quarrel with Agamemnon Feeling is aesthetic feeling

whenever its status is neither that of a mere incitement to or accompani-

ment or result of practical activity, nor that of an accessory or by-product

of cognition, but is, on the contrary, the status of something sought or

entertained for itself, and simply 'tasted' The aesthetic feelings are not

qualitatively different from the non-aesthetic, and this involves that there

is no sort of feeling which may not on occasion acquire the aesthetic

status, or which art may not attempt to objectify " The features of this

formulation correspond absolutely with those of the formulation of

Sanskrit poetics The expression, "tasting" the emotion, could have come

directly from any Sanskrit text Sanskrit poetics forbids the bald report

or news (Varta) that some one is, for example, angry, above all it

expressly forbids the direct mention of the emotion which is sought to be

communicated And the means of this communication is Abhinaya,

representation, a term which Bharata uses to cover not only histrionics,

but libretto, music, dance and even the stage setting Ducasse later men-

tions the social, as distinguished from the private, objectification of emotion,

the test of the former being the object's capacity to impart in contemplation

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SANSKRIT POETICS

the artist's feeling not merely back to himself, but to others also The

entire poetic situation, plastically moulded by the psychological theory of

Sanskrit poetics, is such a perfected social objectification

III. POETIC TRANSFER

We can now take up the very important question how the poetic emotion

is transferred to another

The initial requirement of course is that the poetic situation has been

plastically moulded by the creative artist as a complex of the objective

correlatives of his own emotion Western thought has frequently stressed

that art is symbol "True art," Yeats observed, "is expressive and sym-

bolic and makes every form, every sound, colour, every gesture, a

signature of some unanalysable essence"139 Yeats stresses here that the

essence, the Rasa of Sanskrit poetics, cannot be communicated by dis-

course which is analytical, but has to be integrally embodied in form

Ezra Pound also stressed the need for poetry to be concrete "I believe

that the proper and perfect symbol is the natural object " We have to

interpret the expression "natural object" as standing, not for dead, neutral,

material entities, but the object as invested with the power of emotional

reasonance, the concrete stimulus shaped as a Vibhava in a poetic situa-

tion Pound clarifies that the particular in art is the symbol of generalised

meaning "Art does not avoid universals, it strikes at them all the harder

in that it strikes through particulars"140 In recent times it is Susanne

'Langer141 who has laid the greatest emphasis on the symbolic nature

of art She starts with the distinction made by Wittgenstein142 between

the discursive symbol and the presentational symbol Language is a tissue

in which different signs denoting particular objects are combined according

to the rules of syntax into complex symbols such as sentences These

express propositions which have the same logical form as the facts they

represent Presentational symbols do not act through the logical relation-

ship, but are direct concretisations "Music sounds as feelings feel

And likewise in good painting, sculpture or building, balanced shapes and

colours, lines and masses look as emotions, vital tensions and resolutions

feel Art is the creation of forms symbolic of human feelings " A

creative work, she holds, is a "single, symbolic form, which is the

embodiment of a feeling pattern" It is a virtual object, not a physical

object An art symbol, for her, stands apart from the personality of the

artist and at the same expresses his feeling That is, it has a concrete

reality which does not need any further reference outside the contours of

its form to the prior experience of the artist, because that experience has

been embodied in it The art symbol does not mean a sign pointing to

some other thing It is a creation in which the thought, passion and craft

of the creator take on a transformed life This is what Day Lewis143 also

meant when he wrote : "The poem must stand up after the poet has got

out from underneath it, it must apply beyond the individual experience

out of which it arose and carry meaning beyond the poet's own time and

social environment " Two modern poets144 accept this concept, which is

also the basic concept of Indian poetics, in their analysis of the technique

and effect of Sunset, a poem by E E Cummings, which presents "a com-

plicated recipe for a sunset experience", and if, used, "turns the reader

into a poet"

While all this emphasises that the art form embodies feelings, its transfer

to another is yet to be explained Here, the approach of Sanskrit poetics

is neatly summarised by Lacombe The aim of the creatively moulded

concrete symbol is "to suggest to the soul of the spectator or listener,

through a constellation of signes inducteurs, psychic states impregnated

with aesthetic emotion" 115 Let us clarify and vindicate this claim

Dhananjaya,116 the tenth century dramaturgist who belonged to the

court of King Munja of Dhar, begins with a simple illustration We often

see a child riding a stick and enjoying a horse-ride as it were He shows

all the physical signs and emotions of a horse-rider He tightens the

bridle, uses the whip and makes his mount gallop The question which

now arises is this "Is a horse the cause of this experience of the horse-

ride ?" How can it be so in its absence ? The experience therefore is

due to a medium, through which the child works himself up so as to

experience a horse-ride Just the same is the case with the situation

presented on the stage It is only a medium through which the actor

works himself up to a certain emotional pitch and consequently shows the

signs which are natural to that emotion The spectator, likewise, experi-

ences the emotion by identification with the actor, or more accurately, the

hero whose role is played by the actor The action of sympathetic induction

thus spreads in widening circles We have already referred to Hema

Chandra's use of the significant analogy of the salvation produced in a

man who sees another savouring a fruit

With the clarification of the concept of empathy by Theodore Lipps, the

key role of sympathetic induction in aesthetic experience is beginning to be

increasingly understood in our own time But one tribute which we cannot

hold back from the schoolmen, alike in East and West, is that they attack

and analyse their problems with monumental thoroughness The theory

of sympathetic induction is one about which great intellectual battles have

been fought in India The controversies have been immensely helpful in

aiding us to steer away from any simplicist reduction of the realities

involved

The approach of each controversialist to this specific problem is con-

sistent with his general philosophical outlook Thus, the Mimamsaka

philosophers of India adopted an uncompromising literalism in their study

of the Vedas and other scriptural texts They were thus committed to the

recognition of only the denotation (Abhidha) of words and situations

Lollata, who lived in the late eighth or early ninth century, was a

26

SANSKRIT POETICS

Mīmāṃsaka His writings, unfortunately, have been lost and we know

his views only from their brief review by Abhinava Gupta in his commen-

tary on Bharata 117 But it is clear that Lollata was one of the earliest

commentators on Bharata In Bharata's famous formula there were two

words of strategic importance, which were susceptible of radically

different interpretations. These were Samyoga or combination and

Nishpatti or emergence. He had said that when the Vibhāvas, Anubhāvas,

etc combined, Rasa emerged Lollata, who admitted only denotation,

interpreted Nishpatti as causal origination The Vibhāva or the stimulus is

the direct cause (Kāraṇa) of the aesthetic emotion, Rasa, which is therefore

an effect (Utpādya) To Lollata, Bharata's Nishpatti, emergence, is Utpatti,

causal origination

Abhinava Gupta's brilliant mind noticed at once that the literalism of

the Mīmāṃsakas would annex aesthetics to grammar and bring about as

complete an impoverishment in aesthetics as it had brought in philosophy

He saw that Lollata was confusing aesthetic communication with intellec-

tual discourse, the emotive symbol with the denotative sign The basic

reality in aesthetic experience is the sentiment and its activation Abhinava

argues that the sentiment, the Sthāyi Bhava, is not an object of perception,

which category alone can be embraced by an approach like that of Lollata

The Sthāyin is not an object of perception because it cannot be staticised

as an object existing at only one specific conjunction of space and time

It is an abiding reality of human nature The fact that it abides as a

potential reality, which rises to a relishable state only when the constella-

tion of stimuli, etc is present, further proves that it is not a material

object or reality Later writers brought forward other arguments as well

against Lollata Mammata148 of the eleventh century argued thus. An

effect, when it has been brought into existence, may continue to exist when

its efficient cause is destroyed But the life and reality of the aesthetic

emotion are circumscribed by the duration of the continuing contact with

the aesthetic stimulus-situation It disappears when the latter disappears,

a fact which goes to prove that the Rasa must not be taken as an ordinary,

mundane (laukika) effect Mammata, like Susanne Langer, is stressing

here that the object in art is a virtual and not a physical object and it

becomes a virtual object because the whole phenomenon is processual, the

process involving the activity of intuition and emotion Viśvanatha149 in

the fourteenth century raised yet another criticism Cause and effect can

not be contemporaneous If the Rasa is an effect, having for its cause

the perception of the Vibhāvas, then at the time of the relish of the Rasa,

the Vibhāvas would not be perceived, for we do not find the simultaneous

experience of a cause and its effect The perception of the touch of the

sandal-wood unguent and the perception of the pleasure produced thereby

cannot take place simultaneously, however rapidly the one may succeed

the other Here again, analysis is endeavouring to emphasise the cardinal

distinction between mere perception, or mere cognition in the case of

denotation, and the emotive reaction to it which is a subsequent event and

whose tone is not determined by the stimulus alone but also by the nature

of the sensibility on which it impinges

In the history of Indian philosophy, Mimamsa stagnated in literalism

and was displaced by Nyaya or Logic which was a far more fruitful

approach, although it forgot its limitations when it tried to annex aesthe-

tics This, indeed, was the attempt made by Sankuka who was a younger

contemporary of Lollata His work too has been lost Abhinava Gupta

being our only source for his views Being a Naiyaika or logician, Sankuka

tried to apply syllogistic reasoning to the experience of aesthetic emotion

He claimed that the Rasa was not produced as an effect, as Lollata claimed,

but was reached by the logical process of inference (Anumana) from the

denotational sense Govinda150 criticised this view on the ground that it

disregarded the well-recognised fact that the inferred perception or cognition

of a thing could never produce the same charm, the same aesthetic pleasure,

as direct emotive experience It has also been pointed out that aesthetic

emotion is not capable of being cognised by the ordinary means of

arriving at knowledge, for the feeling of Rama, the hero represented on

the stage, being past, cannot be cognised by the organs of sense belonging

to the present time and the present place It was the exponents of the

doctrine of suggestion (Dhvani) who led the most powerful attack on the

inference-theory and we have therefore to postpone a fuller discussion to

a later section when we shall take up the theory of suggestion But,

briefly, this is the summary of the criticism The aesthetic presentation

(Vibhavas, etc ) cannot be taken as the middle term in proving the

sentiment (Sthayin), because the Vibhavas do not stand in the same rela-

tion to the Sthayin as the middle term (Sadhana) does to the major term

(Sadhya) in a syllogistic statement, but are its suggestor (Vyanjaka)

The views of Lollata and Sankuka which held the aesthetic presentation

to be the efficient cause (Karaka-hetu) or the logical cause (Jnapaka-

hetu) respectively of the aesthetic emotion, thus, could not survive critical

attack The defect of both theories was that they sought to invest the

stimulus with a physical, automatic, compulsive power to evoke emotion

With Bharata, on the other hand, the accent was on the inwardness of the

situation, the intuitive always being with the sensitive heart, both in aes-

thetic creation and response We now come to a brilliant formulation,

which recognised the inwardness of the whole situation and gave very

suggestive insights, even if we have reservations in accepting it in its

entirety The thinker who gave us this formulation is Bhatta Nayaka of

the ninth century More keenly than in the case of Lollata and Sankuka,

we feel the loss of his work, the Hrdaya Daipana Again our source is

Abhinava, but the greatness of Abhinava is that in the summary state-

ment of the position of the other writers whom he intends to criticise he

is astonishingly objective and fair

In general philosophy Bhatta Nayaka followed the Samkhya system

28

SANSKRIT POETICS

Samkhya was an evolutionary theory, with nature evolving under the catalytic action of the spirit Like Lamarck, Bergson and Lecomte du Nouy, Samkhya believed that the need of organisms generated functions which produced organs including the brain and mind The purpose of the evolution of nature is enabling the soul the enjoyment (Bhoga) of experience In this relishing of experience, even the painful is transformed into positive experience as in the case of the experience of a great tragic drama, because the attitude is detached, aesthetic Such a philosophy of evolution and experience was full of cues that cried for extension to the field of aesthetic experience and Bhatta Nayaka undertook this extension

Bhatta Nayaka argues that the aesthetic emotion cannot be produced as an effect, because the causes, namely the constellation of stimuli in the aesthetic presentation, being non-realities, cannot bring about real effects That is, our sorrow when we see the sufferings of Rama in a drama is as genuine as our sorrow when we see a person in the same circumstances in real life But Rama cannot be the cause of our sorrow, in the sense that a person in real life can be the cause, for the gross reality of the situation is that we do not see Rama at all We only see an actor The aesthetic emotion cannot be inferred, because the real character, Rama, not being before the audience, his feeling does not exist as an actuality and what does not exist cannot be inferred Besides, how is it possible for the ordinary reader or spectator to identify himself with the extraordinary virtues of a hero like Rama ? To solve these difficulties, Bhatta Nayaka maintains that the aesthetic emotion is enjoyed in connection with the Vibhavas through the relation of the enjoyer (Bhojaka) and the enjoyed (Bhojya) He admits the denotational power (Abhidha) of the poetic statement, but regards it as insufficient as a total explanation He posits another power also for poetic expression, the power of generalisation (Bhavakatva) It is this which enables the Vibhavas to be sensed in their generalised character which rises above their specific contextual reference Thus, Rama's love for Sita is a particular which becomes the universal for love in general without the limitation of the reference to the agent or the object The third function is that of enjoyment (Bhojakatva) By virtue of this, the reader or the spectator relishes the experience aesthetically, not practically. This enjoyment is described as a process of delectation similar to the enlightened, self-sufficient and blissful awareness, arising, in the language of Samkhya philosophy, from the prominence of the attribute of goodness (Satva) in a man and different from the ordinary pleasurable experiences of the world. To make this last point clear, we have to recall that according to Samkhya, nature is compounded of three qualities, powers or potentialities The terms are difficult to translate because they telescope both physical conditions and psychological and even moral dispositions Tamas is physical inertia, mental apathy, the dark turbulence of the primitive impulses Rajas is dynamic energy, psychological extroversion, impassioned activism Satva is static, potential or

controlled energy, psychological poise, moral perfection This scheme is

surprisingly similar to the psychology of Plato's Republic with its reason-

able, passionate and lustful energies of the soul

Bhatta Nayaka's most important contribution is the clarification that

aesthetic experience is, to use the term of Ducasse,151 an endotelic activity

Activity is ectotelic when the end is external to and other than the activity,

as when we work in an office to be able to make both ends meet It can

be autotelic , it can have an end, but the activity is performed for its own

sake and the end is there only to increase the pleasure from the activity

This is the case with play Scoring a goal is not the absolute end or aim

A drawn match is not a total loss Or activity may be endotelic, as in

art The end is internal and real , real in the sense that it is not secondary

or trumped up as in autotelic activity , internal in the sense that it is not

determined by practical considerations but is really a state of being Bhatta

Nayaka stresses the role of the spirit as the aesthetic relisher (Bhojaka)

of experience His emphasis on the Sattvic nature of the sensibility makes

aesthetic experience contemplative and inward rather than governed by

practical considerations

His second contribution is the emphasis on the universalisation of experi-

ence in aesthetics In European thought the significance of this has been

emphasised ever since Aristotle gave the first clarification If Plato implied

that art was untrue, and based itself on episodes that were real only in

fancy, though they simulated the course of events in real life, Aristotle

pointed out that art was not a slavish imitation of reality, twice removed

from the truth Presenting, as it must do, individual men and women in

the circumstances of life, it does not stop there, but penetrates to what is

significant in action and character, expressing through their words and

actions what is true for all human nature, the poet's truth, the universal

If the poet must necessarily give us something less than physical reality--

in his verse he cannot give us the physical warmth of flesh and blood--

he makes rich compensation by giving something more, the universal reality,

evoking so much of spirit and heightened feeling as life itself can yield

only to the choicest minds and in their finest moments 152

If we now find that Abhinava Gupta has reservations in accepting Bhatta

Nayaka's formulation, it must be clearly understood that he does not deny

the realities that Bhatta Nayaka indicates but only their further analysis

by the latter Aligning himself with the position in logical analysis--

exemplified in Europe by the principle known as Occam's Razor--that con-

cepts should not be multiplied unnecessarily, Abhinava feels that it is not

necessary to staticise either the generalising function of poetry as a sepa-

rate power of Bhāvakatva or the appreciative activity of the reader or

spectator as a distinct, isolated power, Bhojakatva He refers back to

the sentiment or Sthāyin as an abiding inner reality compounded by basic,

inborn reactvities (Vāsanā) and latent impressions of experience He

also assumes the capacity for universal sympathy which, in the specific

30

SANSKRIT POETICS

context of aesthetic experience, manifests itself as sympathetic induction. He feels that the configuration of the aesthetic situation is enough to account for the universalisation of experience and its aesthetic relishing. For the stimulus-situation in art, unlike that in daily life, does not trigger motor action, practical involvement in the stream of represented action. The actor obviously is not Rama, and tomorrow he may be playing the role of Udayana Therefore the Vibhava can only be a medium for the activation of the sentiment. When the sentiment is thus activated by a non-practical context, the experience has to be a generalised one Aristotle implied this when he said in the very first chapter of the Poetics that poems are all modes of imitation That is to say, a play is not a slice of life but a picture or diagram of life On this Samuel Johnson gave the vigorous clarification in his Preface to Shakespeare (1765) : “It will be asked how the drama moves (its audience), if it is not to be credited. It is credited with all the credit due to a drama. It is credited, whenever it moves, as a just picture of a real original.” It is because drama is not life in the raw, but a diagram of life, that we do not rush up on the stage to rescue the innocent Desdemona as she is suffocated. Likewise, the relisher of aesthetic experience is not an isolated power or element of the personality which we need staticise as a Bhojaka. It is the entire personality in a specific attitude which Ducasse, for example, calls the attitude of “endotelic listening-in”. That is, the entire personality places itself in an attitude of aesthetic receptivity, heightening its sensitiveness as far as possible to the emotional suggestions of the aesthetic presentation and relishing those emotional nuances.

In one sense, the generalising power of a poetic tissue can be claimed to be as much a real property of it as its stratum of denotational meaning But while the denotation can be grasped by logical analysis, through grammar and syntax, the generalised emotive intimation is perceived only by sensibility, just as it is there in the poetic tissue, in the first place, because it has been concretised by the poet's sensibility. This again emphasises that we cannot afford to forget for one moment the inwardness of the aesthetic process Jagannatha153 of the seventeenth century was stressing this when he said that, in the depiction of love or erotic sentiment, the vicissitudes of union and separation relate to the interior reality, the heart's mood, rather than to the material context of external circumstances, for a couple can share the same couch and still there will be a gulf between them if the hearts are not united Allport154 unconsciously echoes this "What impersonalistic psychology is able, for example, to give an intelligible setting to the fact that my seat-mate in the street-car is distant from me, while the friend towards whom I am riding is already near me ?" Voltaire155 has a passage emphasising the inwardness and delicate sensitiveness needed in aesthetic appreciation which Regnaud156 quotes in his work on Sanskrit rhetoric because of its remarkable affinity with the Indian outlook “It does not suffice for (aesthetic) relish to per-

ceive or cognise the beauty of a work, it is necessary to sense it, to be

touched by it It does not also suffice to merely sense it, or be touched

by it, it is necessary to react to the different nuances This is yet another

identity between aesthetic relish and sensuous taste, for the gourmet can

immediately sense the blending of two liqueurs" (The metaphor of

savouring liqueur of fine blend, favourite with writers on Sanskrit poetics,

seems inevitable in any depth analysis )

Let us now move forward to a closer look at the exact inward processes

involved in the transfer of aesthetic emotion After discoursing on the

prime stimuli, congruent behavioural features and ancillary emotional reac-

tions (Vibhavās, Anubhavās and Vyabhichāri Bhavās) of love, Bharata

remarks "When all these are represented, aided by poetry, music and

histrionics, the deep-seated sentiment (Sthāyi Bhāva) of love is kindled in

the mind of the audience and developed to that climax, when, through

complete imaginative sympathy with the situation, the audience forgets all

differences of person, time and place, and the climax of emotion reveals

itself in a sort of blissful consciousness"157 The representation of the

stimuli as a concrete constellation emphasises that denotation is not

sufficient Thus, in the poetic text of the drama, which Bharata significantly

calls linguistic representation (Vachika-abhinaya) in harmony with his

general position that every element of the total pattern is an aesthetic

representation, the hero's anger cannot be communicated by the denota-

tional statement that he is angry Udbhata,158 the eighth century aesthet-

ician, went wrong here when he inclined to the view that Rasa has as its

seat (āspada) its own name (svasabda), that is, a denotational reference

to the emotion may help in arousing it For this he was strongly criticised

by Ananda Vardhana,159 the great ninth century exponent of the doctrine

of suggestion who belonged to the court of King Avantivarman of

Kashmir, by Abhinava160 and later by Mammata161 in the eleventh century

Mammata went to the extent of regarding the denotational mention of

the aesthetic emotion (Svasabda vachyatva) as the worst flaw (Rasa dosha)

in aesthetic representation It is again and again stressed in Sanskrit

poetics that emotion is essentially private, that the poet cannot communi-

cate it as he can a thought or image, that the aim should be to see that

the emotion arises in the spectator and that this can only be done by

managing an ideal revival (Udbodhana) in the spectator or reader of the

identical emotion Therefore he has to be confronted with a pattern of

stimuli into which the poet has plastically moulded his emotion, which

then is transferred induction

Here we can legitimately use the present-day knowledge of the process

for a fuller understanding Emotion can be evoked not only by the stimulus

which has the innate capacity of arousing it, due to the psychophysical

structure of the stimulated organism, but also by the perception of the

expression of the emotion in the behaviour of another The wild horse

is afraid not only when he sees or smells his carnivorous enemy, but also

32

SANSKRIT POETICS

when he hears the neigh of fear uttered by another wild horse, even though the object of fear perceived by the latter remains invisible to the former.162

It is worthwhile recalling here once again that voluntary and involuntary expressions of emotion (the Anubhavas) form the most important element in the histrionic discipline of Bharata The emotion first experienced by the poet is private, a state of his being If it is to be transferred, the only way is to make the spectator or reader live through the same experience and feel the same emotion This ideal revival is possible because human nature and experience are generally identical The emotional experience of the reader or spectator, being an ideal revival, goes back to his past experience as well as his basic reactivity But, as Mammata163 takes great care to emphasise, it is at the same time very much more than a reminiscence The past experience serves merely as a centre round which a new reconstruction takes place New nuances of emotion, not previously experienced, are possible through art and are in fact its most precious gifts (This could be the “new art emotion, different in kind from any experience not of art', which T S Eliot refers to, but he does not express himself very clearly ) Thus, aesthetic experience is as valid as experience gained in practical living, an autonomous and independent reality which is not a mere repetition of experience in the workaday world This will be made clearer later when we analyse the exact sense in which Bharata and Abhinava understand art's imitation of life

The need for sympathetic induction in the spectator is once again clarified by Abhinava in his emphasis on the sentiment and the emotion as the hidden realities with which contact has to be established through the medium of the aesthetic presentation We never rest content with the knowledge of adjectives but seek the substantives which the adjectives qualify Likewise, the Vibhavas, etc are not the terminal of aesthetic experience but the media which put us in rapport with the emotion back of them Bhoja164 stressed the same truth when he said that the Vibhavas, etc were like the meaning of separate words (Padaṭha) in their relation to the meaning of the sentence (Vakyārtha) as a whole They do not exist separately by themselves Their ultimate aim and sole justification are the manifestation of the Rasa They are only the means (Upāyamatta) for the latter Bhoja makes a subtle point when he proceeds to say that just as the meaning of separate words, though they are real, are not separately realised when we realise the meaning of the sentence, so quick is our emotive perception of the Rasa from the Vibhavas, etc that there seem to be no Vibhāvas at all nor even a process of transition (Krama) from them to the Rasa165

Abhinava stresses another subtle aspect of the situation Bharata had used the word “union” or “combination” (Samyoga) in his famous formula for the evocation of Rasa it is when the Vibhāvas, etc combine that the aesthetic emotion manifests itself Now Abhinava makes it very clear that this combination is an organismic integration effected by the creative aes-

thetic pattern In mechanical integration, the elements retain their specificity of function. In organismic integration, the function and import of

the elements take colour from the overall import and function Abhinava points out that each Vibhava, Anubhava or Vyabhichari Bhava cannot be

taken as specifically and invariably related to a particular sentiment Tears can arise out of both joy and sorrow Perplexity (Bhrama) and anxiety

(Chinta) can be the accessories of both extrovert activism (Utsaha) and the withdrawal of fear or insecurity166 What eliminates all ambiguity is

the total aesthetic pattern in which each of such features is organically embedded

Ananda Vardhana also emphasises that the reader or spectator should ideally reproduce in himself, with the aid of the suggestive, presented

elements and his own reactivity and feeling equipment, a mode of experience similar to the one, under the spell of which a poet has expressed

himself in the poem or aesthetic presentation in question167 These elements are the Vibhavas, etc which the poet has presented But being

only the objective correlatives of the emotion, they have to be imaginatively synthesised by the reader before they can recover for him the emotional

experience Poetic experience is a "felt reality for all relishers"—Samasta-bhavaka-svasamvedya Here samvedya is itself enough, as it means felt

reality But svasamvedya is used, it means "personally experienced"—an emphasis which is psychologically important, though perhaps etymologically unnecessary, since "experience" has to mean the personal experience of someone And this experience, Ananda Vardhana emphasises, is

an indivisible, integral, unitary aesthetic experience (Aikhanda Charvana) and Rasa means this experience.168

CHAPTER TWO

The Poetic Circuit

I THE WORLD AND THE POET

One of the most significant contributions of Sanskrit poetics is its clear delineation of a circuit of poetic experience In conformity with its general outlook, which identifies the modality of poetic experience with that of experience in life, in terms of stimulus and response, the circuit starts with the world itself, the womb of all experience The next element is the creative spirit, the poet, who reacts intensely to the world and can embody his reaction in a form which is a socially valid objectification This form indeed is the third link in the circuit The fourth is the Sahrdaya, the receiver of aesthetic experience, the spectator of the drama or the reader of poetry Etymologically the term means that he is “of like heart” with the creative spirit The circuit is complete when aesthetic experience makes the Sahrdaya a more sensitively functioning entity in the world, with enriched and more refined reactivities

“Without the stimulus and variety offered by contact with nature and the world about him, his (the artist’s ) work would tend to become monotonous and devitalised and would grow too subjective in character,” wrote Margaret Bulley1 Somerset Maugham2 clarifies this interaction between world and art “The author does not only write when he is at his desk He writes all day long, when he is thinking, when he is reading, when he is experiencing Everything he sees and feels is significant to his purpose and, consciously or unconsciously, he is for ever storing and making over his impressions” Sickert emphasised the need for “cumulative and silent observation a manner of breathless listening, as it were, with the eyes, a listening extending over a long series of years”3 Marin wrote “Seems to me the true artist must perforce go from time to the elemental big forms—Sky, Sea, Mountain, Plains—and those things pertaining thereto, to sort of re-true himself up, to recharge the battery For these big forms have everything But to express these, you have to love these, to be a part of these in sympathy”4 Here we see that what is essential is not mere objective cognition of the variety of the world, but sympathetic interpenetration with its various elements and its life Rodin made this clear when he said that the artist’s eye,

34

grafted on his heart, reads deeply into the bosom of nature

The experience is not a hot-house product of closed subjectivity, for the world with

its power floods into the heart This is what Hopkins called the "inscape",

that stirring of something in the world whose passage into himself he

called "instress" On the other hand, the experience is not a complete

donation of the outside world to the human spirit As Abrams

has emphasised in his study of romantic poetry, the artist is not content merely

to hold the mirror up to nature, but seeks to cast over the world "the

light that never was on sea or land, the consecration and the Poet's dream"

Wordsworth revealed the true nature of the bipolar field of interaction

which is aesthetic experience when he said that the imagination was "creator

and receiver both" and when he described humself as a lover "of all the

mighty world of eye and ear—both what they half-create and what they

perceive" The world and the self, thus, have to interpenetrate "When

he (the artist) has succeeded in dissolving the world in his pure subjecti-

vity," wrote Gentile,

"that is to say, in feeling it, then only can he express

it, drawing from himself what has flowed into him, and analysing in the light

of consciousness the dim and formless matter within him, the mere feeling "

The reality of the interpenetration of the world and the self has been

brought out by Rilke

in a superb passage which it is worthwhile reproduc-

ing here, though it is slightly long "Verses are not, as people imagine,

simply feelings , they are experiences In order to write a single verse,

one must see many cities, and men and things One must get to know

animals and the flight of birds, and the gestures that the little flowers

make when they open out to the morning One must be able to return in

thought to roads in unknown regions, to unexpected encounters, and to

partings that had been long foreseen , to days of childhood that are still

indistinct, and to parents whom one had to hurt when they sought to give

one some pleasure which one did not understand (it would have been a

pleasure to someone else) , to childhood's illnesses that so strangely begin

with such a number of profound and grave transformations, to days spent

in rooms withdrawn and quiet, and to mornings by the sea, to the sea

itself, to oceans, to nights of travel that rushed along swiftly and flew with

all the stars—and still it is not enough to think of all this There must

be memories of many nights of love, each unlike the others, of the screams

of women in labour, and of women in childbed, light and blanched and

sleeping, shutting themselves in But one must also have been besides

the dying, must have sat beside the dead in a room with open windows and

with fitful noises And still it is not enough to have memories One must

be able to forget them when they are many, and one must have the immense

patience to wait until they come again For it is the memories themselves

that matter Only when they have turned to blood within us, to glance and

gesture, nameless and no longer to be distinguished from ourselves—only

then can it happen that in a most rare hour the first word of a poem arises

in their midst and goes forth from them "

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ŚANSKRIT POETIĆS

While apologising for the length of this quotation which, if casually and unsympathetically read, might read like an inventory of the stuff out of which poetry can be made, I must hasten to add that it was necessary for bringing out the affinities between Sanskrit poetics and world currents.

Analysing the form of the Kavya or the extended narrative poem, Dandin9 of the eighth century also mentions a string of features which read like an inventory The subject should be taken from old narratives or traditions, not therefore invented, as regards its main episodic stream. That is, its historicity should be essentially valid , it should have, or at least could have, formed part of the world's events, of the experience of men in the world.

The hero should be sensitive and noble, because he has to react deeply and ideally to the world first, before he can become a medium which can enable the reader to react similarly.

There should be descriptions of towns, oceans, mountains, seasons, the rising and setting of the sun and moon, sport in parks or the sea, drinking, love-dalliances, separations, marriages, the birth of progeny, meetings of councils, embassies, campaigns, battles, and the triumph of the hero, though his rival's merits may be exalted.

The enumeration has an archaic flavour. But it is obvious that Dandin was keeping in mind as a model Valmiki's Ramayana It is also true that many of the later epic poems reveal a dismal misunderstanding and use the features mechanically as an inventory very convenient for padding But the meaning should be clear, especially when we remember Valmiki.

The epic poem should paint a great fresco of man in the world, of life, of human action straddling a vast landscape and continued over seasons, years and generations, of character and personality being moulded by the world and in turn reacting on it.

In epochs when poetry became a cult, a substitute for living instead of the grace of a perfected living, the theme of escape became a very familiar one Many nineteenth century French poets turned to the theme of flight . back to childhood, into the distant past, to other lands real or fanciful, into artificial paradises created with a variety of stimulants.

Baudelaire's fancy is always setting sail for exotic lands ; sometimes it wants to sail away from this world altogether.10 Leconte de Lisle11 felt that the poet had no place in an industrial, technocratic culture and vigorously defended his preoccupation with the past, the preference of the dead over the living Mallarmé was deliberate in his commitment to create a world divorced from empirical reality, "an abstract realm, superior, situated nowhere" 12

The restricted evolution of the Sanskrit language won immense prestige for the Nāgaraka, the cultured urbanite, as the ideal social type, have in fact tended to make a substantial proportion of the literary output in Sanskrit also a courtly tradition with closed horizons where preciosity often supplanted depth and range of feeling But the profounder ideal of the poet as well as the Saindaya, who could feel with men and women and indeed all created things in the variety and depth of

their experience, was also continuously active In a drama like

Bhavabhuti's Uttara Rama Charita, memories, not only of "nights of love,

each unlike the others", but also of the heart-breaking demands made by

the world for moral decisions which can compel a king to inflict terrible

wounds upon himself as individual, turn to blood within the poet, his

characters and lastly within us

If the world, the prime source of all experience, is the initial point in the

circuit of poetic experience, the second element is the poet Ananda

Vardhana13 describes his role in exalted language The poet is a creator in the

boundless world of poetry The universe appears to assume that from which he

is pleased to give to it Whatever be the emotion (either love or pathos

or heroism ) with which he charges his poem, the world becomes immersed

therein Mahima Bhatta14 in the eleventh century uses equally lyrical language

Poetic genius (Pratibha) is like the third eye of God Siva, with which the

poet perceives the shape of things, past, present and future Poetic conscious-

ness touches for a moment the Real Essence of the world 15

What are the requisites of a poet,16 the gifts that go into the making of

a poet ?17 Creative genius (Pratibha) is of course the basic requisite

About culture (Vyutpatti) there is difference of opinion While stressing the supreme

importance of the creative imagination, Rudrata18 of the ninth century

and Hema Chandra19 of the twelfth incline to the view that culture and

practice can polish, brighten, and sharpen the imagination Sanskrit

poetics, thus, would not agree with Ben Jonson20 that "a good poet is

made as well as born", but would be inclined to assent to this opinion of

• Horace21 . "The question is whether a noble song is produced by nature

or art I neither believe in mere labour being of avail without a rich vein

of talent, nor in natural ability which is not educated " Though Coleridge22

distinguished genius and imagination from the corresponding lower facul-

ties, talent and fancy, regarding the former as unifying and reconciling and

the latter as only combinatory and thus mechanistic and associationist, he

did not regard the two groups as mutually exclusive Rather, genius

needed talent and imagination needed fancy He left empirical and asso-

ciationist thought undisturbed in a subordinate position below an idealistic

system Ananda Vardhana,23 while not directly contradicting such views,

wants to make it clear beyond any ambiguity that the supreme position is

reserved for creative imagination He says that if the poet has the creative

power (Sakti or Pratibha) the defects that may arise from the lack of

culture or learning will be cancelled, whereas, if the poet is deficient in it, and

has only learning, the defects in his composition will stand out as conspicuous

features unassimilated into the poetic organism This seems to be very similar

to the view of Keats "The Genius of poetry must work out its own salvation

in a man It cannot be matured by law and precept, but by sensation and

watchfulness in itself That which is creative must create itself "

The consensus of opinion is that the creative imagination is a native

38

SANSKRIT POETICS

endowment Bharata21 designates it as the "internal disposition" (Antargata Bhava) of the poet Both Bhamaha25 of the seventh century and Dandin26 of the eighth acknowledge the supremacy of the creative imagination which is said to be endowed by nature (Naisargiki) or inborn (Sahaja) Vamana27 of the eighth century, who seems to have been the minister of King Jayapida of Kashmir, puts this more emphatically. He asserts that in creative imagination lies the seed of poetry (Kavya Bija) and defines it as an ante-natal capacity of the mind without which no poetry is possible and if attempted the poetic performance would only become ridiculous Abhinava28 quotes Bharata's opinion that creativity is an internal disposition and proceeds to his own elaborate definition of it as consciousness or sentience (Prajna) capable of original invention (apuuva-vastu-numana-kshama), its distinguishing characteristic being the capacity of creating poetry, possessed of relishable feeling, clarity and beauty (rasavesa-vaisadya-saundarya-kavya-numana-kshamatvam ) Mammata29 aligns himself with the view expressed by Vamana though he uses the more general term, power (Sakti) for poetic creativity (Pratibha) Another definition is cited as anonymous by Hema Chandra,30 though Kshemanda31 (eleventh century) thinks it was formulated by Abhinava's teacher, Bhatta Tauta, in his lost work Kavya Kautuka Here poetic imagination is defined as the consciousness that can body forth ever fresh presentations (Prajna-nava-navollekha-salini ) This corresponds to Dr Johnson's statement that the "essence" of poetry is "invention"32

There is another quotation in Hema Chandra from Tauta in which Tauta speaks of the greatness of the poet, whom he calls Sage and Seer Hema Chandra uses this quotation while speaking of the etymology of the word Kavi, poet The Kavi has Darsana or vision and Vamana, the power of description or objective presentation Without the latter the Seer does not become a poet Poetry is not mere vision, but vision objectified in poetic cast, Vamana33 Lowell34 has a passage which expresses the same outlook "However far we go back, we shall find that the poet and the priest were united originally in the same person, which means that the poet was he who was conscious of the world of spirit as well as that of sense, and was the ambassador of the gods to men This was his highest function, and the reason for his name of 'seer' . Gradually, however, the poet as the 'seer' became secondary to the 'maker'. His office became that of entertainer than teacher But always something of the old tradition was kept alive And if he has now come to be looked upon as merely the best expresser, the gift of seeing is implied as necessarily antecedent to that, and of seeing very deep too " Focussing attention on the danger of poetry degenerating into shallow verbalism, Lowell here places the accent on prior vision Bhatta Tauta takes vision for granted as the initial reality without which poetry cannot come into being and therefore he proceeds to lay emphasis on the power of creative objectification Raja Sekhara,35 the tenth century writer, brings out the same idea by

stating that poetic imagination has two aspects, appreciative (Bhavayitri)

and creative (Kavayitri) The appreciative aspect is generally discussed

with reference to the role of the reader or spectator But it also refers

to the poet's own role, his own appreciation of the world and sensitive

reaction to it which yield the vision (Darsana) that is later enshrined

through the power of objectification (Varnana) When Maritain36 asserts

that creativity of the spirit is the first ontological root of artistic activity

in the vital dynamism of fine arts, prior experience should be taken as

elliptically understood Only when sensitive experience is the great prior

reality can a good book, as Milton puts it, become "the precious life-blood

of a master spirit embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond

life" And if Sanskrit poetics stresses the power of poetic imagination for

ever original invention (Nava navolekha) it would essentially agree with

Ruskin's claim that "the virtue of originality that men so strive after is not

newness" it is only genuineness" But it is the genuineness of a rare vision

gained through a rare capacity for the most sensitive experience and there-

fore, for less sensitive reactivities, it cannot but appear as original

Alike in the prior vision and the subsequent objectification, the primary

reality is the dynamism of the aesthetic process Sanskrit poetics repeatedly

emphasises the continuous transitive action of the poet, on the world so

that it will yield to him the mystery of its deeper essence in his vision and

feeling-response, on his medium so that it would mould to shape under

his plastic, creative handling and thus become a transparent symbol for

feeling which was originally private and opaque Thus, we find writer after

writer emphasising the importance of the poet's action (Kavi Vyapara or Kavi

Karma), the continued, unremitting activity of the poetic consciousness

Whenever controversy tended to get bogged down on the details of formal

elements, this concept has proved immensely helpful in pulling it up again

to a higher perspective, for what gives any formal element or technical detail

its power is the reality of the poetic action behind it Bhatta Nayaka, as

Jayaratha37 of the thirteenth century points out, made the poet's action

(Vyapara) which makes both sound and sense, expression and idea, subser-

vient to itself, the basic reality in poetry Kuntaka38 of the eleventh

century, who formulated a significant theory of poetic expression which we

shall discuss later, also agreed in deriving the unique quality of poetic

expression from the activity of the poetic consciousness (Kavi Karma)

Reviewing the many theories which emphasised the importance of either

idea or expression, Samudra Bandha,39 who wrote about 1300, summed up

the situation by saying that only an inclusive theory which recognised

the importance of both the expression and the expressed and derived both from

the activity of the poet's genius which shaped everything could be finally

acceptable Raja Sekhara40 also states that neither the idea nor the word

but the manner of expressing that idea in words (Ukti Visesha) is what

makes poetry Nilakantha Dikshita41 of the seventeenth century echoes

the same thought in almost the same terms

40

SANSKRIT POETICS

Susanne Langer42 makes an important distinction between the physical object and the object created by aesthetic activity The latter has a physical existence, but it is not a physical object, it is a virtual object This is because the real potency of the artistic creation is not exhausted by its finite reality As Coleridge says, the infinite spirit presents itself through the finite object Subject in one aspect, object in another, the work of art is both infinite and finite "In the existence, in the reconciling, and the recurrence of this contradiction consist the process and mystery of production and life The intelligence tends to objectize itself and to know itself in the object"43 Because artistic productions are not evolutes of nature, given elements of physical creation, their reality does not depend on physical reality, but on the fact that they are real creations of poetic power Mammata44 illustrates this with reference to the painting of a horse and explains further that art objects have no place in the everyday world of space and time Because of this freedom from the limitation of spatio-temporal locus or physical status, the question of physical reality ceases to be applicable to them This does not mean that they are unreal It only means that the distinction of physical existence and non-existence does not arise at all in their case This seems to have been the position of Yayavarlya also, as recorded by Raja Sekhara 45 In poetry, things are not what they are physically, but what they are to the mind of the poet Raja Sekhara also quotes the opinion of his talented wife, Avanti Sundari, who says "There is no constant nature of things, so far as poetry is concerned For the poet's mind and poetic expression conceive of things in all sorts of ways" The objective reality which science investigates is not what counts here, but the reality of the poetic reaction, the reality created as a new order of virtual existence by poetic action Purely imaginative creations thereby become as palpable, to quote a favourite idiom of Sanskrit poetics, "as a gloubular berry in the palm of one's hand".

It is because the power, the halo, donated by the poet's spirit is of far greater significance than the contours of the object as given that Sanskrit poetics has insisted that there can be no such distinction as poetic and unpoetic subjects Bhamaha46 of the seventh century, one of the oldest writers on poetics, states that there is nothing in the realm of being or in that of thought which does not serve the poet's purpose Bradley47 states the same thing when he asserts that "we cannot determine beforehand what subjects are fit for art, or name any object on which a good poem might not possibly be written" Bhamaha had indicated that any thought could also be transmuted into poetry It is interesting to note that a reviewer48 found a poetic transmutation of the second law of thermodynamics in these lines of Robert Frost

And even substance lapsing unsubstantial,

The universal cataclysm of death

That spends to nothingness

Dhananjaya

19

endorses

Bhamaha

"Nothing

is

there,

in

the

world,

whether

it

be

delightful

or

detestable,

high

or

low,

gross

or

elegant,

occult

or

deformed,

entity

or

non-entity,

which,

when

touched

by

the

imagination

of

the

poet

and

men

of

taste,

does

not

become

Rasa

"

This

is

because

poetry,

even

when

overtly

dealing

with

a

subject,

is

a

new

creation

"In

the

boundless

world

of

poetry,"

said

Ananda

Vardhana,

50

"the

poet

is

the

sole

creator

"

The

object

is

recreated

and

acquires

a

personal

reference

to

the

creator

"In

looking

at

objects

of

nature,"

wrote

Coleridge,

51

"I

seem

to

be

rather

seeking

a

symbolical

language

for

something

within

me

than

observing

anything

new

"

Beauty

is

"the

subjection

of

matter

to

spirit

so

as

to

be

transformed

into

a

symbol,

in

and

through

which

the

spirit

reveals

itself

"

The

infinite

objects

of

the

world

can

be

annexed

and

assimilated

to

the

realm

of

spirit

if

the

poet

"can

see

them

feel

or

link

them

to

some

feeling

"

As

Coleridge

said

in

the

Nightingale,

"in

nature

there

is

nothing

melancholy",

nor

is

there

anything

glad

And

he

emphasises

the

supreme

importance

of

Kavi

Vyapāra,

the

poet's

action,

in

Dejection

when

he

says

that

in

us

lives

"the

spirit

and

the

power

which,

wedding

nature

to

us,

gives

in

dower

a

new

Earth

and

new

Heaven

"

This

truth

is

valid

not

only

in

poetry,

but

for

all

the

arts

In

Van

Gogh,

for

instance,

as

Shapiro

52

has

pointed

out,

in

every

painting

we

experience

his

exaltation

before

things

In

him

the

opposites

of

reality

and

emotion

are

united

and

reconciled

Van

Gogh

53

himself

has

recorded

that

he

yearned

"to

express

hope

by

some

star,

the

eagerness

of

a

soul

by

a

sunset

radiance"

And

Malraux

has

rightly

called

his

famous

painting

of

the

chair

an

ideogram

of

himself

II

THE

POEM

AND

THE

WORLD

In

the

discussion

of

the

creative

transformation

by

which

the

natural

object

becomes

the

ideogram

of

the

poet's

personality,

we

have

moved

on

to

the

interface

between

the

second

and

third

components

of

the

poetic

circuit,

the

poet

and

his

socially

objectified

self-expression,

the

poem

For

the

ideogramatic

quality

refers

back

to

the

poetic

action

which

created

it

and

forward

to

the

poem

in

which

it

is

concretised

Form,

structure,

style,

ornament,

all

are

organic

features

of

the

poetic

creation

and

since

their

extended

analysis

is

taken

up

in

several

chapters

that

follow,

here

we

shall

concentrate

only

on

a

basic

issue

the

relation

of

the

poem,

the

third

term

in

the

poetic

circuit,

to

the

world,

which

is

the

first

term,

the

mediating

agent

between

the

two

being,

of

course,

the

poet

Bharata

54

states

emphatically

that

the

basis

of

authority

or

authenticity

(Pramāna)

for

the

dramatic

representation

is

the

world

A

theorist

can

only

give

initial

guidance,

the

rest

can

be

learnt

only

from

the

world

He

emphasises

that

one

has

to

know

the

infinite

variety

of

human

nature—

(Prakrti)

and

the

habits

and

manners

generated

by

the

socio-cultural

process

(Sīla)—since

it

is

on

this

that

drama

is

based

42

SANSKRIT POETICS

And finally, in judging drama, the ground of reference for the success of

the art is the world But is art an exact imitation of the world ?

If

the basis is the world, Abhinava significantly compares it to the wall

( Bhithi Samya ) which is further beautified by murals The ways of the

world ( Loka Dhamni ) only furnish a canvas What fills it with significance

is the creative act of the poet The expression "imitation"—of life—does

occur in Sanskrit poetics ( Anukaranam ) But Abhinava takes great

pains to point out that Bharata had used a different word, Anukirtanam

It is difficult to translate this very significant expression in one word The

distinction which Abhinava establishes between Anukaranam and Anukir-

tanam broadly suggests the distinction between a song on life and a psalm

of life Abhinava explains the word as meaning Anuvyavasaya Vyavasaya

means work or activity and the expression implies working with nature or

working in the manner in which nature works This means that art does

not imitate the forms which are the end products of nature's activity but

imitates that creative activity itself Since Kirtanam means a psalm, an up-

ward-soaring expression of idealism, there is implicit here the belief that there

is an upward trend in the evolutionary processes of nature which aesthetic

insight should imitate to further that creative evolution

There is a philosophical background to this, a brief exposition of which

will help in clarifying the meaning Among the many philosophical systems

of India, the Samkhya doctrine was definitely a doctrine of evolution In

its explanation of the mechanism of evolution, Samkhya is opposed to the

outlook which reduces it as a casual sequence resting on accidents Random

mutations in the genes, and the action of the struggle for existence on the

resulting variations in the capacities of organisms for survival imply essen-

tially a series of accidents Like Bergson and Lecomte du Nouy, Samkhya

affirms a broad inner orientation or self-direction in nature The need of

the organism for a rich, diversified contact with the world generates the

function ( sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch ) and the function produces

the organ ( eye, ear, nose, tongue and skin ) The brain and mind are also

physical realities produced by the evolution of nature But there was one

difficulty in the Samkhya formulation It posited an absolute dichotomy

between spirit ( Purusha ) and matter ( Prakrti ) The presence of spirit

catalytically activates matter to evolve, but it is itself completely aloof

from the evolutionary process The insistence on this absolute dichotomy

reflects certain trends in the prior philosophical tradition which had con-

trasted the world's flux with the unchanging Absolute existence and seen

in the former a graded-down reality, if not a complete alienation from

real existence

Vyasa who gave us the Gita, resolved this difficulty If he was a great

philosopher, he was an even greater poet As a poet he could not agree

to the rejection of the crowded splendour of the world, its tensions, pains

and ecstasies The teleological trend in the processes of nature did not

seem to him to be congruent with the Samkhya assumption that nature

was dead, inert, insentient, prodded into evolutionary process by the action

of a remote, merely catalytic, agent He asserted that spirit was not aloof

from the world, but its inner guiding power He also derived historical

existence as a divine programme and man could become the ally of God

when he recognised it as such The Pratyabhijña (which essentially means

this recognition ) doctrine to which Abhinava and his teacher Utpala

adhered, also moved away fiom the Samkhya dichotomy to the Gita's

integration Creation is God's manifestation of Himself , to Himself , a

reflection of God in a mirror which also is God Himself

When the dichotomy of pure being and the world, absolute existence and

historical existence, was thus resolved, there were two immense gains First

of all, art could concern itself with nature and historical existence, with

phenomenological experience, without the tormenting doubt that it was

immersing itself in mere illusion Secondly, evolution in nature was a reality

and since, in man, nature had become endowed with self-consciousness and

freedom of will, which, according to the Pratyabhijña doctrine, are attri-

butes of the divine existence donated to man, he had to undertake the en-

deavour to further the evolution Anuvyavasāya means working like nature,

with nature Commenting on the Aristotelian formula that drama is the

imitation of action in life, Mantain points out that this does not refer to a

merely successive picture or image of the actions performed in human life—

merely successive, that is, made up, as Bergson put it, of immobile sections

sewn to one another in time, like the picture of a race or a football game by

the movies "The 'imitation of action' is itself an action, which is analo-

gous to the actions performed in human life, and which recasts them in a

man-born pattern And this action—analogous to the action of human

life—is the action of the work itself, the action of the play "58 This brings

out exactly the meaning of the expression Anuvyavasāya The expression,

Anukirtanam, reveals further the idealising quality of that action The

real is what has been achieved so far by evolution The ideal is what can be,

what is to be, achieved further "The artist's work," said Goethe,

"is real in so far it is always true , ideal in that it is never actual "51

Baudelaire60 wrote "The imagination is the queen of the

true and the possible is one of the provinces of the true It is positively

related to the infinite " Newman61 claimed that "it is the essence of

poetry that it delineates that perfection which the imagination suggests,

and to which as a limit the present system of Divine Providence actually

tends "

If the innermost inspiration of poetic action edits the real into the ideal,

the outer form, correspondingly, edits raw reality into style One of the

most brilliant contributions of Susanne Langer62 is her clarification of this

truth As a virtual, rather than an actual, object, the art symbol esta-

blishes its habitat at a distance from nature Each art is removed from

nature, even while reflecting it, by its own "primary illusion" Langer's

choice of the word "illusion" is unfortunate, and unnecessary since she

44

SANṢKRIT POETICS

has already clarified that the art symbol is a virtual and not an actual object What she means is that each art form creates a new order of equivalents for the features of reality In painting, this is “virtual space”. The space in painting is a semblance of actual space, but it is a new, virtual reality and has no relation to the space of common sense or of science The virtual space of painting is matched by the virtual volume of sculpture, the virtual “place” of architecture (distinct from the usable room in a building), the virtual time of music, the virtual powers of dance, the virtual history of fiction, etc. The fact that works of art float in a space-time-cause world of their own creation does not at all imply that they have no connection with life and reality For aesthetic creativity is a part of life and reality, and this new order is its creation, just as natural forms are the creation of the evolutionary energy of nature

Bharata63 also insists that the very idea of drama involves the non-acceptance of reality in its raw features (Svabhāva) He asserts61 further that the imaginative recreation of the external world involves the acceptance of a complex of dramaturgical conventions, (Nātya Dharma) which together create a style and transform the ways of the world, of reality (Loka Dharmi) into an aesthetic presentation65 The casual drift of the world's events has to be tightened and concentrated into poignancy. Monologues become perfectly justifiable. Abhinava66 asserts that the presence of only one actor (Ekapātrahāryatvam) which is the feature of the Sanskrit monologue play, the Bhāna, is a legitimate Nātya Dharma. Invisible presences like the Furies in the Oresteia of Aeschylus, symbolical of retribution, have to take form on the stage. Abhinava points out that in the drama, Maya Pushpaka, the divine curse storms into the stage as a terrible form. Lowes67 wrote : “We are dealing with the communication of ideas, perceptions, feelings, impressions That involves a medium The medium and the thing communicated do not correspond : stage time is not real time, a surface has no depth, words are not things There are differences between the relations in each case, of course, but in all one fundamental fact appears ; we accept as one thing something which is another and a different thing Convention, therefore, so far as art is concerned, represents concurrence in certain accepted methods of communication And the fundamental conventions of every art grow out of the nature of its medium.” The fact that Sanskrit drama, as conceived by Bharata, was above all a presentation with a unique style, created out of conventions growing out of the nature of the media used, comes out clearly when we read Bharata on the role of dance and music, the idiom of dramatic speech, the symbolic gesture In his typology, Bharata did in fact include the realistic play. But it figures lower down in the hierarchy He calls such productions Bahya, a term which implies that creativity limits itself to the imitation of the external surface of reality. The fully stylised presentation is called Abhyantara which suggests a fuller penetra-

tion by the creative genius into inwardness, into the autonomy of its own

formal organisation as well as the deepest essence of reality

58

THE POETIC CIRCUIT

45

III. THE RELISHER

The fourth link in the poetic circuit is the reader or the spectator

Sanskrit poetics calls him Sahṛdaya, "of like heart" with the poet. This

is not just a flowery tribute, but a whole theory about the transfer of aes-

thetic experience is behind it. The theory is based on the recognition of

a kinship of spirit between the poet and the sensitive reader. Ananda

Vardhana

clearly states that appreciation of poetry is essentially the

same as the creation of it. Pratīharendu Rāja,

of the tenth century,

commenting on the "endotelic listening" (Bhāvanā Vyāpar) which is a

significant element in Bhatta Nayaka's formulation, proceeds to a genera-

lised concept of imagination, which, according to him, is the basis not only

of poetic creation but also of the reader's and critic's aesthetic recreation

of poetry in the enjoyment of it The aesthetic emotion is transferred

only when there is an ideal reawakening of it in the reader. Ananda

Vardhana

briefly describes the process by which this awakening takes

place The sensibility of the responsive reader first becomes attuned to

the emotional situation portrayed (Hrdaya Saṃvāda) It then identifies

itself with the portrayal (Tanmayībhāvana) It is only when this identi-

fication is there that experience of the aesthetic emotion (Rāsaṇubhāva)

becomes a reality Dhananjaya

of the tenth century elaborates this The

creatively moulded aesthetic presentation which is an integration of stimuli

(Vibāvas, etc ) makes the sentiment relishable as an emotion The

enjoyer of the aesthetic emotion (Rasika) is the member of the audience

(Samaṅgika) who has the requisite sensitivity Dhananjaya makes clear two

things. First, the locus of the aesthetic emotion is the sensibility, not the

stage representation or the libretto The emotion is not a static entity but

a processual reality which is perceived only when it is experienced The

locus of the Rasa, he points out, is not in the represented hero who belongs

to the past, nor is it in the poem itself which is at best an integrated con-

figuration of aesthetic excitants Even more important is the second fact

that the Rasa does not consist of the reader's mere apprehension (Pratīti)

of the emotion latent in the poem or enacted by the actor For, in the

case of mere apprehension, the emotion is an external reality to which

the spectators react differentially according to their different temperaments,

just as the spectacle of the intimacies of a pair of lovers may cause shame,

envy, desire or aversion Identification is necessary for aesthetic experi-

ence The reader or the spectator has to receive the represented feeling

into his own soul to enjoy it And this enjoyment is an active process of

delectation (asvāda, chārvana, rasana or bhoga)

The concept of the Sahṛdaya is nearest to Einfühlung or Empathy

(oneness of feeling with) as basis of poetic pleasure For, without the

46

SANḰRIT POETICS

tuning to the poet and to the premises of a poem, no appreciation is possi-

ble or correct Empathy involves inner mimicry Watching an athlete

doing the long jump, our body unconsciously simulates the posture of the

former as it hurtles through space. But as Lee73 has warned, it may be

dangerous to seek always in incipient motor or visceral mimicry the total

explanation of empathy It is true that glandular changes organise the

body for action in emotional situations The rush of blood in anger and

the faster pulse give the body greater energy to attack or repulse the

object that aroused the anger But it would be naive to regard the bodily

changes as the initial phenomenon and to derive anger as merely the

passive awareness of these changes As Darwin revealed in his analysis of

involuntary expressions like blushing, often it is the mind that is affected

first and initiates the bodily changes As Lee has said, when empathic

imagination—itself varying from individual to individual—happens to be

united to a high degree of (also individually very varying ) physiological

excitability, the visceral and motor mimicry may be conspicuously evident

But the prior reality is the swinging into action of the empathic

imagination

Plato71 has a passage which reveals complete agreement with the view of

Sanskrit poetics that the transfer of aesthetic experience takes place through

sympathetic induction "The stone Euripides calls magnet does not only

attract iron rings, but it also gives them the power of attracting other rings

as the stone itself does . In the same way, the Muse herself inspires the

artists, and through their inspiration others are enraptured, and the line

of inspired is produced . One poet is suspended from one Muse, another

from another, he is said to be 'possessed'. From these primary

rings, the poets, others are in turn suspended ." If, as Bhatta Tauta

said, vision precedes description in the case of the poet, the description

transfers the vision to the reader The glory of art, says Nahm,75 is that

it "creates the creator", that is, the percipient is enabled to share the

thoughts and feelings of the artist, to share in other words the mysterious

but exhilaratory experience of creation Dewey76 also concurs with the

view that the sensitive reader is "of like heart" with the poet The artist

and audience should not be separated since "to perceive, a beholder must

create his own experience We lay hold of the full import of a work

of art only as we go through in our own vital processes, the processes the

artist went through in producing the work" Spingarn,77 similarly, wrote

"The identity of genius and taste is the final achievement of modern

thought on the subject of art, and it means that, fundamentally, in their

most significant moments, the creative and the critical instincts are one

and the same . Criticism at last can free itself of its age-long self-con-

tempt, now that it may realize that aesthetic judgment and artistic creation

are instinct with the same vital life " There are innumerable echoes of

the same view in European thought Empson,78 for instance, wrote · "The

process of getting to understand a poet is precisely that of constructing his

THE FOETIC CIRCUIT

47

poems in one’s own mind’; The reader has then created the poem anew

for himself—by means of the poet’s words The conviction that the true

apprehension of poetry is a creative process is seen also in this delight-

fully lucid declaration of Sir Percy Nunn “To lead pupils to ‘appreciate’

is not merely to lead them to admire or to take pleasure in a beautiful

thing, but to make them become in a sense its re-creators.”79 Robert

Graves80 laid down that “the reader of the poem must fall into a com-

plementary trance if he is to appreciate its full meaning” The reference

to the trance would have been particularly liked by Sanskrit writers, for,

as we shall see later, aesthetic experience to them is definitely a trance-like

condition when the awareness of all other things is eliminated (Vigalita

vedyantata Vedyantata sparsa sunya) Maritan81 also identifies appre-

ciation and creation “Just as the original intuition arose from a self-

identification of the artist with the appointed theme, so aesthetic experi-

ence, reproduction, arises from a self-identification of the spectator with

the presented matter, criticism repeats the process of creation” Finally,

Dhananjaya’s insistence that the poem is not the external object but the

inward experience is matched by Martin’s reference to “the series of events

in our own mind that for convenience but sometimes all too complacently we

call ‘Milton’s Poetry’ ” 82

The reader has to be steadily drawing near to the writer and finally

identify himself with him to recover his experience “Everything is tedious

when one does not read with the feelings of the author,” wrote

Wordsworth 83 Virginia Woolf84 advises · “Do not dictate to your author,

try to become him Be his fellow worker and accomplice ” Proust

regarded the processes of appreciation as variations of the process of

creation, the difference being operational rather than functional “In

reality, every reader, as he reads, is the reader of himself The work of

the writer is only a sort of optic instrument which he offers to the reader

so that he may discern in the book what he would probably not have seen

in himself”85 Proust said that the reader recognises himself in the book

and Shorthouse said the same thing with a fuller penetration into the

inwardness of the situation “It seems to me that a favourite book knew

me ”86 Walpole87 wrote · “One is inclined to feel that no book is

written by its author, or rather that an author merely collects notes for a

certain suggested work and that every reader then wr tests the book for him-

self.” Baudelaire88 asserted that in all the arts, there is “a lacuna which

is completed by the imagination of the relisher” This lacuna is not any

deficiency on the part of the creator of the artistic presentation It exists so,

long as the relisher stops short at a mere apprehension (Pratiti), as

Dhananjaya clarified It is eliminated when the objectified feeling is

received into his own soul by the reader and relished And when this

happens the identity of creator and relisher is reached Pascal wrote

“Not in Montaigne, but in myself I find all that I see in him”

If the reader or critic is “of like heart” with the poet, the expression

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should not be interpreted to mean that the transfer of aesthetic experience

is automatic or that the recipient is passive in this process Apart from

the fact that "endotelic listening' is an active reaching outward of the

consciousness in search of the cues and stimuli embodied in the aesthetic

presentation, Sanskrit poetics expects this mobilisation of sensibility to

be stabilised as a habit before the reader can mature into a critic

Abhinava says that the more a man is attuned to aesthetic impressions

from literature by constant literary habit, the more mirror-like his heart

is as a consequence of the constant study of poetry, the more easily is

the transfer of aesthetic emotion effected. The constant relishing

( Charvana ) of poetry refines the sensibility in such a way that cues can

trigger the aesthetic experience while the casual reader would need the

full presentation and perhaps also interpretation. Even stray verses are

enough for the Sahṛdaya to understand the full context

The view regarding the cquipment which the critic should have, implicit

here, is endorsed by Western critics As Cook said, "art relies for its

full effect on what the spectator brings with him". "It is through the

emotions," says Constable, "that the art historian has to judge whether

he is in the presence of a work of art" This is not so banal a remark

as would seem at first sight In the evaluation of period art, an especially

fine emotional sensitiveness is required as the strangeness of the idiom

would normally block the perception of aesthetic values. As in the case

of aesthetic creativity, in receptivity also innate sensitiveness ( Vasana )

and imagination ( Pratibha ) are irreducible requirements, for which erudi-

tion ( Vyutpatti ) cannot be a substitute Dewey wrote . "Since the

matter of aesthetic criticism is the perception of aesthetic objects, natural

and artistic criticism is always determined by the quality of first-hand

perception, obtuseness in perception can never be made good by any

amount of learning, however extensive, nor any command of abstract

theory, however correct" D H Lawrence put it more forcibly . "A

critic must be able to feel the impact of a work of art in all its complexity

and its force To do so, he must be a man of force and complexity

himself, which few critics are A man with a paltry, impudent nature

will never write anything but paltry, impudent criticism And a man

who is emotionally educated is as rare as a phoenix The more scholasti-

cally educated a man is generally, the more he is an emotional boor"

Lawrence's sharp contrast between scholastic equipment and emotional

sensitivity is in harmony with the emphasis of Sanskrit poetics on one-

ness of heart, that is, sensibility, rather than intellectual parity, between

reader and poet And Lawrence's emphasis on the education of emotions

recalls Abhinava's stress on constant touch with literature which alone

can make the heart's mirror capable of reflecting the subtlest lights and

shades of the aesthetic presentation and the emotional nuances behind

them Leavis endorses this : "Intentions are nothing in art except as

realised, and the tests of realization will remain what they are. They are

applied in the operation of the critic's sensibility, they are a matter of

his sense, derived from his literary experience of what the living thing

feels like " As Lewis Gates96 said, the critic tries to recreate the

consciousness of the artist at the moment he evoked his images, "charged

them with spiritual power, and called into rhythmical order sound-

symbols to represent them henceforth for ever".

IV THE CONCEPT OF BEAUTY

In the Sanskrit tradition, poetics has occasionally been referred to as

the science of beauty (Saundarya Sastra) The words for beauty are

Saundarya, Charutva, Chamatkara, etc But the general tendency is to

play down the concept as not having any autonomous validity and to

assimilate it to the quality of the poet's action and the significance of the

experience he donates to the reader Only one writer, Visvesvara97 of

the fourteenth century, has written a work on poetics with a title specifi-

cally mentioning beauty And even this work opens with the statement

that beauty (Chamatkara) is the sensitive reader's delight on reading a

poem And since he traces this delight to the feeling content and its

expression through structure, diction, figures of speech, etc it is clear that

the concept of beauty has been generalised and assimilated into the quality

of the poetic action itself A significant synonym for the beautiful is

Hidya, that which is capable of moving the heart with a fine delight

The earlier writers use the term Chamatkara as a synonym for positive

literary relish From Abhinava98 we understand that Bhatta Nayaka had

used the word in that sense Anandavardhana99 also uses the word in the

same sense Abhinava100 uses the word many times, but always

consistently with the same generalised meaning Kuntaka101 of the eleventh

century assimilates the concept of beauty to the general theory of creative

poetic action (Kavi Kalp) Narayana, an ancestor of Visvanatha of the

fourteenth century, equated beauty (Chamatkara) with the expansion of the

heart (Chitta Vistara) that results from aesthetic experience and held all

kinds of Rasa realisation to be of the nature of this type of Longinian

transport Jagannatha102 in the seventeenth century equated beauty with

the disinterested, supermundane pleasure we obtain in aesthetic experience

The Agni Purana103 equates the experience of aesthetic emotion, beauty

and the luminous sentience of the soul (Atma Chaitanya)

The attitude of Sanskrit poetics, therefore, is definitely against equating

beauty with sensate surface, especially as given in nature, and in favour

of assimilating the concept to the basic and more generalised reality of

the poet's action which creates a transformed order of existence even out

of the natural datum The artist seeks to create, not a pretty form, but

significant form European thought generally endorses this André

Breton104 referred to the "absurd distinction between the beautiful and

the ugly" Constable claimed . "There is nothing ugly I never saw an

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ugly thing in my life. For, let the form of the object be what it may, light,

shade, and perspective will always make it beautiful." Addison wrote :

"Anything that is disagreeable when looked upon, pleases us in an apt

description Here, therefore, we must inquire a new principle of pleasure,

which is nothing else but the Action of the Mind, which compares the ideas

that arise from words, with the ideas that arise from the objects them-

selves. For this reason, therefore, the description of a dung hill is pleasing

to the imagination, if the image be represented to our minds by suitable

expressions '105 What Addison calls the Action of the Mind is the exact

equivalent of the Kavi Vyāpāra of Sanskrit poetics In Addison's formula-

tion, the inwardness of the description, of the power of words, is not

sufficiently stressed but can be assumed As Bhatta Tauta and Hema

Chandra would put it, the description (Varnana) has power because behind

it is the experience of vision (Darsana)

Lessing's formulation is far more subtle "Art's imitations extend over

the whole of visible nature, of which the beautiful is but a small part Truth

and expression are its first law , and as nature itself is ever ready to

sacrifice beauty to higher aims, so likewise the artist must render it sub-

ordinate to his general design and not pursue it farther than truth and

expression permit Enough that, through these two, what is most ugly and

beautiful in nature has been changed into a beauty of art "106 When he

speaks of the ugly and beautiful in nature, he is referring to repulsive or

attractive sensate surfaces as given and he stresses the impossibility for

art to align itself with such a categorisation Nature itself prefers signi-

ficance to beauty understood in this restricted sense Art also has to make

the same choice and then the ugly is changed into beauty, of a new order,

which is also a synonym for the significant truth of emotion and expression.

And this significance is donated by the creative spirit Avantı Sundarı

said that the poet, with perfect justification, can glorify the moon as nectar-

rayed or present it as a maleficent influence This is unconsciously echoed

by Mitchell 107 "Whether we see the same sunlit sea to be smiling frankly

or in treachery is a matter of our mood " Croce108 says : "Without the

aid of imagination, nothing in nature is beautiful, and with its aid, accord-

ing to our disposition, the same thing is now expressive, now unmeaning,

now expressive in one way, now in another, sad or joyful, sublime or

ridiculous Man, faced with natural beauty, is exactly the mythical

Narcissus at the pool "

Rodin stressed the transforming action of imaginative creativity. "We

call ugly that which is formless, unhealthy which suggests illness, suffering,

destruction, which is contrary to regularity—the sign of health We also

call ugly the immoral, the vicious, the criminal and all abnormality which

brings evil—the soul of the parricide, the traitor, the self-seeker. But let

an artist get hold of this ugliness ; immediately he transfigures it—with a

touch of his magic wand he makes it into beauty."109 There is no con-

tradiction between this type of statement which emphasises the transmuting

power of imagination and a claim like that made by Sir Thomas Browne that even among objects as given there can be no ugliness "There was never anything ugly or misshapen but the Chaos, wherein, notwithstanding, to speak strictly, there was no deformity, because no form . . . In brief, all things are artificial (i e artistic), for nature is the Art of God"110 Even here, the discovery that nature is the art of God is possible only through vision and the truth discovered here is a truth created for itself by the spirit and donated to others

If what is ordinarily considered ugly in nature is transformed into beauty in art, what is the ugly in art? It is the tissue where the poetic action, the Kavi Vyapara, has not been effective Ella Sharpe,111 who considers beauty as essentially rhythm, defines the ugly as the arhythmic, where the sought rhythm has not been able to make the tissue align itself with the significant pattern of undulation and movement For Rickman,112 the ugly is the destroyed or the incomplete object—or the artistic object incompletely transmuted because of the failure or inadequacy of poetic action When that action is adequate, even the ugly is transmuted into the beautiful "The view of beauty which I shall defend," writes Reid,113 "will be that beauty is perfect expressiveness"

A vexed question which repeatedly crops up in aesthetic theory is whether or, not beauty has an objective status Since the concept of beauty has to be equated with the quality of the emotional transport derived from a work of art, the issue is whether or not the capacity for emotional stimulation in this manner is an objective property of the work of art The old distinction between science which is supposed to explore the "real", objective, features of the world and art which is supposed to be concerned with purely subjective experiences lingers here It should not, after the startling revolution in physics of our own day The old view was that scientific observation was an autonomous, completely independent activity, which left the entity or process observed unaffected in the least But Heisenberg's Principle of Indeterminacy, which revealed that microphysical reality is totally unlike what classical physics had conceived it to be, has demonstrated that to observe is to act on the entity observed The resulting knowledge, therefore, is of the entity after it has thus been acted upon Its nature, prior to the observation which is also a transitive action, can never be known This should invalidate the old distinction between "objective" science and "subjective" art In both we are dealing with phenomena that could be called subjective or objective alike They can be regarded as subjective since the scientific datum gives information about an entity as affected by the action of the observing subjectivity and the artistic image presents a natural object after it has been impregnated by the action of the emotive subjectivity Or they can be regarded as objective, for the scientific datum is true as a measure of the interaction of observation and observed entity and the poetic image is valid as a record of the interaction between natural object and sensibility Elizabeth Sewell114

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rejects the usual dichotomies between science and poetry, because they

are "structurally similar activities" and both necessary ; between analysis

and synthesis because "each is a precondition of the other's working" ;

between intellect and imagination , between mind and body ; between

mathematics and words "because each is an instrument for myth in the

mind". Discovery, both in science and poetry, she tells us, is always "a

mythical situation in which mind unites with a figure of its own devising

as a means towards understanding the world" and this figure "is always

in some kind of language". If the assertions regarding myth in science

and poetry seem of doubtful validity, it is because she does not make it

very clear that the concept of myth is being used in a special sense. We

shall have occasion to clarify this later.115

The poetic image is an objectively existing record of an experience

because it can yield back the experience—which here is an emotional

experience—to another sensibility, just as the scientific datum will remain

constant for another observer. But it is here that difficulties arise. Wellek

and Warren116 confront these difficulties in their attempt to clarify the

concept of "adequate interpretation". The poem, they argue, is not so

much a specific, unvarying experience as a potential cause of experiences

Thus the real poem must be conceived as a structure of norms realised

only partially in the actual experiences of its many readers And these

experiences will vary, since sensibilities vary The Iliad, as understood

by the Greeks, is not identical with the Iliad we are capable of under-

standing From this impasse, they make a brave effort to work towards

some standards of objectivity. "Though reactions vary, there must be a

substantial identity of 'structure' which has remained the same throughout

the ages" But again, not all the viewpoints in terms of which the

"structure" is seen will be equally capable of grasping it most meaning-

fully. Therefore, some "hierarchy of viewpoints", a criticism of the grasp

of norms, is implied in the concept of the "adequacy of interpretation"

This dependence on a "system of norms" more or less completely realised

by various generations of readers (as well as by individuals) would avoid

the extremes of absolutism and relativism It would seem to follow also

that one might, after all, by knowing a good deal about the potentialities

of literary form or structure, be able to say that particular generations

of poets or novelists or dramatists held viewpoints that enabled them to

make excellent or relatively poor use of their medium

Wellek and Warren define the problem clearly but there is a veiled

ambiguity in their solution The empirical test of survival for great

literature is one which has acquired great prestige "In general," wrote

Longinus,117 "we may regard those words as truly noble and sublime,

which please all and please always For where the same book produces

the same impression on all who read it, whatever be the difference in

their pursuits, their manner of life, their aspirations, their ages, or their

language, such a harmony of opposites gives authority to their favourable

opinion" The difficulty here is the assumption that the impression produced is the same Hume118 made the same assumption "The same Homer who pleased at Athens and Rome two thousand years ago is still admired at Paris and at London All the changes of climate, government, religion, and language have not been able to obscure his glory" However, as Wellek and Warren point out, the reactions of epochs and of individuals to Homer widely vary But what is their solution? Is it a majority opinion of history? An alternative answer may be difficult to suggest, but the choice of this as the way to escape the extremes of absolutism and relativism still fails to penetrate to the depths of the problem of the objectivity of poetic value And yet, in their reference to the knowledge of the potentialities of form and structure as the instrument for judging the level of poetic achievement, Wellek and Warren reveal their unconscious faith that the problem can be tackled on a scientific, objective basis

A confident approach is possible where this type of diffidence can be completely shed According to Sanskrit poetics, beauty is objective like truth The philosophical basis of this faith is the perception which is unambiguously clear in the Vedas, but gets obscured in some philosophical systems which found difficulties in accepting the world as real, that the world is an evolutionary development from God and embodies the qualities of Absolute Being truth, goodness and beauty The Vedic poet sang "We with our hymns elicit today the All-God, Lord of the good, Savita, whose decrees are true"119 The essentially poetic mind of the Vedic Aryans could not but be attracted towards beauty, which, to them, is no illusion, but an attribute of the eternal order "Firm-seated are the foundations of Eternal Law In its lovely form are many splendid beauties 120 God, may we obtain all things that are beautiful!"121 By Eternal Law have the worlds entered the universal order, the hymn continues, and beauty is as much an attribute of the world as its truth In the Gita, the Supreme Being gives this august reassurance "Whatever is sublime, good, auspicious, mighty, in the universe, understand that it exists as a spark of my splendour"122 While ontological conceptions thus provide the philosophical background to the belief that beauty is objective, it is also supported by psychological analysis, the basic assumption of which is the reality of the evolutionary process which has endowed man with emotions, sentiments, reactivities Disinterested—that is, non-practical—relishing of emotions, is a true event in the psychological history of the individual because his emotivity is a real feature depending upon the solid reality of his psychophysical organisation And since there is the basic identity of human nature between individuals, it should always be theoretically possible for the reader to experience as objectively true the emotion of the poet which he has embodied in a poem Admittedly, sensitivity varies widely between individuals But to use this fact to question the objective validity of the emotion embodied in a poem is as illogical as using defective instruments for a scientific measurement and claiming that

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the consequent discrepancies prove that the magnitude measured has no precise, objective value This, in effect, is the answer of Sanskrit poetics Beauty as a value is objective and needs to be striven for and achieved (sadhya) irrespective of whether one approaches it as an artist or as a spectator The proof of the objective truth of Rasa is its relish by the reader But the reader should be a Sahṛdaya, of like heart with the poet, otherwise he is not the right instrument for the test. The objective truth of beauty is witnessed by the identity of the reaction and experience of all sensitive minds (Sakala sahṛdaya samvadabhaja pramātra gocharīkṛitah)

Sanskrit poetics is not necessarily isolated in this bold attitude towards the problem “I think,” wrote Keats to John Taylor at a time when he was struggling profoundly with the whole question of what poetry is and should be, “Poetry should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a Remembrance.” Surely, this is not possible unless the poem enshrines an objective capacity and the reader has the right sensibility? Surely, again, the insensitive reader cannot be cited as proof that poetry cannot have this objective capacity? Tolstoy’s formulation of the same view would have struck the Sanskrit writers on poetics as a rewording of their own thoughts “The receiver of a true artistic impression is so united to the artist that he feels as if the work were his own and not some one else's—as if what it expresses were just what he had long been wishing to express A real work of art destroys, in the consciousness of the receiver, the separation between himself and all whose minds receive the work of art. (This reads almost like a direct translation of the Sanskrit expression quoted above—Sakala hṛdaya samvedana sakshika ) In this freeing of our personality from its separation and isolation, in this uniting of it with others, lie the chief characteristic and the great attractive force of art”

Clive Bell clears the way towards an objective theory of aesthetic value thus “The starting-point of all systems of aesthetics must be the personal experience of a peculiar emotion The objects which provoke this emotion we call works of art This emotion is called the aesthetic emotion. and if we can discover some quality common and peculiar to all the objects that provoke it, we shall have solved what I take to be the central problem of aesthetics” Jagannatha tries to move closer to a solution Beauty (Chamatkāra) is generated by the poetic action (Kavi Karma) or poetic imagination (Kavi Pratibhā) and comes to dwell in the poetic tissue Beauty means Rasa experience and Jagannatha defines it as a felt or experienced reality of our consciousness (anubhava sakshika), consisting of a trans-mundane pleasure (Aloukika-āhlāda), which latter idea may, for the present, be taken to mean that it is a pleasure which emerges from a non-practical or non-utilitarian context Santayana and others would concur with Jagannatha that the generic quality—which Clive Bell was seeking—is the ability of works of art to give delight.

Santayana127 defines beauty as "pleasure regarded as the quality of a thing" Signor Perena's statement that the beautiful is "that which pleases the mind as objective value" indicates an identical outlook Ducasse128 also feels that beauty or aesthetic value is assessed in terms of the immediate pleasantness or unpleasantness of the feelings obtained in aesthetic contemplation.

But there is a serious danger if the special quality of this pleasure is not stressed, as Jagannatha does stress Ozenfant129 points out "Master-pieces are practically never pleasing Their effect on us is too striking for the definition of 'pleasing' to have any true application The editor of the Dictionary must have been thinking of comic opera " Howes,130 similarly, writes "The Mass in D rarely gives pleasure and the choral finale of the Ninth Symphony causes many people pain " Ogden and Richards131 indicate the need for deepening the concept "The disadvantage of a pleasure view is that it offers us too restricted a vocabulary We need fuller terms with which to describe the value of works of art "

Marshall indicates the direction in which the concept should be deepened when he defines "beauty as relatively stable, or real, pleasure" The epithet "real" does not seem to amount to much here, but the final chapters of this work will clarify the Indian concept of the "real" pleasure derived from the highest poetic experience That will also reveal the profounder meaning of Jagannatha's qualification

Let us return to the issue whether aesthetic value is an objective value Alexander132 wrote "Some there are who believe beauty to be a character which belongs intrinsically to the beautiful object and is merely observed or discovered by us" As against this we have the statement by Lipps "Aesthetic pleasure is an enjoyment of our own activity in an object" The two views seem mutually exclusive But they can be harmonised To the extent that the power to yield delight is the generic quality of objects of art, it seems to be an objective feature But delight is an inward reality in the relisher If it is true, as Jagannatha said, that beauty is anubhava sakshika, attested by the experienced reality of consciousness, it is also true that a consciousness endowed with the requisite sensibility is—and has to be—assumed here "If the pleasure fails the very substance and protoplasm of beauty is wanting," wrote Santayana 133 "Not until I confound the impressions and suffuse the symbols themselves with the emotions they arouse, and find joy and sweetness in the very words I hear, will the expressiveness constitute beauty " We return to the equation between science and art A scientific fact has objective truth when it can be verified again and again But the instrument used should have the adequate capacity to register the fact Beauty is objective when the beautiful object can evoke delight again and again But the individuals who confront it should have the right sensibility "The meaning of any beautiful created thing," wrote Oscar Wilde,134 "is at least as much in the soul of him who looks at it, as it was in his who wrought it "

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The poetic circuit begins with the world and is completed when the

aesthetic experience makes the Sahrdaya a more sensitively functioning

entity in the world, with expanded horizons of the heart The discussion

of this last linking arc of the circle can be more conveniently taken up

later

CHAPTER THREE

The Poetic Tissue

I NUPTIALS OF SOUND AND SENSE

"It is not with ideas that one makes sonnets," Mallarmé1 wrote in a letter to Degas, "but with words" A very imperceptive way of interpreting this would be to regard poetry as nothing but a web of words What Mallarmé means is that opaque, private feeling can mature as art only when it is incarnated in a poetic tissue, which consists of words, but words invested with an unusual charge of evocative power This is what Cocteau2 also meant when he wrote "It is not pathetic messages that make us shed our best tears, but the miracle of a word in the right place"

It is noted very early in the Sanskrit tradition that the poetic tissue (Kavya Sastra) is qualitatively different from the web of language that expounds a scientific proposition or narrates an event Abhinaya3 quotes Bhatta Nayaka who points out that the story or content (A stha) is what matters in the plain narration or chronicle (Purana) of a past event, and the denotational meaning is the most important element in science (Sastra), but in the poetic tissue both word and meaning are subordinate to expression which is a higher reality, though it is an integration of these two components This is the distinction which I A Richards4 makes between "referential" and "emotional" speech, between "pure, scientific, impersonal or neutral statement" in which words are used to point to things and "emotive utterance" which expresses and evokes states of feeling" Pollock5 uses the terms "referential" and "evocative" In evocative symbolism, "human beings attempt to communicate, not the abstraction from the experience, but the actual experience itself" Mallarmé6 contrasted the function of the word in poetry with its function in narration, instruction and discourse as the common currency of "reportage" Bhamaha, twelve centuries earlier, used an identical expression, Varta, news, information, reportage De Quincey emphasises the same distinction, though he uses different expressions literature of knowledge and literature of power Yvor Winters7 opposes poetry to "other kinds of writing", finding that poetry takes "special pains with the expression of feeling" And Ransom8 stresses the antithesis of logical "structure" and poetic "texture"

Writer after writer, in Sanskrit poetics, lays stress on the distinctive

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quality of poetic expression One of the earliest terms coined for this

purpose is Vakrokti, literally “deviant utterance”. If some writers show

a tendency to see this special quality as a feature of the verbal tissue,

others repeatedly correct it by pointing out that it covers both word and

idea, and has ultimately to be traced to the poetic action Thus Bhamaha9

uses the term to refer to the choice of ideas as well as words which makes

poetic attitude and expression different from the matter-of-fact outlook and

speech. Poetry, Sanskrit poetics repeatedly affirms, is distinguished by

the supremacy of the utterance (Ukti Pradhana) Utterance, here, does

not refer to the verbal tissue alone It emphasises both the content, image,

episode and thought coloured by emotion, and the form, the special, poetic

verbalisation Kuntaka,10 who wrote a whole treatise on Vakrokti, explains

the special deviant quality (Vakrata) of poetic expression as the peculiar

charm (Vicchitti) or strikingness (Vaichitrya) which can be creatively

donated to ordinary expression by the imagination of the poet (Kavi

Pratibha) It is the mode of expression (Vinyasa Krama) in which this

imagination incarnates itself that makes poetry stand apart from matter-of-

fact speech or scientific discourse. Nilakantha Dikshita11 also lays stress

on this special mode of expression (Vinyasa Visesha) which enables it to

incarnate beauty. Ruyyaka12 of the twelfth century holds the same view

although he uses a different term, Praudhokti, elevated or distinguished

utterance. All such expressions, Vaktokti, Praudhokti, etc. remind us of

Arnold's definition of poetry as “the most delightful and perfect form of

utterance that human words can reach”,13 or as “nothing less than the

most perfect speech of man”.14

Ransom17 defined poetry as a “compromise between meaning and metre”.

This is rather unfortunate, because it suggests that the poetic intention is

forced down to a lower level in achievement in the process of verbal and

rhythmic incarnation When Abhinava interprets poetic utterance as an

“ideal structure”16 (Utkrishita samghatana) and derives it directly from

poetic action.17 he is confident that the poetic intention can integrate

meaning and word, idea and expression, without any sense of compromise

or scaling down in final achievement. It is very important to realise that,

in Sanskrit poetics, the antithesis is not between meaning and metre, between

idea and verbalisation The idea or meaning is not the soul nor the verbal

tissue the body. Both meaning (Artha) and word (Sabda) together

constitute the body of poetry (Kavya Sarira) The soul is the poetically

experienced feeling As the antithesis usually drawn is between idea and

verbalisation, meaning and metre, it is very interesting to note that the

distinctive approach of Sanskrit poetics finds a parallel in Valéry18 who

wrote : “Poetic necessity is inseparable from sensory form, and the

thoughts set forth or suggested by a poetic text are in no way the unique

and primary concern of discourse, but are rather the means which move

together equally with the sounds, the cadences, the metre, and the embellishments, to provoke, to sustain a particular tension or exaltation, to

produce in us a world—or a mode of existence altogether harmonious"

This leads us to the very significant definition given by Bhamaha19.

"Poetry (poetic tissue) is that in which word and meaning coexist"

(Sabdarthau sahitau kavyam) The word sahita means to unite or exist

together, in organismic fusion The Sanskrit word for literature is

Sahitya and Kuntaka derives this word from Bhamaha's definition The

earliest use of this term, Sahitya, in poetics occurs in Mukula20 of the

late ninth or tenth century and in his pupil, Pratihareṇdu Rāja 21 By

using the expression Sahitya Vidya, for poetics, Raja Sekhara confirmed

this etymology of the term which makes literary tissue the organismic

union of word and idea This organismic union is emphasised by various

European writers, though not with the perfect clarity of the analysis in

Sanskrit poetics Thus, Flaubert22 wrote, attacking Augier's conception

of form as merely an outer garment "No ! Form is the flesh itself of

the idea, as the idea is the soul of life " This corresponds to the concept

of the Sabdartha Savia, but in Sanskrit poetics, as in Valéry, the body of

poetry is composed of both idea and verbalisation, the soul being the Rasa

Baudelaire23 wrote that "idea and form are two realities in one" and

warned that if the meaning was overrated and the form neglected, the

result would be the annihilation of poetry The concept of "two realities

in one" is an exact equivalent of the Sanskrit doctrine of Sauhitya

Banville24 wrote that immediately the poet's imagination had a clear

vision of what to present to the reader, the words would spontaneously

present themselves to the spirit along with the vision

Sanskrit poetics rejected the usual polarisation of meaning and word,

idea and verbalisation, content and form, because these dualities are

apparent only to analytical dissection, while in the actual poetic expression

they are indissolubly united Secondly, against the background of the

entire theory that opaque, private emotional experience could be communi-

cated only by sympathetic induction through a mediating presentation

whose efficacy would depend upon its truth as a concretisation of the

experience, the polarisation could not but be between experience of vision

(Darsana) and expression or description (Varnana), the latter standing

for both word and meaning in their complete fusion An identical percep-

tion is seen in Valéry25 "The essential principle of the poetic

mechanism—by which I mean the production of poetic sensibility by the

use of words—lies, or so it seems to me, in the harmonious interchange

between expression and impression Our poetic pendulum begins in sensa-

tions, moves towards an idea or sentiment, and returns again to a memory

of the initial sensation, or to an act which is capable of reproducing that

sensation " This sensation, or more properly, feeling, is not the idea or

meaning which is usually contrasted with expression in the analysis of the

poetic tissue It is experience Rosenberg26 stresses this when he states :

"Poetry as verbal alchemy is a way of experiencing "

Mallarmé wrote "The verse which, from several vocables, recreates

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SANSKRIT POETICS

one integral word, new, a stranger to language, almost incantational,

achieves the unique perfection of speech "27 The vocables, here, have both

phonetic shape, sound, as well as denotation, meaning But they do not

function separately, atomically. They unite to yield a new, integral reality

To emphasise the paramount importance of this union, writer after writer,

in the Sanskrit tradition, seeks the support of effective comparisons

Bhoja,2h in explaining his concept of the just proportion of sound (Sabda

sammitat?a) clarifies it as the quality of sound (Sabda) and meaning

(Artha) being held as if in a balance That is, they have parity. Meaning,

in poetic expression, cannot claim greater attention than sound or form

Raja Sekhara29 also explains the concept of fusion (Saulhutya) as the proper

equipoise (Yathavatsahabhava) between word and meaning Kuntaka30

says that idea insufficiently expressed is "dead" (M?talpa) and expression

without idea or expressing something other than the intended idea is

"diseased" (Vyadhbhuta) Thus, Saulu?tya means perfect commensurateness

between form and content Taking special efforts to introduce effects of

verbal music implies an overemphasis on beauty of sound (Sabda

saundarya), and Kuntaka warns that this can ony result in the loss of that

parity in integration implied by the concept of Sa?hutya31 Sound and

meaning are compared by Kuntaka to two friends united in some great

endeavour Parasa?a Bhatta calls them brothers between whom exists the

most ideal fraternal feeling (Saubhrat?a) Kalidasa32 (fourth century)

compares the relation between sound and meaning to the ideal relation envi-

saged in the S?mr?ts (religio-ethical texts) between husband and wife and

symbolised in myth in the union of the divine couple, Parvat and

Paramesvara. To indicate the indissoluble union of the two, Hindu myth

has a concept which has also received concrete expression in iconographic

representations This is the A?dha-Na?svara, a figure one half of which is

sculptured in masculine form while the cther half is feminine Kalidasa

and Vidyadhara (fourteenth century) use this concept also to refer to the

"celebration of the divine nuptials of sound and sense in poetry", a fine

idiom used by Wilfred Meynell in his comment on Francis Thompson's

Sister Song

Western thought supports this approach of Sanskrit poetics Dewey33

warns that if one makes a conscious distinction of sense and thought, of

matter and form, one does not "read or hear esthetically, for the esthetic

value of the stanzas lies in the integration of the two" Henry James34

wrote . "Since, in proportion as the work is successful, the idea permeates

and penetrates it, informs and animates it, so that every word and every

punctuation point contribute directly to the expression, in that proportion

do we lose our sense of the story being a blade which may be drawn more

or less out of its sheath The story and the novel, the idea and the form,

are the needle and thread, and I never heard of a guild of tailors who

recommend the use of the thread without the needle, or the needle without

the thread" I A Richards35 has emphasised that metre, diction, metaphor

and methods of organising the poem are not ornaments but parts of the

total, integral expression Marītain36 points out that in poetry the logical

sense, the denotational meaning structured by the words, is digested, so to

speak, by the poetic sense “This poetic sense, which is but one with poetry

itself, is the inner ontologic entelechy of the poem, and gives it its very

being and substantial significance ” And in a manner which would pleasantly

remind Indian readers of Raja Sekhara quoting his gifted wife, Avantī

Sudarī, Marītain quotes Raïssa Marītain37 “It (the poetic sense) is

inseparable from the formal structure of the poetic work The poetic

sense is substantially bound to the form, immanent in the organism of words,

immanent in the poetic structure as a whole ” Word and meaning can be

separated out only in analysis In the poetic tissue they are indissolubly

united Poetic action is, in the quaint idiom of Puttenham,38 “both auricular

and sensible, by which all the words and clauses are made as well tunable

to the ear as stirring to the mind” T S Eliot39 gives the restatement in

contemporary idiom “The music of poetry is not something which exists

apart from its meaning ” Bradley10 puts it a little more elaborately “In

poetry the meaning and the sounds are one, there is, if I may put it so, a

resonant meaning or a meaning resonance If the substance means ideas,

images and the like taken alone, and the form means the measured language

by itself, there is a possible distinction, but it is a distinction of things not

in the poem, and the value lies in neither of them ” But the pleasant

difference of opinion between Bradley and Saintsbury over a specific instance

should have a moral for us In the lines

Our noisy years seem moments in the being

Of the eternal silence

Bradley holds that the beauty lies almost wholly in the meaning, while

Saintsbury41 claims that the sound has its own beauty and it is quite

independent of the meaning To prove his point, the latter proceeds to

show that the meaning of the passage can be exactly expressed thus

“Our noisy (or loud-sounding or clamorous) twelve months appear minutes

(or seconds) in the existence of the unending soundlessness ” One is

puzzled as to the exact point which is sought to be proved by either of the

distinguished critics The paraphrase of the denotational meaning is nothing

more than that It is not the equivalent of the poetic expression The

separation of meaning and verbal form is an analytical dissection In the

living tissue the two are indissolubly united as is clear from the fact that

the paraphrase of the meaning fails to be an aesthetic equivalent of the

poetic statement and likewise the sound sequence by itself, listened to merely

“auricularly and not sensibly” as Puttenham would put it, can only tickle

the ear without stirring the heart To seek refuge from such an analysis

with a poetic answer to that analysis, we may quote Yeats 42

O body swayed to music, O brightening glance

How can we know the dancer from the dance ?

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II. THE POETIC ORGANISM

Raissa Marıtain used the expression "organısm of words". This ıs a very apt ıdıom for ındıcatıng the standpoint of Sanskrıt poetıcs In analysıng the categorıes of realıty, Nyaya, or the Indıan phılosophy of logıc, very carefully and emphatıcally dıstınguıshed between accıdental or separable connectıon (Samavoga) and ınherence or ınseparable connectıon (Samavava) The latter ıs the relatıon between a thıng and ıts propertıes, the whole and ıts parts, motıon and the object ın motıon, etc What ıs ındıcated here ıs essentıally a concept of organısmıc ıntegratıon. Sanskrıt poetıcs envısages the unıon of sound and meanıng ın poetry ın terms of thıs organısmıc concept whıch defınıtely ımplıes a complementarıty of the functıons of dıfferent components Kuntaka saıd that sound and sense should be such as to beautıfy each other (a poınt of vıew whıch mıght have pleasantly resolved the dıfferences between Bradley and Saıntsbury, for that ıs obvıously what sound and sense do to each other ın that verse). Kaldasa13 saıd that they should be equally so beautıful, that, between the two, ıt should be dıfficult to decıde whıch ıs the beautıfıer and whıch the beautıfıed Kuntaka expands the concept to cover the contınuum whıch ıs represented by an extended poem Not only should there be thıs functıonal ıntegratıon between sound and meanıng ın the poetıc moment, but ın the extended poetıc tıssue, such an ıntegratıon should subsıst between one word and another ın the expressıon and one ıdea and another ın the expressed Therefore, has to be a realıty ın two planes In the vertıcal plane, ıt achıeves the epıphany of poetıc feelıng ın verbal form In the horızontal plane ıt ıntegrates the meanıngs among themselves and the verbal forms among themselves, whıle the organısmıc realıty ıntegrates both strata as functıonally ınterdependent components servıng the evocatıon of Rasa Mallarmé11 wrote to Cazalıs, about hıs poem L'Azur : "I swear to you that there ıs not a sıngle word whıch has not cost me several hours of research and that, the fırst word, whıch clothes the fırst ıdea, besıdes makıng ıts own contrıbutıon to the general effect of the poem, serves further to prepare the last "

As ıt ıs the ıntegratıon and not the separate functıons that ıs the fundamental realıty, and as the equilıbrium ıs dynamıc rather than statıc, poetry ıs tensıon generated and ably contaıned It ıs very ınterestıng to note that Kuntaka15 defınes lıterature ın one place as the mutual tensıon, jealousy or rıvalry (Parısparda sparanda) of word and meanıng As he uses the word Suhıtra for lıterature, he ıs explaınıng here the concept of the coexıstence or unıon of sound and sense whıch ıs the basıc traıt of lıterary expressıon Thıs means that the tensıon ıs compatıble wıth the basıc harmony, that ıs, the tensıon ıs a competıtıve rıvalry to achıeve the same common end, whıch ıs the ıncarnatıon of the ınıtıal poetıc experıence Here also Kuntaka extends hıs concept from the poetıc moment to the poetıc contınuum One word should vıe wıth another, and one ıdea wıth another.

of "tension" But Crane47 comes nearer to Kuntaka in his study on

Cleanth Brooks The poetical structure "unites the like with the unlike

connotation to cancel out another, nor does it reduce the contradictory

attitudes to harmony by a process of subtraction . It is a positive unity,

not a negative". Crane is of course referring to that type of poetry—Marvell,

Donne, etc —where ambiguity, paradox and irony are the most conspicuous

features But the tension which is obvious here can exist in other types of

poetry, irrespective of wheather Cleanth Brooks will concede it or not

Kuntaka, at least, it is certain, was formulating poetic tension as a principle

of general validity And what is relevant to our purpose in Crane's analysis

is that the tension of the components can be in harmony with the orienta-

tion of their integrated reality The reality of the dynamic nature of the

poetic equilibration, though not specifically the competitive tension of the

components, is stressed by Brownell48 also The writer "vitalizes the parts

by permeating them with a sense of the whole, and thus gives everywhere

the feeling of completeness, of forces in the repose of equipoise in contrast

'to stagnation or even stasis" Herbert Read49 says "An image is always

jealous of words, that is to say, it is most effective when conveyed in a

minimum of words" Though the word "jealous" recalls Kuntaka's spardha,

Read is not referring so much to the competitive rivalry between word and

meaning or image as to the concept of the just proportion of sound which

alone can achieve the union of meaning and sound on a basis of parity, a

point which was stressed by Bhoja in his concept of Sabda sammittatva

But, in another passage, Read moves nearer to Kuntaka "Two images, or

an idea and an image, stand equal and opposite , clash together and respond

significantly, surprising the reader with a sudden light "50 The parity of

sound and image or meaning, the notion of a tension between them, and

the functional subordination of both parity and tension to the higher,

integral objective of the total poetic expression, which are the most important

features of Kuntaka's concept, are emphasised here As Whalley51 says in

his comments on Read, there is here a process of cross-fertilisation and

mutual enrichment . in such a manner, we may add, recalling Kālidāsa,

that it is difficult to say either of idea or sound whether it is the beautifier

or the beautified But the writer who comes nearest to Kuntaka is Dylan

Thomas "Out of the inevitable conflict of images—inevitable because of

the creative, recreative, destructive and contradictory nature of the motivating

centre, the womb of war—I try to recreate the momentary peace which is

a poem "52 Tension is generated because the equilibrium of the poem is

dynamic and can be achieved only on the basis of balancing of forces The

conflicts make up, in fact, what Day Lewis53 has called that "dialectic of

purification" by which the poet handles the emerging pattern, flaking off

its accretion of waste matter so that the result is a poem, "which is neither

the experience, nor the memory, nor an abstract dance of words, but a new

life composite of all three"

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The poem, which is the peace created out of forces or tensions in functional integration, is the perfect expression of the experience, or more strictly, its concretisation as a verbal tissue The form now is fully functional and organic and therefore unalterable. Emerson51 wrote : “It is a metre-making argument that makes a poem—a thought so passionate and alive that, like the spirit of a plant or an animal, it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing.” The form is like the form of a crystal shaped from within by the action of the solute in a chemical solution Its architecture is internally determined and therefore it cannot be altered Vamana55 wrote . “The insertion and deletion of words occur only so long as there is uncertainty in the mind When the fixity of words is established, the composition is perfect” He proceeds to say that perfection of verbalisation (Sabda Paka) is realised when the words are so functionally, poetically, adequate that they cannot be replaced by synonyms

Latcı thought expanded the concept to cover both the perfection of the stream or web of words (Sabda Paka) and the perfection of the structure of meaning (Artha Paka) According to Bhoja,56 there is perfection of poetic expression (Kavya Paka) when both the replacement of words by their synonyms as well as the substitution or modification of ideas have to be ruled out if the poetic sense is not to be destroyed or radically altered.

Yeats wrote · “The correction of prose, because it has no fixed laws, is endless, a poem comes right with a click like a closing box”57 Elsewhere he wrote : “Our words must seem to be inevitable”58 Raleigh59 says the same thing a little more elaborately “All who have consciously practised the art of writing know what endless and painful vigilance is needed for the avoidance of the unfit and untuneful phrase, how the meaning must be tossed from expression to expression, mutated and deceived, ere it can find rest in words” Raleigh’s expression—“finding rest in words”—is very interesting, for it calls to mind the concept of Saya with which the conception of Paka ( perfection ) of both word (Sabda) and meaning (Artha) was related by the Indian tradition Saya means bed . in poetic theory it means, initially, the repose of words in their mutual favourableness like the repose of the body in a bed, the similitude explaining the etymology of the term The earliest use of the word in this sense is found in the seventh century writer, Bana The discussion of these concepts by the tenth century writer, Raja Sekhara,61 is very interesting He defines perfection (Paka) as maturity (Parinama) and maturity, again, as felicity of verbal tissue , since Paka is realised in the verbal tissue, it is a value which concretes as the power of the word ; but, it is simultaneously emphasised, that power can be perceived only by the man with poetic sensibility (Sahrdaya). Like the word Rasa, Paka (ripe, well cooked)has also linked, in its etymological derivation, to the sensation of taste Further, since Raja Sekhara uses it as a generic concept, it has reference to the perfection of both meaning and expression Therefore, in the final analysis, when the Paka is ideal, the literary value of Saya is realised, where meaning reposes in the tissue of words, while each word

itself finds a perfect embedding in the integral tissue The fourteenth

century writers, Vidyadhara62 and Vidyanatha,63 relate the concepts of Paka

and Sayya in this profounder sense and Mallinatha54 affirms that, with the

realisation of the ideal here, the verbal tissue will show strong aversion of

words to replacement by synonyms

A passage in Robert Nichols65 reads like a footnote, giving data from

personal experience, to Vamana and Mallinatha Nichols is analysing the

birth of a poem He begins with that phase of uncertainty, to which Vamana

refers. when words are inserted or deleted Then he describes how a

slight, but definitive, alteration made a line take perfect shape "No sooner

had this change been effected than I recognised that the line had set in an

order that no subsequent occurrence must be suffered to disturb When a

line is once really right, its rightness is of so sacrosanct a nature that,

rather than change it, the poet will abandon the entire piece The laws

of psychological necessity within the art are inflexible and the poet's

personal integrity is involved in his recognition of and reverence for the

fact that a line is right and that nothing in heaven or earth can make it

otherwise If it is changed, it may be right for some poem or other, but

that poem will not be the poem originally intended " Raissa Maritain,66

likewise, endorses Vamana's dictum that when once the poetic expression

has become perfect, substitution by synonyms is ruled out "In the modality

of prose, words are almost exclusively signs They are there, above all, to

refer the mind to their significations By themselves, they have only a

secondary importance On the other hand, in poetry, words are at the same

time signs as well as objects—objects which are the vehicles of images—

which organise themselves into an independent and living tissue They

cannot suffer substitution by a synonym without the poetic sense being

destroyed and mutilated."

Ben Jonson said that "in all speech, words and sense are as the body and

soul" and De Quincey spoke of language as an "incarnation of the soul"

Here they are referring to language as such, not necessarily poetic language

But even in this generalised level there is a latent profundity, for it is a

miracle that immaterial meaning can incarnate in material sound The

philosophy of Indian grammar recognised this profundity According to

Patañjali67 of the second century B C the grammarian is a Yogi whose

inward vision enables him to look within and see the eternal flow of pure

consciousness It is this consciousness that incarnates in the two-fold

category of sound and meaning and what we call speech, the vehicle of

communication, is nothing but the expression of the spirit active within

The knower of the secret of speech visualises Brahman, ultimate Reality,

in the wreath of letters To Patañjali, the alphabets are not mere phonetic

shapes, but glowing sparks of Brahman illuminating the entire sphere of

existence They are eternal (Akshara), an epithet most characteristically

and frequently applied to Brahman It is this profound inwardness of the

mystery of language that led Bhartrhari,68 later, in the seventh century, to

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SANSKRIT POETICS

define grammar as the door leading to the final beatitude Nevertheless, even while recognising that grammar and the generalised science of language explore semantic realities which are really profound, it is possible to claim that we are dealing with a different crder of meaning in poetry Semantic enquiry can safely accept a polarisation between meaning and word, for the former can have alternative verbalisation in discourse, referential speech But in poetry, the poetic meaning cannot be separated out. It lies in or more correctly it is, the specific verbalisation with its distinctive texture and music Thus so far as poetics is concerned, Longinus is more precise than Ben Jonson and De Quincey, for he states that "thought and language in literature are interfolded each in the other" This significant distinction between discourse and poetry is noted by Indian thought also very carly One Rig Vedic verse69 denounces the person who sees only the externals in poetry and praises the person of sensibility to whom alone the beauty of the inner, poetic sense is revealed This places the right emphasis on the inner meaning But the importance of the tissue, the web of words, is also cqually stressed "When men of intuition create verse after winnowing words, as barley grains are sifted by means of a winnowing pan, then men of equal sensibility recognise the meaning. In such verses, blessed glory is enshrined '70

A W Schlegel71 emphasises the "unity and indivisibility" of a work of art, "the inner mutual determination of the whole and the parts". This is the organismic relation (Samavaya) of the component elements of poetry on which Sanskrit poetics insists Schlegel points out that a beautiful whole can never be pieced together from beautiful parts, the whole must first be posited absolutely and then the particular evolved from it He speaks of a work cf art as ideal if, "in it, matter and form, letter and spirit, have interpenetrated so completely that we are unable to distinguish them" Schiller, who also insists on the "living shape" which can only result from an "actual union and interpenetration of matter and form", has recorded a very revealing experience that shows that in the interaction between word and meaning in poetry, both are equal partners and the flow of transforming, plastically shaping power is not invariably from meaning to word as is commonly supposed, but can run the other way too He was experimenting with the versification of some material which he had first handled in prose He wrote to Goethe - "I have never been so palpably convinced as in my present occupation how closely in poetry Substance and Form are connected Since I have begun to transform my prosaic language into a poetic, rhythmical one, I find myself under a totally different jurisdiction Even many motives which in the prosaic execution seemed to me to be perfectly in place, I can no longer use They are merely good for the common domestic understanding, whose organ prose seems to be But verse absolutely demands reference to the imagination And thus I was obliged to become poetical in many of my motives."72 This experience throws light on the inwardness of the struggle made by many Indian writers to find the

apt simile and metaphor for the pauity in co-operative, integrated function

of both word and meaning Kāldasa, it will be recalled, used the metaphor

of the ideal union of Śiva and Pārvatī The later handling of the concept

by Indian Tantrism further reveals the inwardness of the comparison

Tantrism accepted monism In the pure monist statement, Prakṛti or Śakti,

the energy of material nature which evolves the world, is accepted as the

attribute of Puruṣa or Brahman, the Supreme Being or pure consciousness

In the ritual of Tantra, the two concepts are separately personalised as Śiva

and his consort Śakti, though the basic monism is secured by conceiving the

two as in indissoluble union Here again, the flow of power is not only

from Śiva to his consort If, apart from Śiva, Śakti is blind, undirected

force, in a pregnant metaphor, Śiva, apart from Śakti, is described as a

corpse Usually we think of poetic feeling as fashioning metrical form for

its expression What the imagery of Kālidāsa and others, as well as the

experience of Schiller, reveal is the reality of the power of poetic form in

stimulating the poetic spirit

Valéry wrote “In the lyric universe, each moment must complete an

indefinable alliance of the sensuous and the meaningful The consequence

is that the composition is, in some way, continuous, and can hardly fix

itself in any time other than that of execution There is not one time for

the ‘substance’ and another for the ‘form’, and composition in this genre

contrasts not only with order or disproportion, but with decomposition If

the meaning and the sound ( or the substance and form ) can easily dissociate

themselves, the poem decomposes”73 This is the profounder meaning of

Bhamaha’s concept of Sauhṛdya, organismic union of sound and sense Śiva,

apart from Śakti, is a corpse, a decomposing body The living poetic

organism, similarly, decomposes into dead tissue when meaning and sound

are not in organismic union Kuntaka said that the idea which is imperfectly

incarnated is dead (Mṛtakalpa) But Valéry also steps up the metaphor to

the higher plane, like Indian poetics, seeing the Rasa as the soul and sound

and meaning as together constituting the body (Sabdātha Sarva ) Here

sound and meaning are equal in status and lead to the evocation of Rasa

through establishing reciprocal relations between themselves Valéry defines

the “problem of pure poetry” as the creation of “a complete system of

reciprocal relations between our images and ideas on the one hand and our

means of expression on the other, a system which would correspond

especially to the creation of an emotive state of mind”74 Equality of status

and reciprocity mean that the flow of inspiring power can take place in

either direction Valéry clarifies this “Note well this dual possibility in

first appearance in the interplay · sometimes, some thing has an urge to

express itself, sometimes a medium of expression seeks some idea it can

serve”75 Spender76 records his personal experience which brings out this

profounder meaning of reciprocity “Sometimes when I lie in a state of

half-waking, half-sleeping, I am conscious of a stream of words which seem

to pass through my mind, without them having a meaning, but they have a

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SANḰRIT POETICS

sound, a sound of passion, or a sound recalling poetry that I know. Again sometimes when I am writing, the music of the words I am trying to shape takes me far beyond the words, I am aware of a rhythm, a dance, a fury, which is as yet empty of word.

A helpful analysis by Daiches reveals with what plastic sensitiveness poetic form manages, in fact, becomes the controlled revelation of meaning. The place of any part of the statement in the total pattern of the whole is of great significance in the literary expression, while this is not the case with the non-literary statement. Thus, poetic expression depends to a great degree on the order of the individual word. This is demanded by the poetic function The poet arranges the word in such an order that until the total complex of meaning is achieved, no premature leakage of meaning can occur and the poetic sense remains, integrally unrevealed, until, on the completion of the verbal stream, the meaning "explodes", to use the term of Gerard Manley Hopkins Rhyme and metre are important devices of this type--though they have other functions too--for they unconsciously tip off the reader to delay his integral reaction till the completion of their formal patterns and also warn him against reacting to the poetic expression as if it was a series of propositional statements A poetic form like the sonnet is also a similar device for restraining the reader from premature response until the poem is complete. Thus, in poetry, the meaning does not reveal itself in simple, distinguishable stages, but reveals itself in a sudden explosion at the moment when the form completes its integral shape

The Sphota doctrine in the Indian tradition was an anticipation of this type of analysis As expounded by the grammarians, the essence of the doctrine, very briefly, is that the meaning of the word is not revealed in stages by the successive phonemes out of which it is structured, nor of the sentence by the successive words with which it is composed. The integral revelation of meaning is somewhat like the quantum phenomenon, the revelation of the reality of which in energy changes and transfers by Max Planck has created a revolution in the outlook of physics. For, according to the Sphota doctrine, the meaning holds itself back from self-revelation till the last phoneme of the word is uttered, or the last word in the sentence, thus completing the etymological and syntactical shapes Then the revelation takes place in a Sphota (literally, explosion) Sphota is the integral significance, which makes its discontinuous, quantal appearance when the phonetic shape is complete The phonetic shape (Nada) is the suggestor (Abhivyanjaka), the Sphota is the suggested (Abhivyanga) Curiously enough, the insight which led to this doctrine failed when it was sought to be extended from semantics to aesthetic expression In their anxiety to annex aesthetics also to their own realm, some grammarians tried to interpret all the powers of poetic expression, including the musical texture of the verbal tissue and the resonance of both word and meaning, as really Sphota. The approach would have been fruitful if the concept

had been used analogically or modulated to a higher level of significance,

when it was applied to aesthetics But these grammarians were wedded to

literalism, to the deification of the denotational power of words, by them-

selves, and in the syntactical organisation of sentences Therefore, if they

emphasised the quantum nature of the phenomenon and the delaying of

the. explosion of meaning till the expression was complete in its shape,

they also dogmatised that the denotational meaning, thus finally revealed,

was all that there was in poetic expression Ananda Vardhana, the

expounder of the doctrine of poetic suggestion, was able to give a devas-

tating answer to this type of claim But we should also note that

grammatic analysis itself had not always floundered thus Bharthari, the

author of the classic on grammar, Vākya Padīya, was a staunch advocate

of the Sphota doctrine But he was a great poet too And therefore he

was able to generalise and deepen the concept to that level where it

could be extended to cover poetic expression also, without confusing

poetic meaning with denotational meaning He was able to do this because

he attacked the problem at its deepest level—the profound mystery of

meaning incarnating in concrete linguistic expression Meaning, here, is

not a propositional meaning intended to be conveyed through a particular

expression It is the meaning behind the visible universe He refers to

the Highest Universal (Mahā Sattā) which represents the real essence of

all things and which permeates all Words can have meaning because all

meanings derive from this Great Meaning 78 For Bhartrhari, the Principle

of the Word (Sabda Tattva) and the Principle of the Ultimate Reality

(Brahma Tattva) are interchangeable 79 Sphota is indivisible (Akhạnda)

and represents spirit (Caitanya) in its purest form The Muse of grammar

(Vaiyākaraṇa Bhūṣaṇa) is Brahman itself If the other grammarians

had understood the inwardness of the concept of Sphota in this manner,

they could have used it in the case of poetry also without confusing poetic

expression with denotational communication Banville 80 assessed the

situation with a correct intuition “It is the word placed to complete the

rhyme, the last word of the line of verse that, like a magician, must cause

to appear before our vision all that the poet wished to communicate But

this word of enchantment, this magic word where do we find it and

how do we find it?” Banville answers his own query, the word will

emerge simultaneously with the vision if the inward experience is there

But here we are in the field of poetic, not prosaic or denotational,

communication Visvanatha 81 stresses the importance of the expectancy

or curiosity (Jijñāsā) aroused by one word in the progressively appre-

hended poetic statement to know the words that follow But he is not

talking of propositional statements, but poetic expression For he defines

poetry as a sentence the soul of which is Rasa and the stimulation of

expectancy he referring to is a feature of the poetic sentence, it is

fulfilled with the relish of the Rasa when the poetic expression reaches

completion of form The aesthetic relishing here traverses in reverse the

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involution of the meaning in linguistic tissue in aesthetic creation. R. L.

Stevenson52 wrote : "The true business of the literary artist is to plait or

weave his meaning, involving it around itself, so that each sentence, by

successive phrases, shall first come into a kind of knot, and then, after a

moment of suspended meaning, solve and clear itself."

Even if integral communication of meaning in a propositional statement

is delayed till the phonetic form of words and the syntactical shape of

sentences are completed, it is still possible to convey the same meaning in

alternative formulations But this is not possible in poetic expression

because meaning and verbalisation cannot be separated out This is why

Vamana rules out replacement by synonyms and paraphrase. Cleanth

Brooks endorses this prohibition Referring to poetic structure he says :

"The structure meant is certainly not 'form' in the conventional sense in

which we think of form as a kind of envelope which 'contains' the

'content' "83 Nor is it a logical structure or "rational meaning" which

can be apprehended adequately by paraphrasing it in prose Most of our

difficulties in criticism" Brooks proceeds to say, are rooted in the "heresy

of paraphrase" 81 If we allow ourselves to be misled by it, we distort the

relation of the poem to its "truth", we raise the problem of belief in a

vicious and crippling form, we split the poem between its "form" and its

"content"—we bring the statement to be conveyed into an unreal competi-

tion with science, philosophy or theology Montgomery85 repeats the

thought, moving nearer to concrete illustrations "How much the power

of poetry depends upon the nice inflections of rhythm alone, may be proved

by taking the finest passages of Milton and Shakespeare, and merely putting

them into prose, with the least possible variation of the words themselves

The attempt would be like gathering up dewdrops, which appear jewels

and pearls on the grass, but run into water in the hand , the essence and

the elements remain, but the grace, the sparkle, and the form are gone."

This is an advance on Vamana's formulation, for it shows that even without

replacement by synonyms, by merely using the same 'words in prose,

without the poetic rhythm, the poetic sense can be destroyed But the

study in Sanskrit poetics of the aesthetic qualities of various metres

expresses the same thought. as we shall see later

Bradley86 gives a helpful clarification of the indissoluble union of

intention and medium in art Just as there is in music not sound on one

side and meaning on the other, but only expressive sound, just as in

painting there is not a meaning plus paint, but only a meaning in paint,

in true poetry it is impossible to express the meaning in any but its own

words, or to change the words without changing the meaning Bradley

proceeds to illustrate this by taking a line which is certainly very free from

"poetic" diction " "To be or not to be, that is the question " A para-

phrase would run like this : "What is just now occupying my attention

is the comparative disadvantage of continuing to live or putting an end to

myself" For practical purposes, "the purpose, for example of a coroner",

this might suffice. But, for the deeper poetic purpose, it is utterly inade-

quate. "Hamlet was well able to ‘unpack his heart with words’, but he

will not unpack it with our paraphrases "

Bradley’s analysis of the Shakespearean line which is free from “poetic”

diction helps indirectly to reveal the soundness of the position taken up by

Sanskrit poetics that the basic reality in poetry is the poet’s action

(Kavi Vyapāra) Words themselves are neutral, it is this action which

transforms them into poetic tissue Lowes87 wrote "Words in them-

selves are neither poetic nor unpoetic They become poetic, or they remain

unassimilated prose, according as the poet’s imaginative energy is or is not

sufficiently powerful to absorb them” Claudel88 points out that while

prosaic discourses uses only the denotational power of the word, in poetry

it is used as the “condensed vehicle of the intrinsic energy of feeling” In

poetry a word of insult is equivalent to a blow Valery89 says that, though

the words used in poetry are the words used in prose, they are not the

same values Read said “Poetry is properly speaking a transcendental

quality—a sudden transformation which words assume under a particular

influence—and we can no more define this quality than we can define a

state of grace ” The mysterious transformation of words is wrought by

poetic creativity, the “transcendental” nature of that creativity is something

we can discuss later It is because poetry thus steps up words from the

power-level of denotation to that of poetic induction that paraphrase decom-

poses poetry For paraphrase means a regressive descent to the denota-

tional stratum “A lyric poem does not mean but is,” wrote Williamson 90

"As plain sense its meaning becomes an abstraction, as imaginative sense

it is always realizing something more than its obvious meaning, is always

conveying a state of mind as well as ideas ” Brett91 points out that “what

the poem says is always more than what is said in the poem” If the

argument were all that the poem says, it would be (as Coleridge in fact

said of Pope’s Essay on Man) not poetry, “but thoughts translated into the

language of poetry”, versified discourse

III TRANSCENDENCE OF SOUND AND SENSE

If, from the poetic tissue, we separate out word and meaning for purposes

of analytical discussion and through analytical dissection, we could either

say with Bhoja92 that poetic expression is one which gives parity and equal

importance to both (Ubhayapradhāna) or with the Agni Purāna93 that

both are unimportant (Apradhāna) There is no paradox here In the

poetic concretisation both are equally important But neither has ultimate

importance, for neither is the ultimate source of value That is the poetic

action (Kavi Vyapāra) as the Agni Purāna asserts Here we must

remember the deeper meaning of Kālidāsa’s comparison of the relation

between word and meaning to the relation between husband and wife as

laid down in the Smṛtis (religio-ethical texts) Marriage is a sacrament

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and man and woman enter the holy union for the service performed

together to Moral Law (Dharma) to which they both as well as the

institution of marriage, are subordinate Since Rasa in this comparison is

like Dharma, it means that sound and meaning are not self-determined

entities but determined by the poetic emotion Kuntaka, who attached so

much importance to poetic expression as to write a whole treatise on it

and included in it style and ornament and other features, ultimately derives

it from the poet's creative intuition (Kavi Pratibha). The special utterance

of poetry (Vakrokti) is, ultimately, inspired utterance

The great advance of researches in psychology in our own age has

emphasised the very important role of unconscious processes in inspiration

Albert Béguin91 speaks of the images which “ascend from the depths of

the being and compose a song” not yet expressed in words. But this

insight cannot be regarded as wholly the gift of psychoanalysis or Freud

or other contemporary theories which have dealt with the importance of

the unconscious Carus95 wrote in the forties of the nineteenth century

“All that operate, create, act, suffer, ferment, brood in the Night of our

unconscious life—all that manifest themselves there, in our organismic life

and in the influences we receive from other souls and the entire universe—

all these ascend, with their specific accent, from the darkness of the uncon-

scious to the light of the conscious life And this song, this miraculous

confidence from the Unconscious to the Conscious, we call : feeling ” A

century still earlier, Diderot96 traced the poetic metaphor to unconscious

processes The creation of original metaphors, the yoking together of

remote spheres, the apprehension of unsuspected relationships, come about

through the accumulation of delicate and varied experiences during the

long life of an organism The memory serves like a vault of images, stored

in the darkness of nerve centres, from where they spring in an unpredictable

and often inexplicable manner, coupling themselves to present ideas to form

the metaphors of the poet and the hypotheses of the scientist 97

The understanding of the unconscious processes involved in creative

activity, thus, cannot be considered the sole prerogative of our own times

In India, long before poetics’ began to take shape as a distinct discipline,

in the Vedic period itself, we see the intuitive understanding of the reality

of the unconscious processes The spontaneity of inner inspiration is

realised by the Ṛg Veda “Like joyous streams bursting from the moun-

tain, to the Lord our hymns have sounded”98 The spontaneous song is

a miracle The glorious word occurring spontaneously to the poet is like

“the appearance of the finely-robed loving wife before her husband” 99

But it is rapidly realised that the miracle is not external but arises within

It is realised that the goddess of poetic utterance reveals her divine self

only to those who can understand her real nature 100 This, of course, is

a metaphor The reality is poetic creativity (Pratibhā) It is from the

unconscious levels of this creativity that the poetic idea and word emerge

to light

That neither meaning nor sound has any intrinsic value and that value is created by the poetic action ( Kavi Vyapara ) are established again in Sanskrit poetics by the outcome of the speculations on the excellences ( Gunas ) and defects ( Doshas ) of poetry Ten Gunas and ten Doshas are mentioned by Bharata 101 Both merits as well as flaws may refer to the sound as well as the meaning For instance, in the analysis by Dandin, 102 though sweetness ( Madhurya ) is primarily an excellence of the sound stratum created by alliteration, use of soft vocables and other devices, words suggesting a vulgar sense are prohibited as destructive of sweetness, which therefore emerges as a feature of the meaning stratum as well The important question now raises its head, whether such qualitative distinctions are invariably valid, whether a flaw is permanent ( Nitya ) or transient ( Anitya ) That is, can we define any feature as a flaw, right from the outset, and be sure that whenever that feature is found embedded in a poetic tissue, the poetic effect will be really marred ?

This provokes the attack on the problem at a deeper level and Visvanatha 103 realises that, if a dangerous simplicism is to be avoided, absolutist definitions of flaws will have to be dropped Here he was anticipating Dubos 101 who wrote “A work which moves us greatly must be excellent on the whole For the same reason the work which does not move us at all, does not engage us, is worth nothing And if criticism finds in it nothing to reprove in the way of faults against the rules, it means only that a work may be bad without having faults against the rules, as a work full of faults against the rules may be an excellent work ” But Visvanatha's analysis penetrates deeper to a functional point of view which evaluates particular traits in their embedding in the organic contexts and judges them as flaws or merits in the light of that evaluation and not by any absolute criteria The flaw ( Dosha ) is now redefined as what adversely affects the evocation of the feeling ( Rasapakarsaka ) No feature, therefore, can be regarded as a permanent flaw in any context Visvanatha shows that what is ordinarily considered a flaw can become an excellence by actually helping and not hindering the evocation of the feeling

As a matter of fact, the recognition of this truth is implied in the works of many writers long before Visvanatha Thus, while mellifluousness was considered an excellence and discordant sounds ( Sruti-Kashtha or Sruti-Dushta ) a flaw, as early as the seventh century, Bhamaha 105 lays down the general proposition that particular contexts make even discord an excellence Kuntaka 106 endorses this by saying that letters and sounds must be appropriate to the context and that certain sounds unsuited to certain situations may help the evocation of feeling in other situations

It is worthwhile quoting here what T S Eliot 107 has to say on the same subject “I would be a mistake to assume that all poetry ought to be melodious, or that melody is more than one of the components of the music of words Some poetry is meant to be sung, most poetry, in modern times, is meant to be spoken—and there are many other things to be

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spoken of besides the murmur of innumerable bees or the moan of doves

in memorial elms Dissonance, even cacophony, has its place." Flaws

and excellences in the poetic tissue, thus, have to be analysed with

reference to the feeling which seeks incarnation in it The poet cannot be

condemned to be a bard of tender sentiments, eternally. He may be an

angry man We may find in an expressionist painting that the anger is

the pigment, the coruscated surface. the aching colour Likewise, anger

may bristle in the rough texture of the words

It is Dandin who undertakes a detailed analysis of the question from

this deeper, functional point of view. One whole chapter108 is devoted

to the discussion of Doshas or flaws But each flaw is analysed with a

qualification that in certain contexts it ceases to be a flaw and becomes

an excellence ( Guna ) Thus, if harsh sounds ( Suti-Dushta ) are to be

avoided in the delineation of the erotic sentiment ( Sngara ) they can be

a positive excellence in the depiction of the terrible or the awe-inspiring

( Raudra ) Unintelligible prattle, where syntax collapses and meaning is

obscure, is generally to be shunned, not only in poetry, but in prose also

But Dandin points out that it can be ideal for a child's sweet prattle or the

speech of a sick man or a mad man's raving Dandin's analysis reaches

a deeper level when he refers to contradictory speech ( Virodhartha ) He

is not referring to the utterance of a character deliberately meant to conceal

from another his real intentions or misguide him He is dealing with the

spontaneous utterance in profound emotional crises, like the speech of

Clytemnestra, when Agamemnon's herald arrives, in the Oresteia of

Aeschylus, where the emotion revealed in speech is utterly different from

the emotion that is creating a storm within Dandin fully justifies such

utterances by arguing that there are states of mind in which such contradic-

tory speech is the natural mode of expression Therefore this contradictory

quality is not a flaw, but an excellence, in such contexts

Raja Sekhara sums up the drift of the entire speculation on this issue by

stressing once again the importance of the creative action of the poet

With a delightful lack of inhibition, he justifies even plagiarism and details

thirty-two different modes by which literary borrowing may be turned to

advantage Those who find this rather appalling should speedily reassure

themselves by realising that the plagiarism referred to here is of the type

which Shakespeare practised when he lifted whole stories from Holinshed

and other sources The stories undergo a sea-change because they are sub-

jected to a creative re-handling It is this creativity, Raja Sekhara109

points out, that enables the poet to obliterate the ordinary distinctions

between flaws and excellences The real poet transmutes flaws into excel-

lences The poetaster ruins his poetry even with what are usually recog-

nised as excellences

We can now proceed to see how this creative intuition attacks the

problem of poetic figures

CHAPTER FOUR

Poetic Figures

I. THE DISPENSABILITY OF FIGURES

Figures of speech are called Alamkāras (literally, ornaments, decorations) in Sanskrit poetics and poetics itself is often designated as Alamkāra Sāstra, the science of ornament or embellishment Many writers have demurred against this on the ground that what is embellished (Alamkārya) is more important than the embellishment (Alamkāra) Poetics has kept that important distinction in mind but the term Alamkāra Sāstra has continued to be in vogue.

The pleasure we take in the pictures of simile and metaphor, as distinct from unfigurative word-picture, may be due to the shock of surprise caused by the unexpected rapprochement of two notions, that seemed, a moment before, unconnected and remote from one another 1 Bharata2 treats Alamkāras as part of the "linguistic representation" (Vācika-abhinaya) which is the libretto of the drama He mentions four figures But in course of time the number enormously increased

Vamana believed that all figurative expressions were but aspects of metaphorical expression (Upama Prāpancha) He is, however, alone in this type of monism Other writers found it difficult to agree that all figures implied comparison or juxtaposition of images But there was a profound perception in Vamana's concept which should not be ignored To describe one object in terms of another, to perceive, in Wordsworth's words, "affinities in objects where no brotherhood exists to passive minds", has always been the poet's pride and power Vamana's concept has also affinities with Eisenstein's concept of creative montage in filmic presentation "A work of art, understood dynamically, is the process of arranging images"3 The principle of the arrangement is montage or creative juxtaposition "In every such juxtaposition the result is qualitatively distinguishable from each component element viewed separately4 The juxtaposition shall evoke in the perception and feelings of the spectator the most complete image of the theme itself " When Vamana6 insisted that not only simile and metaphor, but all genuinely poetic imagery was a latent juxtaposition (Aupamya-garbha), he seems to have been thinking of the generalised problem of concretising the theme, which, in the Indian tradition, is essen-

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tially linked to the Rasa, in a stream of juxtaposed and integrated images.

The affinity between images thus juxtaposed is, therefore, something which

belongs to a deeper plane of aesthetic creativity and experience than the

affinities that ordinarily suffice for simile and metaphor

But the difficulty in understanding the real meaning of Vaman.'s concept

increased as the number of poetic figures defined by analysis multiplied.

Jayadeva7 (thirteenth century) gives about one hundred and Appayya

Dikshita8 (seventeenth century) adds a score more The two broad divi-

sions were the ideational figures (Arthalamkära) which related to the sense

and the verbal figures (Sabdalankara) which related to the word The

distinction is not clearly expressed in the analysis of Udbhata9 of the eighth

century But it is implied, for he treats the verbal figures first and then

proceeds to the ideal figures But Mammata10 in the eleventh century

clearly distinguishes them and gives a helpful test for deciding whether any

particular instance is a verbal figure or an ideal figure The test is whether

the example can or cannot bear a substitution by synonyms If the figure

disappears with such a substitution, it is a verbal figure Toleration of

synonym would indicate that it is an ideal figure

The extent to which specialisation in the analysis of figures was carried

can be revealed by taking a typical example : indication of the beauty of

a woman's face Upama or simile - "Your face is like the moon".

Rupaka or metaphor "Your moon-face" Pratipa - "The moon is like

your face" Sandelha - "Is this your face, or is this the moon?"

Apahnuti "This is the moon and not your face" Upameyopama -

"The moon is like your face, and your face is like the moon" Ananvaya

"Your face is only like your face" Smarana - "Having seen the moon I

remembered your face" Bhantimat - "Thinking it to be the moon, the

Chakora (a bird which is supposed to feed on moon-beams) flies towards

your face" Ullekha - "This is the moon, this is the lotus, thus the

Chakora and the bee fly towards your face" Utpreksha - "This is verily

the moon" Atisayokti - "This is a second moon" Tulyayogita - "The

moon and the lotus are vanquished by your face" Dipaka : "Your face

and the moon rejoice in the night" Vyatireka - "Your face always shines,

but the moon shines only in the night" Dishtanta - "In the heavens the

moon, on earth your face" Prativastupama - "The moon reigns in heaven,

your face reigns on earth" Nidarsana - "Your face bears the beauty of

the moon" Aprastuta Prasamsa - "The moon is pale before your face"

Parinama "By your moon-face, the warmth of passion is cooled."

Samasokti "Your face beautifully spotted with black eyes and adorned

with the light of smile"

This helpful string of examples given by De,11 following Dandin,12

indicates the danger of this type of intensive specialisation, of which poet-

asters could and did make capital, entirely dispensing with inspiration That

is why Ananda Vardhana,13 without barring images altogether, advises

caution He is afraid that the crowding of images may distract the attention

of the reader away from the feeling-import of the poem Mammata, Bhoja14

and Ruyyaka15 try to restrict the number, but the scholars proved

irrepressible

It was the undeniable emotive power of the best specimens of that type

of poetry which completely dispensed with figures of speech that provoked

a deeper analysis of the nature and function of poetic ornament in the

poetic organism The “natural description”, devoid of ornament but

endowed with poetic power, is called Svabhavokti With the definition

of poetry as Vakrokti or “deviant” utterance which was an apparent anti-

thesis between Svabhavokti and Vakrokti which urgently demanded a reso-

lution Bhamaha accepts Svabhavokti as a poetic figure or Alamkāra, as

Raghavan16 has shown through a painstaking analysis Bhamaha17 includes

Svabhavokti in Vakrokti because he interprets the latter term as poetic,

rather than as necessarily ornamented or embellished, utterance The anti-

thesis he insists on is not between Svabhavokti and Vakrokti but between

Vakrokti, an inclusive expression for all really poetic utterance, and Vaita,

news18 may report of current happenings (Loka Vaita) or

technical information (Sāstra Vaita) They have their own place but do

not qualify as poetry Naturalistic description, on the other hand, can

qualify as poetry, even though it dispenses with all ornament, if it has

strikingness or real poetic impact

Negatively, Svabhavokti rules out the ordinariness and vulgarity of

Vaita Positively, it must incarnate beauty through the various qualities

into which that concept resolves itself Bana,19 of the seventh century,

who uses the term Jati for Svabhavokti, insists that news (Vaita) is

essentially vulgar (Grāmya) in the sense that the language has not been

chastened in the crucible of poetic action Poetic naturalism has to

be Agraṃya, rise above this vulgar, prosaic level Kumara Svamin20

(fifteenth century) repeats this caution Māḥima Bhaṭṭa21 feels that

naturalism in poetry should be very alert to the danger of a flaw which he

calls the lapse into the excluded utterance (Avacya Vacana) Attributes

which do not add to the significance, or words which do not heighten the

impact or aspect of things which are commonplace — these, if not excluded

in the poetic utterance, lead to this specific flaw Kuntaka, who opposed

the inclusion of Svabhavokti in Vakrokti, was obsessed by the fear that

cart-drivers' talk would gain acceptance in poetry as Svabhavokti The

danger, probably, is not unreal But the cautions of Bhamaha, Bana and

others safeguard against it If Wordsworth insisted that rustic speech was

suitable for poetry, he was well aware of the cautions that had to be kept

in mind, as Barstow22 and Pottle23 have shown in their studies on poetic

diction and idiom Wordsworth speaks about a “selection of the real

language of men”, about expression “simple and unelaborated”, but

“purged from causes of dislike or disgust” He recognised that “selection”

was necessary to “separate the composition from the vulgarity and mean-

ness of ordinary life”

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These contra-indications deal primarily with the language tissue, about which care has to be taken in the approach of naturalism which dispenses with ornament But what makes the naturalism poetry rather than reportage (Varta) is not the mere avoidance of the prosaic but the presence of positive qualities Poetic language, said Wordsworth, can be the language of general human speech but it must be in "a state of vivid sensation".21 Poetic experience and imagination, thus, should be the prior reality Camille Pissarro, in a letter of 1892 to his son Lucien, makes a very significant observation which shows that the vulgarity (Gramyata) of which Bana and Kuntaka were very nervous in naturalism is automatically excluded if the naturalism is poetic Pissarro believes like Wordsworth that aesthetic creation is best undertaken as recollection in tranquillity His reason for this belief is that only those features of the scene which have intimations of value to the aesthetic sensibility will survive in memory He asks Lucien to practise drawing from memory "I am more than ever for the impression through memory It renders less of the object—vulgarity disappears, leaving only the undulations of the truth that was glimpsed, felt "

The felt truth, thus, is more important than the objective truth and if the felt truth seems identical with the objective truth in a piece of naturalistic poetry, the fact still remains that it is the imagination which secured or created this identity Bhamaha defines this imaginative quality (Bhavikatva) as that power of the poetic expression by which the past and the future presented by the poet are so vivid as to look like belonging to the present Murari,25 the ninth century dramatist, said that the poet is like the sage (Rishi) who brings through the power of his vision the past and future into the present Bhamaha and Murari indicate here the distinction between the mere chronicle and the evocative naturalism or Svabhavokti Visvanatha26 also makes the distinction "By a mere narration on the part of the poet of what happened, the soul of poetry is not realised, because that, the mere narration of events, can be effected by chronicles and the like " What is required is not reportage, Varta, of the past but an integral resurrection of the life of the past, to use Michelet's phrase

Writer after writer emphasises the living quality of the evocation in really poetic Svabhavokti, whether it relates to the past or to a present object or context Vamana refers to the luminously clear seizure of the essential nature of the object (Vastu-svabhava-sphutatva) Dandin27 demands the actuality (Sakshat) of the object and Bhoja28 elaborates this as the portrayal of an object's actual appearance (Svrupa-sakshat-kathan) Taruna Vachaspati (thirteenth century ) says that in the poetic evocation the object emerges as if it is right before you (Pratyakshamiva drsayanti ) In Svabhavokti, more than in any other poetic intention, the content or meaning should have the most luminously perfect revelation in the verbalisation (Artha vyakti ) Rudrata,29 therefore, uses the attribute "mature in meaning or ideation" (Pushtartha) for poetic naturalism

POETIC FIGURES

79

Kuntaka is the only writer who gets into some analytical difficulties regarding poetic naturalism He starts by accepting Bhamaha’s term Vakrokti, which is primarily meant to distinguish the accession of evocative power by language in poetic expression and only secondarily means embellished utterance, if the embellishment indicates additive elements like poetic figures Kuntaka, further, derives Vakrokti from the poet’s genius (Pratibha) Using Vakrokti now as a generic concept, he proceeds to analyse the poetic embellishments that can be legitimately included In it Poetic figures are an important category of such embellishments Thus he unconsciously comes to use the term Vakrokti as almost coextensive with the term Alamkāra or ornament 30 The unconscious shift from his own original position should be carefully noted To regard figures as aspects of Vakrokti or poetic expression is legitimate But to see only figurative expression as poetic expression is a serious unconscious fallacy Bāṇ31 defined the poetic figure thus “A figure of speech is a deviation from the plain and ordinary mode of speaking, for the sake of greater effect it is an unusual form of speech ” Bāṇ does not fall into the difficulties which proved a trap for Kuntaka, but this definition is astonishingly helpful in clarifying to us how those difficulties arose Poetry is an unusual, deviant form of speech and it is the recognition of this that caused expressions like Vakrokti and Praudhokti to emerge in Sanskrit poetics As poetic figures are a very important aspect of this unusual form of speech, we couple them very naturally in association as Bāṇ does, and legitimately But the danger arises when we derive the unusual quality of poetic expression solely from poetic figures

Dandin had noticed this danger earlier His solution is forthright, if paradoxical If poetic expression invariably means figurative expression, the Vakrata ( literally, the deviation mentioned by Bāṇ and coupled by him and Kuntaka with the search for juxtaposed images or other ornament ) implied in Vakrokti cannot be laid down as the invariant characteristic of all poetic figures, for it is absent in Svabhavokti which Dandin insists is a genuine poetic figure 32 He does so insist because the opposition insists that all poetic expression is figurative expression Dandin is satisfied that Svabhavokti is genuinely poetic So it has to be considered a poetic figure according to the opposition’s premises If the deviousness (Vakrata) is not there in Svabhavokti, it is a headache for the opposition, who should modify their concept of Vakrokti 33 In fact, Dandin becomes heartily tired of this term because of its wide oscillation of meaning and uses Atisayokti, the term and the concept being derived from Bhamaha 34 Atisaya or Adbhuta is wonder and he refers to the wonderful transmutation by which language blooms into poetry when handled by the creative genius of the poet There is also a specific figure of speech named Atisayokti But Dandin makes it clear that he is using the term in a more generalised and profound sense, as standing, in fact, for the poetic modality that is basic to all figures as well as to naturalism Abhinava35 would later accept the concept and the

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term as standing for the generic property of all poetic figures (sarvalamkāra-sāmānyarūpam) and since he relates it to transcendental (lokātīa) vision it becomes identical with the essence of poetry, embracing both naturalism as well as figurative expression But Dandin had also stressed vision and earlier Bhamaha had related Atisayokti to the transcendental poetic intuition (lokatikānta gocharata) All this makes it absolutely clear that the sense in which Bhamaha used the expressions Vakrokti or Atisayokti exactly corresponds to the use of the expression "deviation" by Valéry36 "Whenever speech exhibits "a certain deviation from the most direct expression-that is, the most insensible expression of thought, when-ever these deviations make us aware in some way of a world of relationships distinct from purely practical reality, we conceive more or less clearly of the possibility of enlarging this exceptional area, and we have the sensation of seizing the fragment of a noble and living substance which is perhaps capable of development and cultivation, and which, once developed-and used, constitutes poetry in its artistic effect" This deviant expression that is poetry can take in figures, but can also dispense with them And the upshot of the argumentative subtlely on the part of Dandin, which was provoked by the misunderstanding of Vakrokti displayed by so many, is that his attitude towards figures of speech stands revealed as identical with that of a writer like Housman,37 twelve centuries later Housman says that metaphor and simile are "things inessential to poetry" They are frankly "accessories", for they are employed by the poet "to be helpful, to make his sense clearer or his conception more vivid", or they are used by the poet "for ornament", because the image contained possesses an "independent power to please"

Mammata also follows Dandin in claiming Svabhavokti as a poetic figure He points out that poetic naturalism has impact, strikingness (Vāchchitrīya) and this is full qualification for being considered as figurative speech Bhoja generalises the concept of poetic ornament (Alamkāra) as that which helps in incarnating beauty or radiance (Kavya-sobha) in the poetic tissue Vakrokti, thus, is not exclusively figurative speech It is utterance which enshrines beauty Naturalism or Svabhavokti, therefore, does not create any difficulties for Bhoja Vidyanatha38 (fourteenth century) also closes the issue by noticing that poetic naturalism can be beautiful (Chāru)

But Kuntaka's difficulty is genuine He readily admits the striking quality of pen-pictures of objects, nature and men39 But he cannot accept naturalism as a figure or ornament, because the intrinsic nature of the object (Vastu-svabhāva) should be the ornamented (Alamkārya) He admits that beauty is manifested here But it is the intrinsic beauty of the object (Vastu-vakrata)

The depth of Kuntaka's difficulty is now revealed - the beauty in poetic naturalism is something intrinsic to the object, donated by the object, not donated by the poet; only if it were created by the poet could it be called a poetic ornament, so Svabhavokti is not a poetic ornament, The problem

here completely changes its shape Whether naturalism is a figure or not is

now unimportant. The important question is whether or not it is basically

poetic, in the sense of being a creative donation by the poet We cannot

accuse Kuntaka of acute insensitiveness here, for others have felt the same

difficulty Mammata comes up against it in his analysis of the figure known

as Bhavikalamka We saw earlier that Bhamaha specifically emphasised

the role of the pictorially evocative power of the imagination (Bhavika) in

compositions which attempted the integral resurrection of the past or the

delineation of an idealised future The poetic figure here was called Bhavi-

kalamkara Now Mammata raised this issue when things of the past or

future are visualised, there are two possibilities, the things by themselves

may possess a power and beauty whereby their mere mention may make

them seem like being actually present before us, or this quality of their

becoming vivid enough to appear like things of the present may be wrought

in them by the extraordinary gifts of expression of the poet Mammata feels

inclined to include the former also as Bhavikalamkara His reason is

that the figure here is like Svabhavokti, where the beauty is more or less

initially given (siddha) and since Svabhavokti is accepted as a figure, this

class of evocations of the “glorious” past or future should also be accepted

as a poetic figure But earlier, Bhamaha and Udbhata, dealing with the

same issue, had insisted that if expression is to qualify as a poetic figure,

the poet's powers must have added something So they accepted only

those instances as Bhavikalamkara where the power of the evocation rested

on the adequacy of the verbal tissue (Sabdanukulya) created by the poet 40

Mammata moves nearer to the core of the problem than Kuntaka, for

although he gets involved in the difficulties created by those instances

where the beauty seems to be initially “given”, he also recognises that

there are other instances where it is the donation of the creative poet And,

to be fair to Mammata and Kuntaka, let us also concede that the million-

dollar “historical” sagas from Hollywood often lean too heavily on the

themes by themselves But in admitting such instances as poetic and in

assuming that in naturalism the beauty is the object's donation, Mammata

makes the same mistake as Kuntaka And we have to look to Bhamaha

and Dandin for a juster appreciation of the real inwardness of the

problem

Illustrations from Western thought can clarify the problem here and also

show that Mammata and Kuntaka were not being singularly obtuse in their

approaches Drinkwater 41 classifies poetry in three groups The first group

consists of impressions made directly upon the poet's mind by natural objects,

by objective action, and by personal sensation, all recorded without philo-

sophical argument The second group consists of material which shows

these various impressions not merely recorded, but recorded in their effect

upon the poet's emotion He appropriates them to the activity of his own

feelings The third group consists of material in which the poet goes

beyond the record of an object or action and beyond the record of its

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effect upon his emotions, and allows himself to embellish the occasion with

dogmatic statement or reflection of the mind The first group corresponds

to the Svabhavoktı of Sanskrit poetics, as is clear from the example Drink-

water uses, a poem which gives a fine evocation of winter, “of the red-

breast sitting and singing betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch of

the mossy apple-tree, while the night thatch smokes in the sun-thaw, of the

secret ministry of frost hanging them up in silent icicles, quietly shining to

the quiet moon”. Now the difficulty here is that the distinction is not clear

between Drinkwater’s first and second groups Is there such a thing as a

record of the object, of objective action, in poetry, which is a separate

category from the record of impressions in their effects upon the poet’s

sensibility ? Is there such a thing in poetry as the intrinsic beauty of the

object, Kuntaka’s Vastu Vakrata, different from the beauty of the poetic

vision and expression, of Vakrokti ?

Analyses by Coleridge, Mann, T S Eliot and others can help us towards

an answer to this query Coleridge speaks of the identification of “the

percipient and the perceived”. Even in immediate perception, images of

memory flow in to coalesce with it and to form “nuclei in the reservoir of

the soul’ And these constellations are retained in memory as feelings,

combine as feelings, emerge as feelings For their elements were charged

with feeling in the primal instant of perception, and were at that first stage

in the process of gestation endowed with, and known as, feelings 42 Natural-

istic poetry need not be written at the very instant of the impression Even

if it is, memory and sensitiveness have time for their selective, refining

process Thomas Mann43 wrote · “The strange thing was that these

pictures and memories had their extreme vividness and brilliance, their ful-

ness of detail, not as it were, as first hand It was as though memory had

not originally been so concerned to preserve them in all their detail, but

had to yield them up afterwards, bit by bit, word by word, out of its very

depths They had been searched out, refashioned, reproduced with all their

attendant circumstances, given, so to say, a fresh coat of paint and hung

in strong light, for the sake of the significance which they had unanticipatedly

taken on ” Eliot,44 though he proceeds cautiously, makes it very clear that

naturalistic images are retained by memory because, even at their first

impact, the impressions elicited responsive feeling reactions “Why, for all

of us, out of all that we have heard, seen, felt, in a life-time, do certain

images recur, charged with emotion, rather than others ? The song of the

one bird, the leap of one fish, at a particular place and time, the scent of

one flower, an old woman on a German mountain path, six ruffians seen

through an open window playing cards at night at a small French railway

station where there was a water mill , such memories may have a symbolic

value, but of what we cannot tell, for they come to represent the depths of

feeling into which we cannot peer We might just as well ask why, when

we try to recall visually some period in the past, we find in our memory

just the few meagre ai bitrarily chosen set of snapshots that we do find there,

the faded poor souvenirs of passionate moments " If the last sentence raises an issue, it also provides the answer in the last two words The moment of observation of the natural object was also a passionate moment Or, as Bhatta Tauta would have said, description ( Varnana ) has life and evocative power because it is the recollection of a genuine experience of vision ( Darsana ) and vision here means seeing the object not with the eye alone, but the heart as well Virginia Woolf15 wrote "Recall, then, some event that has left a distinct impression on you—

how at the corner of the street, perhaps, you passed two people talking A tree shook , an electric light danced , the tone of the talk was comic, but also tragic , a whole vision, an entire conception, seemed contained in that moment." Baudelaire16 helps to sum up the whole issue "What is pure art according to the modern conception? It is the creation of an evocative magic incorporating at the same time both object and subject, the world external to the artist and the artist himself " His own urban landscapes have the realism of reportage But they are also the objectifications of his own inward tensions and poignant emotions

Thus, Drinkwater's—and Kuntaka's—distinction between record of the object and such record irrigated by feeling is not valid in poetry Only the latter is the invariable reality, unless we take into account bald reportage, Bhamaha's Varta, but that is not poetry Any statement which implies that poetic beauty is the object's donation finds it necessary to correct and amplify itself immediately Leigh Hunt says in one place

"There are simplest truths often so beautiful and impressive that one of the greatest proofs of the poet's genius consists in leaving them to stand alone, illustrated by nothing,but the light of their own tears or smiles, their own wonder, might and playfulness " But the poet could not have seen these truths unless he had shared their smiles or tears And Hunt himself states elsewhere "In poetry, feeling and imagination are necessary for the perception and presentation even of matters of fact "47 Wordsworth48 also, similarly, makes a statement which he has to correct speedily He opens with a statement of the powers requisite for the production of poetry, the first being "Observation and Description—that is, the ability to observe with accuracy things as they are in themselves, and with fidelity to describe them, unmodified by any passion or feeling existing in the mind of the describer, whether the things depicted be actually present to the senses, or have a place only in the memory" The evocations of things present to the senses and those abiding in memory generally correspond to the Svabhavokti and the Bhavikalankara of Sanskrit poetics But Wordsworth soon finds that instead of Observation and Description, he has to speak, like Bhatta Tauta, about Vision ( Darsana ) and Description ( Varnana ) For, a little later, he radically modifies his statement "These processes of imagination are carried on either by conferring additional properties upon an object, or abstracting from it some of those which it actually possesses, and thus enabling it

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to react upon the mind which hath performed the process, like a new

existence"

A E ( George Russel ) wrote . "We have really nothing to write

about but ourselves."10 Arnold Bennett50 was more forthright in his

demand that the objective in art should be soaked in the subjectivity "No

good thing is produced with 'perfect detachment' or without passion

None of my work is detached or pretends to be " Middleton Murry51

wrote "There is no real antithesis between personal and impersonal

art the opposition is a false one." Lowes52 draws a symbolic picture

of the poetic mind confronting the sea "I may be caught by the sea's

mystery, oppressed by its vastness, stirred by the majestic 'Hitherto shalt

thou come, but no further, and here shall thy proud waves be stayed'.

The I who see am manifold as what I see, and what I see takes form

and colour, proportion and emphasis from what I feel "

When the dust of controversy, whether to include poetic naturalism in

the figurative speech that is poetry, settled down in Sanskrit poetics, the

conclusion that was stabilised was that the object of Svabhavokti is the

finest essential aspect ( Visi?shita svabhava) of the thing, which the poet's

eye alone can see and his imagination alone can embody in genuinely

poetic utterance Poetic vision thus becomes paramount even in

naturalism As Roger Fry53 said, in routine living, the normal person

only reads the labels, as it were, on the objects around him, and troubles

no further Valéry refers to the dead habit of seeing through the dictionary.

Prosaic individuals cannot see the profound beauty of ordinary objects,

with the result that they have had to invent beautiful views "Of every-

thing else they are unaware But at the beautiful view they regale them-

selves on a concept swarming with verbal associations . . . And since

they reject as nothing that which has not a name, the number of their

impressions is limited in advance " In poetic vision, however, all these

perfectly familiar things and people become linked in an associative

relationship quite different from that which obtains in the ordinary

contacts of daily life "They become ( if you will forgive the expression)

musicalized It is as though they affect one another with a mutual

resonance of which harmony is the prime feature"54 This is exactly what

Mammata55 meant when he said that in aesthetic vision we are no longer

determined by the strong polarising influences of desire and aversion

which ordinarily condition our attitude towards things, with the result

that they become enjoyable in and for themselves establishing a new

harmony with our being

Ifor Evans56 has made the strong plea that poetry should be considered

a way of knowing the world as valid in its own terms as science

Science gives power by detaching man's inner feelings from the outer

world and exploring the latter objectively, poetry generates power by

taking the world into one's own being, assimilating objects by reacting

with feeling to their essential nature that can enter into such enriching

relation with our subjectivity. "Poetry" says Leigh Hunt,57 "begins where

matter of fact or of science ceases to be merely such, and to exhibit a

further truth, the connection it has with the world of emotion, and its

power to produce imaginative pleasure" Shairp58 points out that any

object or truth can become fit subject for poetic utterance "Only in

order that it should be so, it is necessary that the object, whatever it is,

should cease to be a merely sensible object, or a mere notion of the

understanding, and pass inward--pass out of the coldness of the merely

notional region into the warm atmosphere of the life-giving imagination

Vitalised there, the truth shapes itself into living images which kindle

the passion and affections, and stimulate the whole man" Stedman59

contrasts the Weather Bureau's description of the storm as "an area of

low pressure rapidly moving up the Atlantic coast" to the poet's evoca-

tion of "the gigantic storm-wind of the Equinox descending on the

Atlantic and scouring land-ward in his wrath the toiling surges laden with

sea-weed from the rocks". The scientific description here does not inva-

lidate the imaginative reaction

Shelley60 spoke of poetry as "purging from our inward sight the film

of familiarity It compels us to feel that which we perceive, and to

imagine that which we know" As Mathew Arnold61 said, "the grand

power of poetry is the power of so dealing with things as to awaken in

us a wonderfully full, new, and intimate sense of them, and of our rela-

tions with them" In the non-uttarīyan (lokottara, alaukika, or

lokatikrānta in Sanskrit poetics) context of poetic perception, subject and

object enter into a new enriching relation Maritain62 referred to poetry

as "that intercommunion between the inner being of things and the inner

being of the human Self which is a kind of divination" The Latin vates

was both a poet and a diviner. That was also the original meaning of

the word Kavi in Sanskrit And that is why Browning calls poets the

"makers-see"

Poetry can create new myth and realities. But in naturalism or

Svabhavokti, it sees the world afresh "We often speak of the imagina-

tion" wrote Robert Lynd,63 "as though it were a brilliant faculty of

lying, on the contrary, it is a faculty by which not only do we see and

hear things that the eye cannot see or the ear hear, but which enables

the eye to see and the ear to hear things that they did not see or hear

before" This can be compared with Coleridge's statement64 of the two-

fold aim of the Lyrical Ballads on the one hand, "to give the charm

of novelty to things of every day", by touching them with "the modifying

colours of imagination", on the other hand, to give substantial interest

to supernatural incidents and agents "by the dramatic truth of such

emotions, as would naturally accompany such situations, supposing them

real". Let us concentrate on that part of the endeavour here which

relates to poetic naturalism Here Coleridge speaks of the object as

touched by the modifying colours of the imagination In another passage

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from the same source, he says that one great service the poet renders to

us is that of "awakening the mind's attention to the lethargy of custom,

and directing it to the loveliness and wonder of the world before us, an

inexhaustible treasure, but for which, in consequence of the film of

familiarity and selfish solicitude, we have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear

not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand" Here the implication

seems to be discovered that the world has its intrinsic loveliness which need only

be discovered We seem to have got back to the problem over which

Kuntaka stumbled In poetic naturalism, is the beauty donated by the

object or by the poet? Does the poet "discover" the loveliness of the

world or make it lovely by touching it with the "modifying" colours of

the imagination ?

Let us take the help of some concrete instances Keats depicts a wave

breaking, out at sea,

Down whose green back the short-lived foam, all hoar,

Bursts gradual with a wayward indolence

Betjeman65 paints an ampler canvas :

Forced by the backwash, see the nearest wave

Rise to a wall of huge translucent green

And crumble into spray along the top

Blown seaward by the land-breeze Now she breaks

And in an arch of thunder plunges down

To burst and tumble, foam on top of foam,

Criss-crossing, baffled, sucked and shot again,

A waterfall of whiteness, down a rock,

Without a source but roller's furthest reach

And tufts of sea-pink, high and dry for years,

Are flooded out of ledges, boulders seem

No bigger than a pebble washed about

In this tremendous tide

And lastly, here is a landscape, not marine but riverine, by Bhavabhuti,66

the seventh century dramatist "This is the mountain Kraunchavata with

its flocks of crows sitting in the vast clump of bamboos, resounding with

the mournful hootings of owls Here, frightened by the cries of the

peacocks roaming about, the snakes coil higher round the branches of

the old sandal trees Nearby are the southern ranges with their peaks

darkened by the clouds resting on their points and with the waters of

the Godavari roaring and splashing in their caves And these are those

holy confluences of rivers with deep waters, awful with the tumult of

the waves rushing forth in wild confusion and dashing against one

another."

POETIC FIGURES

In all the three instances, there is no simile or metaphor or any other figure of speech Initially the poet's contribution seems to be confined to the adequacy of verbal music (Sabdanukulya) which Bhamaha and Udbhata demanded in such evocations (It is there in Bhavabhuti, too, but the tumult of the waves—Anyonya pratighata samkula chalat kallola kolahalam—defies translation, at least by this writer) But is that the total donation of the poet?

Very luckily we have the comment of a painter, Reuben Tam,67 on one of his own marine landscapes, entitled Dark Wave This may help us to work towards an answer “Dark Wave is one of a series of paintings of ocean forms that I have been doing for a number of years In this painting I have tried to present a phenomenon of a breaking wave with its white, tumbling head, its dark shadow, its black upsurge, and its streaks of foam But of course these are just the objective components used to bring to focus the subjective experience contained in the picture The total experience itself is the subject matter, the concern of the painting I might trace the experience to its origins in observation and memory, in awareness of symbols of freedom and action, and in response to movement and hiatus, rise and fall, and mass and glint, and in the need for seeking verification in the raw outer world of one's inner vision of reality Thus each of my paintings is the expression of cumulative experience While the outer boundaries of experience may at times be vague and endless, its core may be brought to bright focus by some aspect of the physical world like a wave suddenly breaking before one's eyes And in turn, the specific object, when re-created, re-recorded, struggled with and worried over on canvas, reveals, finally, the general, the longer time, the larger areas of awareness and participation”

We can safely extend the truth of this statement about the Dark Wave to the leisurely green roller of Keats, the wave straining against the backwash in Betjeman and the tumultuous clash of waves in Bhavabhuti If by the poet, he also removes another veil, to reveal his own inner world where what he reveals was seen and felt by him in the first instance because the poet's seeing is experiencing And experience here means that the entire personality, with its sensitiveness, memories and capacity for objectification, was involved in the encounter with the object, with the result that the record of the encounter presents the spirit in action as much as the object on which it acted The objects in poetic naturalism are, therefore, not stolid, neutral physical objects They become transformed and revealed as “objets à réaction poétique”, to borrow Le Corbusier's phrase68

“In the hollow of humility” wrote Maritain,69 “a painter meditates and gazes, he sees the vines that God had made, the olives, the nettle trees, the bulls, the unicorns—the moors and skies of Brittany—and the labours and movements, captured in slow motion, of men whom God also made,”

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what he receives through his eyes falls into the silence of a fervent lake

of contemplation and vegetates until its resurgence in a work capable of

acting as a talisman that would bring peace to the heart.

The world

enters the artist and poet and reemerges as his experience

"Though we

have travelled the world over," wrote Emerson,70 "to find the beautiful,

we must carry it with us, or we find it not.

The best of beauty is a

finer charm than skill in surfaces, in outlines, or rules of art can ever

teach, namely a radiation from the work of art, of human character-

a wonderful expression through stone, or canvas, or musical sound, of

the deepest and simplest attributes of our nature, and therefore most

intelligible at least to those souls which have these attributes."

We come

back to the fundamental position of Sanskrit poetics : that art is a

representation (Abhunaya) of the feeling experienced by the poet through

concrete objects which therefore acquire the status of signes inducteurs.

Poetic utterance can be but need not only be figurative utterance

The

figure is dispensable

What is not dispensable is feeling and experience

This feeling can find full-bodied expression without the use of figures or

the juxta-position of images in simile and metaphor, in poetic naturalism

But the naturalism has to be poetic

Nami Sadhu71 (eleventh century)

in his gloss on Rudrata, points out that whereas factuality (Vastava)

means only a statement of a thing as it is, poetic naturalism (Jati) implies

a living evocation that can create an experience (Anubhava) of the thing

in our sensibility.

The Spanish poet Jiménez was always working towards

his ideal of depuracion.

a purification that would lead to a bare, intense

statement and a limpidity like that of a pool, as he wrote, into which the

spray of a fountain has disappeared leaving no trace on the surface that

has received it

"Intelligence, give me the precise name of things

.

Let my word be the thing itself, newly created by my soul

Through me

let all those who do not know things approach them"72

Naturalism, in such an endeavour, becomes poetic experience, as Nami

Sadhu points out

"It is revelation what thou thinkst Discourse"73

II

THE FUNCTIONALISM OF FIGURES

To open a chapter on poetic figures with a long section on their dispens-

ability may seem paradoxical

But actually it was the poetic quality of

naturalism or unfigurative expression that curbed the drift towards a heavy

overlay of ornament and provoked a functional analysis of the role of

figures in poetic expression

When feeling was reaffirmed as the soul of

poetic expression, the unconscious drift in theory towards the identification

of poetic expression with necessarily figurative expression, which we saw

in Kuntaka, was arrested

Figurative expression was no longer held to

be obligatory

On the other hand, if figures were used, they were not to

be ends in themselves, but had to serve the feeling and become the means

of its realisation

Ananda Vardhana74 points out that ornament

POETIC FIGURES

89

(Alamkāra) makes sense only when there is something of which it is the

ornament (Alamkārya) Otherwise it is like decorating a dead body, adds

Abhinava75 What is embellished is the feeling and therefore poetic figures

are functionally justified only when they help in the evocation of feeling

Thus Ananda Vardhana lays down these principles the figure should

suggest the feeling, it should be born along with the poet's revelation and

delineation of the feeling, it should be naturally and easily introduceable,

the poet should not have to pause to make a special effort to effect it76

What is taking shape now is an organismic theory The metaphors

used for the analysis are interesting, for they reveal a progressive insight

into the inwardness of the situation The merely pretty figure, which has

no profound organismic justification, is compared to the removable orna-

ment, like a jeweled wristlet or hairpin (Kataka or Keyura) for instance

And the caution is given that the figure should really be like an external

limb (Bahuvanga), a limb of the body which is strictly functional and

structural and ideally responsive to the mind -which controls the body

Both Ananda Vardhana and Mahima Bhatta77 emphasise that the figure

should be thus irremovable, structural, organic But both writers soon

find that even the metaphor of the limb is not very happy, for it implies

a dualism beween feeling and poetic tissue, of which the poetic figure is

a component, like the dualism beween soul and body Effective expres-

sion is the epiphany of the poet's feeling and it figurative speech

which is part of the body that is separate from the soul, however responsive to

it The figure is the concretisation of feeling (Rasa Kshipta) It is not

realised by an effort which stands out as a separate endeavour from the

primary one in which feeling moves towards its expression (apithag yatna

muvātya) Thus, from feeling to resonant image or musical sound, the

ideal and verbal figure which realise it, poetry is one unity, one complex

of rich experience78 Paul Valéry79 wrote “A metaphor is what arrives

when one views things in a particular manner” This is the effortless

(apithag vatna) accession by feeling of the figure which is its objective

correlative that Sanskrit poetics speaks of Coleridge80 refers to the

opposite, the laboured (pithag yatna) pursuit of the striking conceit

"Modern poetry is characterized by the poets' anxiety to be always strik-

ing Every line, nay, every word, looks full in your face, and asks

begs for praise ! I am pleased to think that, when a mere

and stripling, I had formed the opinion that true taste was virtue, and that

bad writing was bad feeling"

It is interesting to note that Pater81 endorses what Sanskrit poetics has

to say about the dispensability of ornament and the need for its full

functional justification if used "As the very word ornament indicates

what is in itself non-essential, so the 'one beauty' of all literary style is of

its very essence and independent of all removable decorations, it may

exist in all its fullest lustre in a composition utterly unadorned with

12

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hardly a single suggestion of visibly beautiful things” This is exactly what Dandin and others claimed for Svabhavokti or poetic naturalism and it also echoes Ananda Vardhana's insistence that what is embellished is more important than the embellishment. Pater also repeats the demand for the structural justification of the poetic figure made by Ananda Vardhana, Abhinava and Mahima Bhatta "And above all, there will be no uncharacteristic or tarnished or vulgar decoration, permissible ornament being for the most part stuctural or necessary" Spingarn,82 likewise, emphasises, in the manner of Ananda Vardhana, that feeling and expres-

sion form a unity He is primarily speaking of metre and rhythm, but rhythm can be a verbal figure in Sanskrit poetics and later Spingarn generalises his comment to include all ornament "Rhythm and metre must be regarded as aesthetically identical with style, as style is identical with artistic form and form in its turn is the work of art in its spiritual and indivisible self" To confuse abstract classifications with aesthetic realities is "to confuse form as concrete expression with form as ornament or a dead husk" Spender,83 likewise, writes - "The poet must be conscious of the profound significance and meaning of imagery, his imagery must be true Images are not still-lifes to be hung on walls They are vision of the history of the race and of life and death" This is what Ananda Vardhana meant when he said that imagery should be born along with the poetic vision and its expression, not created by a separate effort

A closer study of the poetic process would indicate the need for a flexible interpretation of the demand that the image should be born along with the initial vision and experience Abhinava84 has earned the gratitude of posterity by giving precise and careful summaries of the various previous theories about the concept of Lakshana,85 which can be rather inadequately rendered as the trait or overall quality of the extended poetic tissue He summarises ten views According to the third of these, in the creative process, the poet's imagination has three activities (Vyapara) which correspond to three successive and steadily expanding vibrations (Praspanda) In the very first vibration, the poet's genius conceives the aesthetic emotion to be objectified and intuits the quality of its feeling-tone (Guna) This is often very difficult to verbalise and all verbalisations can only be approximate Thus, if the emotion is erotic feeling (Singara), the quality of its feeling-tone (Guna) is approximately verbalised as sweetness (Madhurya) The second vibration effects the creation of poetic figures (Alamkara) The third selects the words and ideas (Sabda, Artha) which build up the actual poetic tissue or body of the poem (Kavya Sarira) The poem is a unity, for there is inner congruence between the emotion, image and the overall texture of the extended poetic tissue They are all successive realisations of the same creative impulse as it evolves and expands to the various levels which analysis at least has to distinguish in an endeavour that involves both emotional experience and its objectification through literary craftsmanship The concept of phased

vibrations is useful, because in the later phases of the creative endeavour

we can safely introduce the critical intellect, working, not autonomously,

but in ideal cooperation with the emotional inspiration Some images seem

to emerge from the unconscious, along with the first emotional experience

But there are others discovered by the probing intellect, touched by the

emotion, and the quality of the poem as basically the product of inspiration is not affected adversely in the least by the presence of such images

if aesthetic sensibility has adjudged these suggestions of the poetically stirred

intellect and accepted them as truly reflecting the emotional experience

"Metaphor," wrote Whalley,86 "by an enveloping compulsion, defies the

theoretical borders between one sense and another, between sense and

feeling, thought and meaning, and moves towards a self-deterninate form "

In this juxtaposition or comparison of realities, ordinarily widely separated,

which Vamana held as the fundamental nature of all figures of speech,

the danger is that the form may not be self-determinate, the self being,

here, the poet's self itself, stirred by an emotion This is why Ezra Pound87

defined the image thus "An image is that which presents an intellectual

and emotional complex in an instant of time I use the term 'complex'

rather in the technical sense employed by the newer psychologists such

as Hart " Here the intellect's role in the discovery of the image is not

denied, but only that image is poetically valid which embodies the

emotion

Sanskrit poetry, especially in the later phase, when every scholar thought

that he was qualified to write poetry, almost completely forgot the earlier

caution that the image should be generated by the later phase--if not the

very first phase--of the same vibration that initially arose from the heart

pulsing stronger under the impact of an emotional experience Thus, a

readership, consisting mostly of scholars and not poetically sensitive minds;

bestowed the title Ghanta Magha on the seventh century poet Magha

because in his epic88 he described Mount Raivataka as towering so high

that the sun and the moon on either side seemed like metal gongs (Ghanta)

hanging down the sides of an elephant Titles like Yamuna Trvikrama,

etc bestowed on other poets clearly indicate that the image hunted out

by the uninspired intellect was not distinguished from the image which

embodied emotion.

Here the distinction made by Wordsworth89 between fancy and imagination in the creation of imagery proves helpful "Fancy does not require

that the materials which she makes use of should be susceptible of change

in their constitution, from her touch , and, where they admit of modification, it is enough for her purpose, if it be slight, limited and evanescent

Directly the reverse of these are the desires and demands of the Imagination

tion She recoils from everything but the plastic, the pliant, and the

indefinite " Wordsworth's terms could be more precise, but the meaning

is clear The images hunted up by fancy are not the images created by

the phased vibration of the poetic imagination in the expanding circles

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SANḰRIT POETICS

of the creative activity For there the material of the image is plastic,

or made plastic, as a mould for the emotional experience. Wordsworth

proceeds to indicate the fascination of this inferior imagery which, incidentally,

swept many of the Sanskrit poets off their feet. "Fancy depends

upon the rapidity with which she scatters her thoughts and images, trusting that their number,

and the felicity with which they are linked together

will make amends for the want of individual value " Here is an instance

of the rapidity that can overwhelm us with a shower of gifts, whose

number makes us forget their poor emotive quality. Subandhu,90 the

seventh century novelist, describes the newly risen, ruddy moon in a chain

of images " the ball of Princess Night, the golden mirror of the

God of Love, like to a cluster of young red flowers on the Eastern Peak,

round as drops of saffron on the foreheads of eastern damsels, a toilet

dish, as it were, filled with a ball of pellucid saffron belonging to a wanton

of the night " Here the same writer pays a flowery tribute to the heroine's

beauty "Her lips had the glow of eventide in close proximity to her moon-like face

The mouth seemed like a seal set to guard the jewels of her

teeth Her brows were clusters of bees about her blue lotus eye,

decorative arches for the face that was the abode of love, the shores of passion's sea "

Wordsworth indicates another fascination of fancy "She

prides herself upon the curious subtlety and "the successful elaboration with

which she can detect lurking affinities" A verse on moonlight by the

poetess Chandala Vidya is an apt example "It seems as if the world,

worn out with its daily routine, is bathing in the silvery water of the ocean

of milk Through this stirring, the reddish stars are looking like water-bubbles" The imagery of fancy has also its place in poetry, for it is

difficult to react ungraciously towards an instance like this by the poetess,

Madirekshana "Over the surface of the ponds frequented by them, the

bees, humming continuously, are conversing with the lotus buds, hidden

under water" But such imagery does not incarnate the highest poetic power.

"In the higher poetry," wrote Wordsworth, "an enlightened critic chiefly

looks for the wisdom of the heart and the grandeur of the imagination

Wherever these appear, simplicity accompanies them, Magnificence herself,

when legitimate, depending upon a simplicity of her own, to regulate her

ornaments"

The wisdom of the heart and the grandeur of the imagination regulated

both the use and surrender of ornament in Valmiki, the first as well as

one of the two greatest of India's epic poets Ananda Vardhana was fascinated by the creative insight of the master and many other critics noted

that Valmiki provided the model for both naturalism (Svabhavokti) as

well as the legitimate use of imagery He was equally successful in both

because he made the heart's feeling the sovereign authority for deciding

between naturalism and imagery, with the result that both proved equally

ideal for the deeper poetic purpose In the Ramayana, there are magnificent paintings of landscapes and the seasons They are not decorative

additions, Spender's still-life studies that could be hung on the walls or removed Rama, the prince cruelly exiled to the forests, wins a new realm of inward happiness when he intuits the profound reality of the great life of nature that pulses in strong, broad rhythms around him Involved imagery is ruled out here, as the accent is on the objective beauty of nature, though the paradox of poetry is that the objective does not exist unless the sensitive subjectivity has responded to it and thereby made it the symbol of the inner vibration But this can be done and is probably better done-in a context of the type indicated where the intention is to lead the human spirit to communion with nature-without that second phase of the vibration of the poetic spirit in the creative process which proceeds beyond the intuition of the flavour of the feeling experienced to the crystallisation of imagery Thus, with Sita by his side, Rama experiences the profound benediction of the rains after implacable summer had long ruled over the scorching earth and the hushed wood "The dust settles and a cool wind blows The heat of the summer is allayed . . . Emerging from the heart of the clouds, cool as camphor, redolent with the fragrance of Ketaka flowers, the balmy winds can, it would seem, be gathered in cupped hands and sipped From the flowers, bruised by the downpour, the nectar drips drop by drop The grassy slopes of the forest-tracts revived by the rain, where the peacocks dance, gleam brightly under the moon at night Only when the birds retire to their nests and the lotus closes, whilst the evening jasmine opens, can one divine that the sun has set Chariots and other wheeled vehicles no longer venture on the roads, deeply rutted by continuous rain "91 But when Sita is abducted by Ravana, the mood becomes poignant Here Valmiki's profound creative intuition reveals that imagery not only need not be ruled out in poignant emotion but can ideally embody it In fact, since remembrance is not at peace, some feature of the landscape invariably triggers an association causing a fresh spurt of pain Thus we see a totally different painting of the rains "The sky appears like one wounded, bound with the rags of moisture-laden clouds, stained with the vivid tints of the setting sun, bordered with red Whipped by the golden thong of the lightning, the sky seems to be crying out loud in thunder The lightning that leaps out from the hold of the cloud is to me like Sita struggling in the hold of Ravana "92 The skyscape here has the magnificence to which Wordsworth referred It smoulders like a sunset conflagration in Turner But the magnificence has its own simplicity, because the image is born with the feeling through the swiftness of the principle of emotive association

Valmiki's naturalism as well as use of imagery made clear to Sanskrit poetics that the reality of feeling was the most important requirement in poetry and that the quality and the strength of the tension within would determine by themselves whether the expression would be naturalistic or whether it would incarnate figures If the figure ( Alamkara ) is an adorn-

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ment, that which is adorned by it is the emotion And Ananda Vardhana95

gives the perceptive clarification that even as the ordinary ornaments, the

jewels, putting them on or laying them down, suggest to us the mental

state of the person, so also does the use or the relinquishing of figures

suggest the poetic emotion and mood Sanskrit poetry cannot be accused

of too puritan a resistance to the imagery of fancy There are poetic

moods, not belonging to the highest tension but still not unrewarding,

where an elegant handling of such imagery is justified But the highest

type of imagery is that which is born with the emotion "Images, however

beautiful," wrote Coleridge, "do not of themselves characterize the poet

They become proofs of original genius only as far as they are modified

by a predominant passion , or by associated thoughts or images awakened

by that passion "91 Images which are not touched by the poetic emotions

are mere verbal pretentiousness (Vagvikalpa) in Ananda Vardhana's

opinion As Appayya Dikshita95 said, the image has life only when it

is acceptable to the heart (Hrdaya) The function of the image is to yield

poetic radiance (Kavya Sobha) as Bhoja said and this radiance or beauty

is, in Sanskrit poetics at least, invariably connected with the activation of

the reader's or spectator's feeling Thus, if many of the Sanskrit poets

misunderstood the highest function of the poetic image, theory never relaxed

in its insistence on this strict functional justification 96 If Kuntaka stumbled

in the evaluation of naturalism (Svabhavokti) and held the opinion that

the embellished word and sense (Salamkrita sabda and artha) alone cons-

tituted the unique expression (Vakrokti) that was poetry, and if he gene-

rally identified the embellishment with figure and imagery, he made amends

by deriving the image directly from poetic action (Kavi Karma or Kavi

Vyapara), by seeing it as realised by the poetic genius (Kavi pratibha

nuvartita) He clarified and vindicated his position by pointing out that

the correct term for the figure is not just Alamkara, ornament or figure

of speech, but Kavyalamkara, poetic figure The genuine presence of

poetic feeling is the criterion for distinguishing the poetic figure from a

mere speech figure

A view of poetry whose cardinal emphasis is on the incommunicability of

emotion except through induction and therefore on the responsibility of

the poet to build up a complex of objective correlatives, or sensually

palpable concietisations, cannot accept the pure automatism of emotional

inspiration If emotion shapes the concretisation, the critical intellect has

to adjudge it and find it really flawless In the use of imagery also, Sanskrit

poetics indicates the criteria by which the stratum of images can be

appraised as to their final validity Ananda Vardhana97 first takes up

the verbal figures and condemns alliterations (Yamakas) used at a stretch

in such tender situations like separation in love (Vipralambha) Kuntaka98

endorses this Both Ananda Vardhana and Abhinava warn against excess

(Atinivahana) in imagery, "loading every rift with ore" in the idiom of

Keats, but when such opulence is not justified by the feeling Like Pater,

Sanskrit writers believed that ornaments could be "diversions, a narcotic spell of the pedestrian intelligence", and that art consisted in the "removal of surplusage" But the concept of surplusage is a relative concept When images emerge from the newly awakened wonder of the heart (Ascharya-bhuta) and when the poet's expression has matching skill (Vaidagdhya) the tissue can be rich as well as emotionally genuine But such richness as well as austere simplicity are alike functional and Ananda Vardhana99 insists that the poet should be intuitively aware of the principle of the assimilation and avoidance of figures according to the context of the feeling The principle of timely rejection (Kale cha grahana tyagau) has to be used with subtle insight An instance is given of a figure (Slesha) worked out in the first three lines of a stanza, to arouse the poignancy of separation in love (Vipalambha) and abandoned in the fourth line, to evoke another figure (Vyatireka) which also heightens the same feeling, but in another way It is laid down that there are occasions when the figures should be incipient, merely touched upon It can be left to the lesser artist to work them out to the bitter end

Ruskin described memory as an "unindexed and immeasurable mass of treasure" and regarded imagination as a "brooding and wandering, but dream-gifted" selective faculty working upon the materials stored up in memory Lowes100 gave a more elaborate outline "There enter into the imaginative creation three factors which reciprocally interplay the Well and the Vision and the Will Without the Vision, the chaos of elements remain a chaos, and the Form sleeps forever in the vast chambers of unknown designs Yet in that chaos only could creative Vision ever see this Form Nor without the cooperant Will, obedient to the Vision, may the pattern perceived in the huddle attain objective reality Yet, manifold though the ways of the creative faculty may be the upshot is one from the empire of chaos a new tract of cosmos has been retrieved , a nebula has been compacted—it may be '—into a Star" A more res-trained style would have saved Lowes from the rather unfair criticism which indeed has been made that he is not writing psychology at all How-ever, a more important criticism that can be offered is that the definition of the exact role of the will is rather blurred here The implied sense seems to be that the will is the poet's intellect in the role of craftsman, shaping the inner vision into a concrete, sensibly palpable, objective correlative This role is recognised as the primary role in Sanskrit poetics too But there are several other roles also for the intellect As Maritain101 has said, the spontaneous welling up of images, without which there can be no poetry, precedes and nourishes the activity of the poet but the mind regulates the activity and gives it a direction "It waits for the results, stops them as they issue, makes a selection and forms a judgment" This is the second role of the critical intellect which has to keep in view the principles of the avoidance of excess (Atimvahana) and the timely assimilation and exclusion of figures (Kale cha grahana tyagau) emphasised

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by Sanskrit poetics The third function, of which both Lowes and Maritain

are silent, is the exploration on its own by the intellect for apt imagery

This corresponds to the imagery yielded by Wordsworth's fancy which

is really the intellect touched by the imagination rather than imagination

proper.

But let us go back to the image emerging from the really deepest level

What is the principle of its genesis ? Maud Bodkin102 has raised the

criticism that "in his general theory Lowes seems to take no account of

emotional forces as determining either the selection or the fashioning of

the material of the poem" This is the image, which, in Ananda Vaidhana's

words, is born along with the very first poetic urge And since the funda-

mental principle of Sanskrit poetics is the experience and transfer by induc-

tion of emotion, such imagery has to be the direct product of the emotional

experience Reverdy's definition of the image, which André Breton also

quotes in the First Surrealist Manifesto, reads : "The image is a pure

creation of the spirit It cannot emerge from a comparison but only

from the bringing together of two more or less distant realities No

image is produced by comparing ( always inadequately ) two dispropor-

tionate realities A striking image, on the contrary, one new to the mind,

is produced by bringing into relation without comparison two distant

realities, whose relations the spirit alone has seized"103 Maud Bodkin's

criticism of Lowes can be raised against Reverdy also—that he has not

clarified the exact nature of the relation of the distant realities seized by

the spirit But his definition makes a real contribution in pointing out

that rapprochement rather than comparison is the basic reality of the

valid image although the formal shape of figures like similes may appa-

rently seem to be plain comparisons This rapprochement of distant

realities is possible because the distance is annihilated by the emotion

Here a cautious acceptance of psychoanalytic interpretations seems legi-

timate The distant reality, when assimilated, is over-determined In

addition to its normal sensuous signification, it has received a baptism in

the expansive flow of the emotion which has donated to it an emotional

signification as well. The image it presents is now the result of a process

of condensation

Valmiki, again, is the poet who presents us with the finest instances of

imagery of this level of power We have already seen how, in the case of

Rama steeped in the sorrow of separation, some feature or other of the

changing seasonal landscape is rapidly assimilated by the tormented memory

in an associative bond, so that the feature becomes impregnated with

emotion, the lightning struggling in the grip of the clouds becomes Sita

resisting Ravana with white impotent hands. Gautier said that "the

Lamartinan landscape is a state of the soul" Valmiki also uses descrip-

tions of nature for the subtle revelation of the soul of a character When

nature at times appears like a woman to Rama, he remembers the only

woman in his life and we are in the presence of a pure and chaste sorrow

POETIC FIGURES

97

Ravana, his antagonist, is no barbarian He too has poetic sensitiveness

But his is a very sensual nature and cues in the landscape trigger this

sensuality, thus annihilating the distance between a physical reality or

feature and the reality of a temperament which is ever prone to be

sensually aroused Ravana and his hosts once camp by the river Narmada

The breath of the river tempers the heat and the spot is ideal for a halt

Ravana is gratified "The sun of a thousand rays seems to have changed

the world to gold and, in the sky, this orb of day, whose beams were just

now intense, having observed me seated here, has grown as cool as the

moon The wind, fearing me, blows softly, diffusing a sweet perfume.

Narmada appears like a timid girl." He strides towards the river "as

towards a lovely and attractive woman". The river, though described by

the poet and not Ravana, is seen through the eyes of that supreme hedonist

"The flowering trees formed her diadem, the lotus her eyes, the pair of

Chakravaka birds her breasts, the gleaming sandbanks her thighs, the flock

of swans her bright girdle The pollen of the flowers powdered her limbs,

the foam-crested waves formed her immaculate robe Sweet was she to

the touch "104 A purely formal analysis might reveal that the imagery

here rests on an incipient comparison But it is really the result of the

rapprochement of two distant realities and the erotic sentiment is the

unconscious associative bond that annihilates the distance

Ananda Vardhana's elucidation that the image of the highest poetic

power is born along with the emotion implies that when the emotion is

generated by unconscious conflicts, the image is also determined as to its

form by the reality of the unconscious. One of the finest instances of this

occurs in Valmiki in the scene when Rama's victory over Ravana, who

had abducted Sita, is complete Sita hears terrible words from her lord

and liberator "Know Sita, the war I waged was not for you, but to

retrieve my name and that of my family Therefore, with my leave, go

as you please, anywhere I have no need of you What self-respecting

man, born of a high family, will take back a woman who has lived in

another's house ?"105 The fact that Rama is looked upon as an incarna-

tion has often created difficulties in the genuine literary evaluation of the

great epic Thus, orthodox criticism, chasing the infallible incarnation, has

been completely misled in the interpretation of these sombre words It

is true that Rama later says that his rejection was merely to prompt the

fire-ordeal, through which Sita comes unhurt, so that the world may clearly

see that Sita is inviolate. It is even very likely that Rama himself came to

believe, in retrospect, that this was his motive But Valmiki here sees the

depths of the tormented human heart far more clearly than it is ever

capable of seeing them The fire-ordeal was needed not only to vindicate

Sita in the eyes of the world, but to exorcise Rama's own tormented fears

which he would not have admitted. The language and idiom show a

harshness which is justified only because they reveal the break-through of

troubled fantasies, "Will the excitable demon have been able to restrain

13

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SANḰRIT POĒTĪC̆S

himself when he saw your beauty day by 'day?'" Surely, Rama was not

árguing the case of a sceptical world by proxy here. His own unconscious

fears were coming to the surface. If the break-through of unconscious

conflicts in the tortured emotion of this critical moment is still not obvious,

look at the subtle imagery, which Valmiki causes to well forth from the

depths Rama says . "When you, whose chastity is overcast by the

shadow of misgiving, stand near me, it offends my eye even as a lamp

to a man of sore eyes." A sickly light would have caused equal hurt to

normally healthy eyes But the reversal of the image is more just, because

it has been moulded by the unconscious realities Sita has remained

pure, like the flame of a lamp It is Rama who is afflicted by a deep

malaise The profound nostalgia of Rama, his yearning for the absent

Sita and later, the tenderness of the reunion, unmistakably show that Rama

had never ceased passionately loving her and that, deep within him, he had

never lost his faith in her. But the tormenting doubts of the unconscious

'were also real The anguished emotion of the conflict moulds its own

imagery which reveals both the acute reality of his own torment and also

the recognition, very deep within, that Sita's purity could never have been

violated and it is he himself who has become diseased through troubled

fantasies

Whalley106 has pointed out a subtle feature of the poetic image - that

it is a feeling-vector Not only is it the vehicle for a "charge" of feeling,

but it also has a directional character—it seeks to move in a certain direc-

tion Whalley confines himself to the emergence of these vectorial charac-

teristics in rhythmic pattern But Day Lewis has pointed out the tendency

of images to be congruent with one another and thus form a distinctive

pattern "If the poem is to be a whole and not a series of stabbing,

meaningless flashes, a pattern of imagery must be created, a relationship

equivalent to that which underlies all reality, living or inanimate "107 The

inanimate crystal creates its pattern through the strict functionalism of

the processes of its growth by secretion D'Arcy Thompson's great

work108 has shown the same principle at work in the growth of the forms

of organisms What is true of growth is also true of perception

Kohler109 has shown that man perceives objects in organised wholes,

gestalts, and that all man's observations are in terms of patterns The

poetic process involves the perception or experience of reality as an

organised, meaningful whole and the embodiment of that experience in

a poetic organism which again is a whole with an integral pattern Sanskrit

poetics, as we shall study in detail later, insists on the permeation of the

entire, extended composition with feeling (Rasa bhava nürantaratva)

And if the ideal imagery is co-natal with feeling, a consistent pattern of

imagery, valid throughout the poetic matrix, has to be and will be realised

• Belyi110 has fruitfully explored one aspect of this reality in his brilliant

analysis of the spectrum of Gogol Among all our senses, the visual seems

to be the most fertile in storing up images and yielding them back in

poetic association Colour plays an important role in the perception,

retention and creative handling of such images Drenched in colour is

this sunlit world And the extent to which the world has soaked into

the blood of a writer can be understood by studying the colour references

in his work This is what Belyi has done with Gogol His patiently

collected statistical data on the imagery of colour in Gogol's writings show

the yellow graph rising steadily from the joyous Evenings in the Village

through Taras Bulba and making its greatest quantitative leap upward

in the second volume of Dead Souls, where the gold is not the gold of

gold-plate and gold-thread, but the gold of the cathedrals and crosses of

the Orthodox Church. At this depth, colour has become a symbol of

inward temper, an objective correlative of the exalted feeling In

Indian tradition, such an analysis can be fruitfully applied to Vyasa's

Mahabharata to lay bare the pattern of imagery that develops consistently

throughout the epic The analysis reveals how frequently the bright

lustre of fire glows throughout the vast epic in metaphor and simile The

body of a beautiful woman glows like fire An ascetic, though clad in

rags, impresses like glowing embers below the layer of ashes Soldiery

surrounds an enemy warrior like the circle of fire described in space by

whirling a burning stick The battle is like the conflagration which will

consume the universe at the end of an eon The aroused warrior glows

like a burning pillar The fiery anger of a chaste woman is like a kindled

flame which no one can trifle with, without being scorched Given

random compilations from both Valmiki and Vyasa, we will have

no difficulty in distinguishing the authorship with the help of the quality

of the imagery alone The lyricism of Valmiki and the molten energy of

Vyasa determine respectively the dominant emotion of their epics, their

forms and the pattern of the web of their imagery

CHAPTER FIVE

Diction, Style, Metre

and Rhythm

I. DICTION

THE deep analysis of poetic naturalism, which completely dispensed with figures and ornaments, re-established the primary importance of emotional experience in poetic creativity and emphasised that figures, if used, should be determined by the requirements of emotional expression. When, thus, figures were not barred absolutely, inferior talents began to use them liberally, without bothering too much about the very important principles behind their sanction Poetic tissue began to exhibit an exaggerated colouration through imagery; and appreciation, conditioned by rhetorical concepts, was satisfied by the serial perception of images, in spite of the fact that they were atomic, separate, not functionally integrated into the poetic organism.

Since verbal figures formed an important division of poetic ornaments and since they could be managed with skill in rhetoric, without necessarily requiring inspiration, poetic endeavour, with many, drifted into this blind alley. Artificial contortions of language and the writing of stanzas in the form of pictorial or abstract designs became a passion. This convention, known as Citra Bandha, seems to have fascinated even the major poets. It is not unlikely, as De suggests, that it arose from the practice of writing inscriptions on swords and leaves, where the peculiar shape of the available space became a pleasant challenge to verbal skill. Bharavi goes all out for it in the description of a battle and some scholars have justified it as a brilliant imitation of the military art of deploying armies in different forms in the battlefield.

All in all, it is a rather puerile mannerism, but Western critics would do well not to jump to the conclusion that it was a typical excess of the Oriental mind. Puttenham, in the sixteenth century, gives examples of "shaped poems". These suggest the puzzle corner in the newspapers rather than the revelation of genius but no doubt provided harmless and elegant intellectual exercise. In the seventeenth century, George Herbert and Robert Herrick poets with a fine lyrical gift, also wrote poems which could be

100

fitted into pictorial shapes on the printed page

Guillaume Apollinaire indulged in this pleasantry, making the typography of the poems follow

the outline of a smoking cigar or a necktie or a watch or a fountain or

rain, rather like the Greek poets in Alexandria who had presented poems

in the shape of an altar or an egg or a shepherd's pipe

He did this in the first place because he wrote these poems on post cards, many of them

from the front in the First World War, and hoped to amuse and cheer

his friends by them

When he published them later, it was no doubt because he felt that his designs had a certain charm and recalled the

conditions in which he composed them

In India also, Chitra Bandha by Dandin

is recognised for the first time by a misguided Magha

appears to regard it as indispensable in an epic poem

Rudrata deals with it in some detail, but it is suffered by Mammata only in deference to poetic practice, discredited by Anandavardhana and totally rejected by Visvanatha

Chitra Bandha was an aberrant phenomenon, though not an exclusively Oriental failing, and it was referred to here only as an extreme instance to which literary jugglery led

The reaction from the atomism of ornament led to the development of the concept of diction (Riti)

Very briefly, the drift of the thought was that the impact of a literary tissue was integral, determined by its totality

This was something more than and other than the cumulative impressions left by a series of brilliant images or verbal figures

It was the effect of the continuously flowing and evolving stream of poetic narration, its subtly orchestrated music

The narrative stream was the matrix in which figures, both verbal and ideal, were embedded

This embedding is analysed by Abhinava with brilliant subtlety

A simile is a figure, an ideal figure

When it takes form in poetic expression, it has a body, it is embodied in linguistic tissue

This body (Sarira) itself has to be beautiful

The beauty of the embodiment, or embedding, of simile, metaphor and other figures in linguistic tissue, is the Lakshana, the characteristic of the poetic matrix as a whole

We referred to the Lakshana earlier

It was a more inclusive concept than the poetic figure or Alamkara and here Abhinava clarifies the subtle principle by which the extended poetic continuum integrates figurative embellishments like flowing water whose ripples occasionally glint by catching the light

Even an ideal figure does not become poetically perfect with the mere juxtaposition of normally unrelated images, however brilliant

that juxtaposition

Its linguistic expression has to belong to the particular poetic stream in which it is used, become a cadence in its music, a shapely curve in the evolving undulation of its rhythm

Valéry also held, like Abhinava, that the content which resisted transformation into form should be rejected

"The true poet will always sacrifice for the sake of form--which after all is the poetic goal, in fact the poetic act itself, with its organic requirements--the thought that cannot dissolve into the poem and demands, for its expression,

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words and tones that sound foreign to the tonality of the poem." The

distinction between ideal and verbal figures, indicated by Mammata, was

that the former would and the latter would not, tolerate substitution by

synonyms This is a valid and helpful guide ordinarily, but ceases to apply

in a depth analysis The ideal figure also cannot tolerate indefinite substi-

tution by synonyms, for its verbalisation has to become a melody that

fits into the harmony of the music of the poem Vāmana had said that

with the perfect realisation of form, no more substitution would be possible.

By implication thus rules out substitution in ideal figures also, but it is

Abhinava who gives the final, brilliant clarification

The concept of diction was elaborated by analysis, it is clear, after

differentiation in diction had become a reality in poetic practice. Just as

manners become differentiated in the various regions of the country,

literary manner also became differentiated This is first noticed by Bana

In fact he relates diction to general manners (Pravrtti) as literary manner

He remarks that the various regions of the country produce literature

marked by differential traits in diction. Vāmana mentions three dictions :

Vaidarbhī, Panḍalī and Gaudī Rudrata adds a fourth : Lāṭīya All

these are geographical names The sharpest contrast is between Vaidarbhī

and Gaudī The former is characterised by limpid sweetness, the legacy of

the mellifluous Prakrit that had once flourished in Vidarbha (area around

Nagpur) The Gaudī diction of Bengal was characterised by an ornate

vigour which may be related to the baroque taste of the region as evinced

in its architecture and sculpture during the period from the fourth to the

seventh century

Certain writers seem to flounder in their analysis of the exact significance

of differentiation in diction Rudrata goes to the extent of regarding

diction or Rīti as a verbal figure (Sabdalankāra) For him, the Gaudī

Rīti is a species of composition which indulges in the use of long com-

pounds, comprising seven or more words, an arbitrary number anyway.

Even as late as the sixteenth century we find Kavi Karnapūra sharing the

general suspicion of the Gaudī diction and regarding it as the result of a

passion for harsh, high-sounding words

It is quite possible that the Gaudī diction attracted more poetasters than

the Vaidarbhī with its subdued, reticent grace and this might have dis-

credited the diction itself But to see diction as a matter of verbal texture

only, as Rudrata did, was to regress from the concept of diction as the

inclusive reality, as the basic poetic matrix which integrated image and

verbal ornament Earlier, Bhamaha had shown a penetrating intuition in

his approach to the problem He not only did not make the mistake of

identifying diction wholly with verbal texture, but tried to lift the whole

issue to a much higher plane by relating the quality of the poetic tempera-

ment to the quality of the diction We have already seen that Bharata

had enumerated the excellences (Guṇas) and flaws (Doṣhas) of poetic

expression Bharata had mentioned ten excellences and some of these

implied that the basic criterion applied was the adjustment of sound and

sense But sound and sense can be orchestrated in various equally legiti-

mate ways and, therefore, for a deeper appreciation of the integrated

reality we are dealing with here, we need concepts that would clearly

refer to the poetic temper that determined the overall quality of the

orchestrated continuum To seek the help of an analogy from music, just

as terms like adagio, allegio and scherzo clearly indicate the temper of a

symphonic movement (and not merely its speed as determined by a

metronome ) we may be able to work our way towards descriptive terms

which can fairly clearly indicate the temper of the extended poetic conti-

nuity Bhamaha14 dropped those Gunas of Bharata which seemed to lack

this depth of penetration and retained only three, which he definitely

related to the poetic temper These were sweetness ( Madhurya ), energy

( Ojas ) and limpidity ( Prasada ) If these could be fairly easily identified

as qualities of diction, it was also stressed that they manifested themselves

in the diction precisely because they were the qualities of the poetic

temper and mood that were objectified in the poetic tissue Here again

Bhamaha took care to stress that the terms should not be misunderstood

or graded down as mere descriptions of the verbal tissue only Limpidity

( Prasada ) was not only a matter of clear, lucid verbalisation It implied

a well-adjusted, optimistic poetic temperament ( In fact, Prasada suggests

a sunny, optimistic outlook ) This deepening of the concept enabled

Bhamaha to steer clear of the facile popular preferences as between the

Vaidarbhi and Gaudi dictions which noted only the features of the verbal

tissue and not the fact that they revealed the deeper reality of the poetic

temper He was not satisfied with a Vaidarbhi which successfully spun

a web of soft and tender vocables and incarnated sweetness ( Madhurya )

but betrayed a poverty of ideas and imagination The long compounds of

Gaudi could build up a thunderous sonority but it would be an empty

rumble if the energy ( Ojas ) did not reveal itself as stemming from deep

within, from the poetic temper itself It is very interesting to note here

that Udbhata15 pointed out that while the concept of the poetic figure

( Alamkara ) related either to the sound ( Sabda ) or the meaning ( Artha ),

the concept of Guna related to word and sense together in their integrated

reality And a later commentator16 claimed that the figure stood to poetry

in the relation of mere conjunction ( Samyoga ) while the excellence ( Guna )

stood to poetry in the relation of inherence ( Samavaya ) or inseparable

connection ( Nitya Sambandha ) At this analytical depth, Bhamaha found

no justification for rating one diction as intrinsically superior to another

They were all different literary manners and equally acceptable if they

realised their functional inwardness

Ananda Vardhana17 also steadily resisted the tendency to regard the

Guna as a feature of the verbal tissue only To those who tried to derive

the literary excellence of energy ( Ojas ) exhaustively from the use of long

compound words ( Dirgha Samasa ) he cited verses from Bhatta Narayana

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SANSKRIT POETICS

and others, which had this excellence, though they did not use the complex

orchestration of long compounds. Thus he was able to establish that the

Guna should really be related to the quality of the poetic temper, of the

inward event ( Chitta Vritti ) The excellence of energy ( Ojas ) depended

on the sparked, incandescent feeling ( Dipti ) Ananda Vardhana now

related the Guna to Rasa, which was the former's originating base (Asraya)

But since words and their collocation can also suggest Rasa, the verbal

tissue (Samghatana) can also do so, provided it takes the accompanying

Guna as the base and goal (Asraya) The verbal tissue realises the Guna

and through it evokes the related Rasa

Raghavan18 has drawn attention to an analysis by Winchester19 which

is identical with that of Sanskrit poetics "While individuality is not to

be classified, it may be said that there are, in general, two opposite tenden-

cies in personal expression . on the one hand to clearness and precision ,

on the other to largeness and profusion The difference between the two

may be seen by comparing such poetry as that of Matthew Arnold with

that of Tennyson or such prose as that of Newman with that of Jeremy

Taylor Minds of one class insist on sharply divided ideas, on clearness

of image, on temperance, and precision of epithet Their style we charac-

terise as chaste or classic The other class have a great volume of thought,

but less well-defined , more fervour and less temperance of feeling, more

abundant and vivid imagery and wealth of colour, but less sharpness of

definition Their thoughts seem to move through a haze of emotion and

often through a lush growth of imagery They tend to be ornate and

profuse in manner, eager in temper , they often produce larger and deeper

effects, but they lack restraint and suavity It is a contrast not peculiar

to literature, but running through all forms of art . The one makes

upon us the impression of greater delicacy, temperance, charm · the other,

the impression of mass, complexity, power We are not called upon to

pronounce either manner absolutely better than the other " The two

literary manners Winchester contrasts closely correspond to the Vaidarbhi

and Gaudi and Bhama'ha also holds them equally legitimate, if genuinely poetic

Dandin20 defines the extended poetic tissue as a series of words charac-

terised by an agreeable sense or idea (Ishtar tha vyavacchinna padavali )

This leads him to consider the question of appropriate expression of appro-

priate ideas, or in other words, to discuss the suitable arrangement of

sound and sense for the purpose of producing poetic effect which is techni-

cally denoted by the term diction (Riti or Marga) He does not, like

Rudrata does, make the mistake of regarding diction as a matter of verbal

texture only The diction characterised by sweetness (Madhurya) should

not only be woven with tender vocables, but also avoid words suggesting

a vulgar sense Likewise, if Bana noticed only the verbal bombast

( Aksharadambara ) in the diction of the Gaudas, Dandin sees in it the

reflection of a flamboyant temperament, a mental bombast ( Atthadamb-

bara).21

DICTION, STYLE, METRE AND RHYTHM

105

Excited by the discovery that in diction we have an integrative reality of a higher order than the figure or image, Vamana22 went to the extent of claiming diction to be the soul of poetry (Rīti atma kavyasya) He elaborates this figurative description by pointing out23 that the word (Sabda) and its sense (Artha) constitute the body of poetry, of which the soul is diction or Rīti He seeks to establish the integrative reality of diction by defining it as a special arrangement of words (Viśiṣṭa pada rachana) This speciality (Vaisiṣṭya) in patterning is what realises the poetic excellences (Guṇas) Viśvanatha21 in the fourteenth century rejects the "extreme" claim by pointing out that arrangement of the elements of poetry implies only a disposition or posture of limbs (avayava) and cannot make it the "soul" of poetry The tradition of Indian poetics could not tolerate the view that anything other than Rasa or poetic emotion should be the soul of poetry But a truth lay concealed in this dispute Just as posture, the body poised for action, clearly reflects the inner temper and mood, diction reflects the inner temper, whether it is extrovert and energetic as in Gauḍi or balanced and serene as in Vaidarbhī

II STYLE

It is Kuntaka who attacks the problem of diction with an intuition that matches the depth of the understanding shown by Bhamaha Like Winchester and Bhamaha, he divides diction or Mārga into two broad types, the limpid (Sukumāra) and the ornate (Vichitra) which approximate to the Vaidarbhī and the Gauḍi Kuntaka avoided the latter terms most probably because the regional differentiation of styles had more or less ceased to be a reality by his time and, further, he felt that the reality he was dealing with here was a matter of poetic temper not of regional mannerism He made it very clear that the analysis of diction could not rest on the verbal texture, in seeing whether it consisted of simple words or was an intricate web spun out of long compounds In fact these features themselves were projections of the inner temper which, Kuntaka emphasised, also implied a clear attitude in using poetic figures and delineating poetic emotion This approach enables him to define his two dictions The limpid style is basically in terms of contrasted poetic temperaments The limpid style is dominated by beauty that is mainly natural (Sahasobha), the other by ornamentation (Āharysobha) The former inclines to poetic naturalism (Svabhāva-ukti), the latter to embellished utterance (Vakrokti) The former relies primarily on the native strength of poetic reactions (Sakti), the latter attempts further a poetic transformation of erudition (Vyutpatti)25

In Kuntaka, the analysis of diction, initially understood as a broad literary manner which reflects a broad type of poetic temperament, leads to the discovery of style, understood in the sense of a more strictly personal

14

106

SANṢKRIT POETICS

manner Bhaṭata, with his profound dramatic insight, had indeed given

a cue here when he laid down that the style of expression in dramatic speech

should be in keeping with the temperament of the character who speaks

the lines But this insight was obscured in the handling of diction by

several subsequent critics as merely regional manner Bana regarded

diction as literary manner (Pravṛtti) but his classification follows the

regional alignment Vāmana26 explicitly states that the various dictions

have geographical names because the differential characteristics were

specific to the different regions. Dandin’s insight was able to penetrate to

the distinction between diction and style Though he uses the broad cate-

gorisation of diction as limpid and ornate, he adds that dictions are

infinite and their differences very subtle So subtly does the character of

one poet’s writing vary from that of another that it is as difficult to verba-

lise these differences as to verbalise the differences between various kinds

of sweetness, of sugarcane, milk, etc27 Burroughs28 does not share Dandin’s

diffidence about verbalisation but agrees with him in the catholic accept-

ance of variety "Who shall say which style is the best ? What can be

like a hurled lance, or than Emerson’s for his purpose—electric sparks,

the sudden, unexpected epithet. or tense, audacious phrase, that gives the

mind a wholesome shock , or than Gibbon’s for his purpose—a style like

solid masonry, every sentence cut foursquare, and his work, as Carlyle said

to Emerson, a splendid bridge, connecting the ancient world with the

modern , or than De Quincey’s for his purpose—a discursive, round-about

style, herding his thought as a Collie dog herds sheep , or than Arnold’s

for his academic spirit—a style like glass, or than Whitman’s for his

continental spirit—the processional, panoramic style that gives the sense

of mass and multitude ?"

But it is Kuntaka who states most emphatically that styles are indeed

infinite in variety and subtle in difference, because they are based on the

nature (Svabhāva) of the poets, of which also there is infinite variety in

the world A limpid style can also assimilate erudition, usually supposed

to be the mark of the ornate style But the erudition will be seen to be

handled in a distinctive manner, which will reveal the personality of the

writer29 Nīlakānṭha Dīkṣita30 in the seventeenth century echoes this

when he says that a poet of mark has a distinctive style and that to possess

a distinctive style is to be a poet of mark Here Indian thought essentially

agrees with Rémy de Gourmont31 who said that "style is a specialization

of sensibility" and with Ezra Pound32 who, in his study on Gourmont,

discussed style as the modality of the individual voice A typical passage

from a writer of distinction, as Hudson33 points out, will have a charac-

teristic ring, like a well-known voice Puttenham34 states this truth delight-

fully "For’ man is but his mind, and as his mind is tempered and qualified,

so are his speeches and language at large , and his inward conceits be the

metal of his mind, and his utterance the very warp and woof of his

conceits" As Carlyle says in one of his Journals, style is not the coat

of a writer, but his skin "Literature," said Newman,35 "is the personal

use or exercise of language That this is so is proved from the fact

that one author uses it so differently from another The throng and

succession of ideas,' thoughts, feelings, imaginations, speculations, which

pass within him, the abstractions, the juxtapositions, the comparisons, the

discriminations, the conceptions which are original in him, his views of

external things, his judgments upon life, manners, and history, the exercises

of his wit, of his humour, of his depth, of his sagacity, all these innumerable

and incessant creations, the very production and throbbing of his intellect,

does he image forth in a corresponding language, which is as multiform

as this inward mental action itself, and analogous to it, the faithful expres-

sion of his intense personality, attending on his inward world of thought

as its very shadow " An identical perception is implicit, if it is not

as fully elaborated, in Kuntaka when he says that diction as style is

characterised not only by the way the web of words is spun (Bandha guna) but

also by a distinctive attitude in using poetic figures and delineating

emotions Style, thus, is not merely a manner of expression , it is "a way

of seeing things", as Flaubert put it Patmore36 emphasises the personal

vision when he calls style the "rarest of all artistic merits, which consists,

not in a singular way of saying but of seeing things" T S Eliot said in

his study of Donne that "a style, a rhythm, to be significant, must also

embody a significant mind, must be produced by the necessity of a new

form for a new content" Proust37 brings out the deeper meaning of

style thus "Style is in no way a decoration as some people believe,

it is not even a matter of technique , it is—as colour is with painters—

a quality of vision, the revelation of the particular universe which each

of us sees, and which others do not see The pleasure that an artist gives

us to make us know one universe more"

Diction is evaluated in terms of the poetic tissue for it is initially avail-

able to us as a structure of words or Sabda Samghatana, as Sanskrit

poetics would term it Probed deeper, diction reveals itself as the reflec-

tion of the broad organisation of temperament, self-sufficient and adjusted

or extrovert At a still deeper level, when we see diction as personal

style, we find in it not only the reflection of temperament but the subtler

revelation of personality For, even if two poets use the Vaidarbhi

( or Gaudi ) diction, their personal styles can bring about a differentia-

tion which is unmistakable We have seen that Indian poetics noticed

these realities Let us now move on to another aspect of the craftsmanship

of words Without running the danger of being labelled a schizo-

phrenic case or instance of split personality, a poet, especially a dramatic

poet, will have occasion to depict various emotions Therefore, even when

the broad typology of his diction remains constant, he can vary his diction

within a certain range in consonance with the emotions delineated in specific

contexts And he should do it, if diction is really the patterning of words

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determined by the inner intention The problem here has hidden complexities and I would like to take the help of the clarification given by

Olson,38 in his study on Empson Olson says ' The mimetic poet, like

any other, may be said to have seven subsidiary aims, with respect to

language , I call them 'subsidiary' because this essay has made it obvious

that they could not be principal These aims are disclosure, partial disclosure, concealment, direction of attention, evocation of suspense, production of the unexpected, and ornament What must be disclosed, concealed,

etc. belongs to the part of poetics which deals with plot, character, and

thought, and cannot be analysed here, our present concern is simply the

functioning of language as meaningful with respect to these aims A

great deal, then, of suspense, surprise, and emotion is effected by something other than diction as diction , nevertheless, diction can enhance these,

and on occasion even generate them itself It is this aspect of poetic

language—of diction as diction—that I wish particularly to examine Its

problems are problems of word-choice and word-arrangement . . . The

problem of diction is not one of how a frightened man, say, would talk,

or of how, more generally, speech serves as an indication of character,

passion or situation , it is one of how, given all such determinations of

the speech, words as words may prove most effective As I have said,

this is in one sense the least important part of poetics, for the words

are determined by everything else in the poem , in another sense, it is the

most important because the words are all we have to go by, they alone

disclose the poem to us'

Olson's analysis is very helpful because of its extraordinary affinities with

the outlook of Sanskrit poetics First of all, in consonance with the basic

position that art is the concretisation of feeling in a sensuously palpable

tissue, Sanskrit poetics would affirm with Olson that words are all we have

to go by, they alone disclose the poem to us When Olson emphasises

diction as word-choice and word-arrangement, he is only unconsciously

echoing the definition of diction in Sanskrit poetics as Sabda Samghatana,

verbal tissue or structure And, finally, when Olson says that, given all

the contextual determinations, words as words have to prove to be the

most effective, Sanskrit poetics would be in complete agreement with him,

for it insists that the web of words, the diction, should reflect not only the

specific emotion delineated in a context but also the deeper truth of the

personality of the poet` which has created not only that context but the

complete poetic organism in which that context is only one episode The

demand on poetic creativity, here, is very complex An energetic quality

( Ojas ) in diction was found suitable for feelings of wonderment, heroism

and awe ( Adbhuta, Vīra, Raudra ) But this quality was also conventionally associated with the Gaudī style Ananda Vardhana therefore raised

the pertinent question whether a whole region—if Gaudī is to be regarded

as a regional style—restricted itself only to themes dominated by these

emotions 39 This could not have been the case The conclusion, then, is

that the Gaudī stands not so much for a regional style as for a specific

poetic temperament , and if art is life seen through a temperament, the

Gaudī can deal with the entire emotional range of life and not a restricted

spectrum The energetic, extrovert temperament can also delineate the

tender emotions, but it will reveal its higher dynamic tension even while

being faithful to the episodic context and its appropriate feeling tone

Kuntaka meant the same thing when he pointed out that not only the

grand style, the ornate diction (Vichitra Mārga) but also the limpid style

(Sukumāra Mārga) can assimilate erudition , there will be no ambiguity

in the end-result about the basic poetic temper Swinburne can at times

be as full of classical memories as Milton But while the latter mobilises

them as the glittering units of a splendid processional march, in Swinburne

they melt and run with the limpid stream of the verse

And the brown bright nightingale amorous

Is half assuaged for Itylus

For the Thracian ships and the foreign faces

The tongueless vigil and all the pain

This truth of the deepest level, clarified by Kuntaka, does not militate

against the contextual variation of diction within a certain range for mimetic

purposes, as Olson recognises Bana10 notices the differential character-

istics of regional styles thus “In the North there is mostly play upon

words (Slesha), in the West attention is given only to the sense (Artha),

in the South it is poetical fancy (Upreksha), in the Gaudas there is verbal

flamboyance (Aksharadambara)” Immediately he adds that the best

writer should and does combine all these four features in the best manner

Unembellished sense is acceptable as poetic naturalism provided it is

cleansed of vulgarity (Gramyata) Word-play is acceptable if it is unforced

(Aklishta) Flamboyance can have its own beauty, but the veil of words

should not be so heavily embroidered that it obscures the emotion, which

should always be transparent (Sphuto rasah) This catholicity leads to

a rethinking of the issue in terms of functionalism We have already seen

that Ananda Vardhana exposed the fallacy in regarding any diction, under-

stood as a broad and inclusive literary manner, as restricted to a narrow

emotional range But, within the larger flow of narration, modulations of

verbal expression in harmony with specific contexts can serve the poetic

intuition in a fully functional manner Middleton Murry41 called the

Grand Style “a technical poetic device for a particular end” and, connecting

style with the theme or myth, observed that the Grand Style was appro-

priate if superhuman characters were depicted “If the characters of the

plot are superhuman and majestic, it seems more or less necessary that

their manner of speech should differ from that of ordinary dramatic poetry

by being more dignified The poet heightens the speech of his super-

human characters in order that they may appear truly superhuman” The

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SANSKRIT POETICS

Gaudī manner characterised by energy (Ojas) was, similarly, found suitable for heroic or awe-inspiring characters and situations. Here it is a technical poetic device for a particular end One technical feature of the Gaudī manner is the fact that it is full of long compounds (Samasa-bhūyishta) that build up a sonorous music, a dense, crowded splendour Aristotle12 says that “of various kinds of words, the compounds are best adapted to dithyrambs” which are hymns to Bacchus, the god of the vine, enthusiastic, wild, boisterous.

The need for the close functional relation of various dictions, with their specific qualities, to feeling, which is the soul of poetry, begins to be emphasised by writer after writer Magha13 points out that what is important in verbal music is not the differential sensuous effects of sounds orchestrated in different ways, but the psychological resonance Thus, the terms used for the Gunas or specific excellences of diction really refer to psychological realities Magha means by energy (Ojas) a flaring up of the responsive sensibility, its sudden activation and exaltation It is like the ebullient, extrovert energy (Tejas) of the heroic type Similarly, limpidity (Prasada) is the soothed, serene sensitivity It is like the tranquil contentment (Kshama) of the poised, well-adjusted mind Magha very emphatically related the excellences of diction (Gunas) to emotion and sentiment (Rasa and Bhava) and the latter were the determiners (Niyamakas) of the former

Mammata shows the same approach The verbal tissue of a work cannot be said to possess the qualities of energy or sweetness, he points out, unless we mean by it that the underlying sentiment is vigorous or sweet The excellences of diction (Gunas) are therefore related to the emotion (Rasa), as virtues like heroism are related to the soul of a man Thus, energy (Ojas) in diction causes a brilliant expansion (Vistāra) of the mind and resides in the sentiments of heroism, awe or fury Limpidity (Prasada) is the cause of a quick apprehension of the sense extending over the mind at once (Vyapti or Vıkasa) like a stream of water over a cloth, or like fire among dry fuel, the latter being a metaphor borrowed from Bharata41 Sweetness (Madhurya), residing normally in the erotic mood of love-inunion, but also appropriate to, and rising successively in degree in, pathos, love-in-separation and tranquil acceptance, is regarded as causing a softening or melting (Druti) of the heart45 Visvanatha, likewise, defined diction (Rıti) as a specific patterning of words (Pada Samghatana) which helps the realisation of the poetic emotion (Upakārinī asamādinām)

But it is Bhoja who makes the most brilliant contribution to this discussion Diction is the final shape of poetic expression and the initial and primary reality that confronts the relisher From either perspective, the first analysis has to categorise it as a web of words (Sabda Samghatana) What is the principle of their patterning, the prior, integrative reality that determines their deployment? At this deeper level of analysis, we come across the overall aesthetic qualities (Gunas) of diction like sweetness,

DICTION, STYLE, METRE AND RHYTHM

111

limpidity (Madhurya, Prasada), etc But they too are not absolute values

It is true that in relation to the tissue of words they mould, they become

principles of integration (Samghatana dharma) But if the words serve

them, they in turn serve the poetic emotion and are the instruments of

its realisation Here, Bhoja makes a remarkably brilliant suggestion and

points out that diction should be regarded as an Anubhava 46 In Bharata's

voluntary and involuntary behaviour, both expressive of emotion, of the

character who is the primary stimulus (Vibhava) that initiates the aesthetic

reaction in the aesthetic situation, plastically shaped by the poetic creati-

vity Ordinarily, the Anubhava is a mimetic form, the transposition into

art of the reality of the living world, the reactions of men and women to

the changing stream of situations, which are also parallelled in the episodic

stream of the drama or poem Diction, on the other hand, is a pure creation

of the poetic spirit, not a mimetic form This had better be clarified, as

misunderstanding is likely Language is the creation of the race and history

and therefore it would be absurd to call it the creation of a poet But,

as Newman said, "while the many use language as they find it, the man

of genius uses it indeed, but subjects it withal to his own purpose, and

moulds it according to his own peculiarities" Diction, as distinguished

from language, is thus the pure creation of the poetic spirit Now, we

have seen that the demands on the poet, in the use of diction, can be

extremely complex If the diction has to be appropriate to a particular

character in a particular situation, those facts are not its sole determinants

Even while meeting these demands of mimetic truth, the poet has to

ensure that his diction realises a higher truth as well, the truth of his

temperament, outlook and vision of the world If the emotive behaviour,

Anubhava, of a particular character in a particular context, is the means

which the poet uses to spark an emotion appropriate to that episodic

context, he has also to keep in mind the integral pattern of the whole

composition and see that all these transient emotional sequences are

genetically derived from the basic emotion This is the emphatic prescrip-

tion of the doctrine of the derived emotions (Vyabhichari Bhavas) In

the same way, but in a far subtler operation, the poet has to use the

modulations of diction for the contextually just accentuation of the emotions

as well as for the integral balance of the emotion in the total work

Diction thus is the equivalent, in the sphere of creative craftsmanship, of

the Anubhava in the sphere of the content that is shaped by that craftsman-

ship, a content which is assimilated from reality by a mimetic transposition

And since the transposition of life into art is fundamentally an act of pure

creativity, at the deepest level of analysis, the distinction between the given

and the donated disappears and the emotion as well as the diction which

embodies it are alike revelatory of the individuality of the poet, his

Svabhavā, as Kuntaka asserted

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SANSKRIT POETICS

III METRE AND PROSE RHYTHM

From diction we can now pass on to the related problems of the choice

of medium, verse or prose, and the selection of the metres, if verse is the

medium

"Ever since man has been man," wrote Mill,17 "all deep and sustained

feeling has tended to express itself in rhythmical language, and the deeper

the feeling the more characteristic and decided the rhythm " While this

relation between feeling and rhythm has been noticed very early, there

are subtler realities latent in that relation Rhythm, though it is an

abstract pattern, considered as pure form, can be the vehicle of unconscious

feeling and therefore the symbol of it The germ of a poem may emerge

from the unconscious depths of creativity as pure rhythm first and only

later take on the flesh of meaning, of story and incident Paul Valéry18

wrote "My own poem, Le Cimetière Marin, came to me in the form of

a certain rhythm which is that of the ten-syllable French line arranged in

the proportion of four to six Another poem, La Pythie, began with an

eight-syllable line the sound of which came of itself " T S Eliot19

reaffirms this truth "A poem, or a passage of a poem, may tend to

realise itself first as a particular rhythm before it reaches expression in

words and may bring to birth the idea and the image -

Operating in these subtle realities is a very precise law of genetic relation-

ship between feeling and expression Rhythm is an intrinsic feature of

expression and like its other features is determined by the feeling If

rhythm has its laws of form, they are not externally imposed Coleridge59

said "As it must not, so genius cannot, be lawless, for it is even this

that constitutes its genius-the power of acting creatively under laws of

its own origination " And Baudelaire,51 the rebel, was an uncompromising

classicist in the matter of form "It is clear that systems of rhetoric and

prosodies are not forms of tyranny arbitrarily devised, but a collection of

rules required by the very organization of the spiritual being - never have

prosodies and systems of rhetoric prevented originality from manifesting

itself distinctively The opposite would be far more true, that they have

been a help to the blossoming forth of originality."

There is an extraordinary episode in Valmiki's Ramayana, which may

go back to the third century B C,52 about how the poem arose It is no

mere anecdote, but a profound parable of the creative process, especially

in relation to the emergence of rhythm and metrical shape The episode

runs thus When Valmiki once went out into the forest in search of fire-

wood and grass for his daily ritual, he saw a happy pair of Krauncha

birds sporting on the branch of a tree Suddenly, the male bird is shot

dead by a hunter's arrow and the female utters a cry of anguish and

terror A spontaneous utterance wells up from the poet's heart and emerges

from his lips, lamenting this tragedy53 Immediately after he speaks, he

notices that the flow of spontaneous expression had a perfect rhythm and

melody. He ponders on this miracle and through deep introspection and

analysis of the state of his mind at the time of its utterance, he discovers

for this profound mystery of the unconscious creative process a solution

which he gives out to his pupils in these words "That which proceeded

from me who was overpowered by emotion could be nothing but poetry

or rhythmic expression "51 Ananda Vardhana saw in this significant

episode the embryonic form of the Rasa theory according to which emotive

experience is the soul, the fundamental basis and inspiration of the

rhythmical expression that is poetry.55

The profound meaning of this episode, which affirms the genetic relation-

ship between feeling and rhythm and the verse mould, is echoed by Ker16

when he says "The form of the verse is not separable from the soul of

poetry Poetry has neither kernel, nor husk, but is all one " Emerson

also affirmed that feeling creates its own rhythm when he said that "it

is not metres but a metre-making argument that makes a poem" Metres

are not self-determining but determined by the feeling, as Valmiki implied

The feeling is so passionate and alive that it has an architecture of its own

as Emerson said 57 Thoreau said in the Week "As naturally as the

oak bears the acorn, and the vine a gourd, man bears a poem since

his song is a vital function like breathing, and an integral result like

weight " Thoreau spoke of a poem as a "natural fruit," as "one undivided,

unimpeded expression fallen ripe into literature", a sentence that found

extension in the first preface to Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass "The

rhyme and uniformity of perfect poems show the free growth of metrical

laws, and bud from them as unerringly and loosely as lilacs or roses on

a bush, and take shapes as capable as the shapes of chestnuts and oranges,

and melons and pears, and shed the perfume impalpable to form "58 We

saw earlier that Springarn regarded rhythm and metre as aesthetically

identical with style, style with form and form in its turn as identical with

the work of art in its spiritual and indivisible self

In the significant episode in the Ramayana, Valmiki goes on to the

detailed aspects of the craftsmanship involved in the plastic objectification

of feeling He says that the narration should be in stanzas of spacious

metres, flawless in phonetic structure It should be musical "like a melody

on strings" Coleridge said "As wine during animated conversation,

they (the effects of metre) act powerfully, though themselves unnoticed "

It is the melody on strings, fully resonant or muted, of Valmiki's metrical

rhythms, that realise for his most poignant moments their deepest impact,

enabling them to communicate their emotion while taking away the raw-

ness so that it is savoured aesthetically even when it is reacted to intimately

and personally

The form of the verse-mould or stanza is a reflection in miniature of

the general structural lines of the poem It is a means of giving us an

experience which is organised in a particular way, a way which brings out

the highlights, deepens the shadows, and, which with imperceptible

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direction, calls upon us to respond with more sensitive feelings. Expression,

sound, and rhythm, arranged in a particular pattern which we call the

form, require us to obey a certain order and development of thought, of

imagery and emotion And it is this shaping of a poem structurally which

gives to poetry the necessary qualities of formal beauty which we find

also in sculpture, music, and painting . namely, balance, symmetry, climax

or focus, contrast, repetition, and that structural rhythm which includes

movement, continuity, proportion, and unity.59 But all these are instru-

mentalities, not ends in themselves, poetical devices for the concretisation

of feeling

The analysis of metres in terms of their efficacy to be the vehicles of

feeling was begun very early in Indian poetics. Katyayana60 ( third

century B C ) is one of the oldest writers in this field He discusses the

appropriateness of certain metres to certain subjects and situations Bhoja

demands that the epic poem (Maha Kavya) should be composed in metres

which are melodic and musical. Since the range of themes is great, metrical

variety is necessary. The situations should forge their own metre

( Athanuupa Chandas) The very metre must be suggestive of the

dominant emotion of that canto Bhoja goes into a detailed analysis and

points out, for example, that a metre like Viyogini is ideally suited for

pathos (Karuna).61 Kshemenndra has also written extensively on this topic

while discussing metrical propriety (Vrittauchitya) and has pointed out

that the Anustubh metre is ideal for narration, pointed speech and summa-

tive sequences, while a spacious metre like Sragdhara is appropriate for

descriptions of war and generally for the emotions of heroism, valour and

awe

Among the verbal figures (Sabdalankara) Bhoja enumerates is one

termed Gati It is the choice of the proper poetic form, verse (Padya),

prose ( Gadya) or the mixed medium (Champu) This brings us to the

aesthetics of Sanskrit prose Earlier to Bhoja, Dandin62 had divided prose

into three varieties savouring of verse in being pronouncedly, near-

metrically rhythmic (Vritta-gandhi), limpid, and mellifluous with sweet

vocables and no long compounds (Churna), and the very opposite of that

( Utkathka praya) Here, the second category is the nearest approximation

to the temper and spirit of modern prose We find it in Sanskrit in some

of the early commentaries (Bhashya) There it is the instrument of

analysis and its simplicity and force may not unreasonably be claimed

to be a donation of the scientific purpose for which it is used In literature,

we find it in the great beast-fable cycle, the Panchatantra.63 But when the

prose romance emerged, a complexly orchestrated prose style developed

which, today, we would find more akin to verse than prose as we

understand it

The distinctive characteristic of the prose of the Sanskrit romances is

the supremacy of rhythm Now, metre is an abstract pattern of rhythms

Formal analysis can indicate the precise shape of this pattern But in

any specimen which has poetic vitality, the component rhythms will be

found to vary from the abstract scheme, for the excellent reasons that

rhythm is really the undulation of poetic feeling as it flows into the

linguistic tissue and moulds it and the pulse of feeling cannot be expected

to be precisely and mechanically repetitive or regular. "When the actual

movement of the stresses in a poem," points out Whalley,61 "does not

vary significantly from the abstract metre, it is a sure sign that the poem

springs from a shallow level of consciousness or is unduly cerebral and

technical. And a poem which reiterates its metre insistently may become

so soporific and benumbing that it soon fails to convey even the most

prosaic and superficial meaning."

When the genuine poet handles it, metre becomes infinitely flexible

With a poet like Milton, the abstract metrical pattern remains in the back

of the mind like the steady ticking of a metronome and when metre is

present in this way it only serves to throw into relief the nonrepetitive

movement of the rhythm. This reality suggests the possibility of another

way of handling the linguistic tissue, definitely not as a replacement of

verse, but as a permissible alternative form to dispense with metre

altogether and concentrate on the organisation of rhythms with the maximum

flexibility. It is worthwhile referring here to the very interesting comments

of William Carlos Williams,63 himself a gifted creative writer. He starts

with a pleasant tirade against the iambic pentameter. "The man who can

conquer the dominance of the iambic pentameter, in our verse, or find

a way to subordinate it, can conquer our world." This is the mode that

fixed itself in the language with Chaucer, achieved official recognition with

Surrey, and an apotheosis in Shakespeare's sonnets and later plays at the

beginning of the seventeenth century. "Since then, so far as any basic

change in the accepted structure of the poetic line is concerned, nothing

new has occurred. It is generally accepted even that no further change

is possible, we have rung all the changes." Now, Williams points out that

in Shakespeare's later dramatic dialogues, the line-group is often obliterated

for the ear, either by run-on lines which carry over the separating pause

into the body of the next line, or by phrase groups which insert pauses

within the body of the line. A great prevalence of run-on lines renders

this obliteration so complete that verse becomes practically without metre

or line grouping. "I am strongly inclined to believe that English poetry

might be a great gainer if we would at once frankly recognize this rhythmic

but unmetric verse as strictly rhythmized prose and print it as such without

the deceptive line-division."

Endorsing that particular suggestion was not the point in citing Williams.

About that we may have reservations. But the analysis is helpful in

showing that the abstract metrical pattern may sometimes deliquesce so

completely that the flexible tissue may be called either prose or poetry.

Williams wants to call it prose, but if metre has disappeared, the organisation of rhythms has not, and since that feature is much more distinctive

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than in ordinary prose, we will have to call such tissues poetic prose. And

if the complete flexibility of iambic pentameter tempts Williams to call

it prose, we may be tempted to call Bana's prose poetry, for at this depth,

where metre becomes no longer relevant, the distinction really gets blurred.

As Philip Sidney66 pointed out, "there have been many most excellent

poets that never versified" And Wordsworth67 wrote. "Much confusion

has been introduced into criticism by this contradistinction of Poetry and

Prose, instead of the more philosophical one of Poetry and Matter of Fact,

or Science (Bhamaha's Loka Vata and Sastra Vata) The only strict

antithesis to Prose is Metre, not is this, in truth, a strict antithesis, because

lines and passages of metre so naturally occur in writing prose that it would

be scarcely possible to avoid them, even were it desirable "

We should not exaggerate the achievement of the Sanskrit writers in

this field Thus, when the Champú form, or the narration in mixed prose

and verse, arose later, by about the tenth century, there is a deplorably

uniform lack of insight Handled with discrimination, the form would have

had possibilities For instance, prose could have been used for narrative

stretches where there is no heightening of emotion or the mood is realistic,

extrovert or humorous, and verse for the more lyrical and poetic sequences

It is this sensitive use of the media that has made the old chant-fable from

Picardy, Aucassin and Nicolette, one of the most delightful creations in the

whole of literature A Japanese master like Issa68 also use the haibun

form, which is a mixed genre of prose and verse like the Sanskrit Champú,

with profound sensitiveness, as can be seen from his meditations over his

two-year-old daughter's death He describes, in prose, his shock when she

fell ill, the long vigils by her bedside, the preparation of the mind to accept

the inevitable But the tragedy remains unassimilable, and the fountain of

tears, which no philosophical thought can dam, must rise high as a jet

of song Note the transition and the perfect justness of the transition in

terms of the increasing intensity of feeling "Our hopes proved all in vain

She grew weaker and weaker, and finally, on the twenty-first of June, as

the morning glories were just closing their flowers, she closed her eyes for

ever Her mother embraced the cold body and cried bitterly For myself,

I knew well it was no use to cry, that water once flown past the bridge

does not return, and blossoms that are scattered are gone beyond recall

Yet try as I would I could not simply could not cut the binding cord of

human love

The world of dew

Is the world of dew

And yet

And yet "

But the Sanskrit Champú writers use the media haphazardly The result

has been that the Champú lacks the force and directness of prose and the

heightened expressiveness of poetry

DICTION, STYLE, METRE AND RHYTHM

117

Even in the earlier period of the prose romances, we cannot call the medium used by a writer like Subandhu69 poetic prose It is merely an artificial medium which is neither prose nor verse, nor poetic in any genuine sense But it is different with Bana 70 In the last analysis, his Kadambari is meant to be enjoyed for the atmosphere it builds up, sensuous, twilit, musical And just as the Spenserian stanza is one of the most important poetic devices for realising the soft, cloudy radiance of the dream-world conjured up by the Faerie Queene, Bana’s highly rhythmic, cadenced poetic prose has become the finest medium for his romance which speaks of a great love that survived the vicissitudes of many rebirths In the modern European tradition, it was Laforgue who obliterated the distinction between poetry and prose as formal categories He did not abandon rhyme or rhythm But the rhyme is no longer part of a regular scheme, and sometimes yields to assonance or alliteration The pattern of sound, in fact, is applied evenly to a whole passage rather than at certain fixed points in it Rilke and T S Eliot learned from him the art of counterpoint Within their lines, and sometimes competing with their formal pattern, is a secondary organisation of assonances, alliterations and echoes 71 This led to the situation analysed by Eliot 72 “It would be convenient if poetry were always verse—either accented, alliterative, or quantitative, but that is not true Poetry may occur, within a definite limit on one side, at any point along a line of which the formal limits are ‘verse’ and ‘prose’” Walter de la Mare73 wrote “Every good prose will reveal at a heedful reading a marked tendency in its sentence and paragraph construction towards a loosely measurable sequence of a variable pattern, occupying so much time, and therefore its equivalent of sensuous and mental activity—as in a grave and ceremonious minuet ” While this may be true of all good prose, in poetic prose, the sensuous, formal features of poetry are assimilated to a far greater extent Though prose, the verbal tissue in Bana is poetic not only in its spirit but its texture There may be no metre, but the rhythmic organisation is distinctive There may be no rhyme, but the assonances and alliterations build up their percussive effects, gentle or strident as the mood modulates The tissue is not only poetic in spirit, but approaches the flavour of verse, it is Vritta-gandhi, to recall Dandin’s classification

CHAPTER SIX

The Doctrine of Suggestion

I. THE GREAT CONTROVERSY

We can now take up one of the greatest contributions of Indian poetics,

the concept of resonance or suggestion (Dhvani) Its initial formulation

was a brilliantly intuitive seizure of the implication that was latent in

Bharata's profoundly psychological analysis of the poetic context But it

unleashed great storms of controversy which, however, proved ultimately

to be a benediction, for they cleared the air of all ambiguities of analytical

thought and established the concept firmly as referring to a genuine and

distinctive power of poetry

The basic text of the doctrine of suggestion is the Dhvanyaloka.1 From

the eleventh century onwards, the assumption becomes fairly universal

that the author of this classic is Ananda Vardhana of the ninth century

But there are difficulties here The work consists of the Kārikā, gnomic

verses, and the Vrtti, which is the exposition of the Kārikā, generally

in prose, though with citations of illustrative verses Buhler, Jacobi and

others have pointed out some very interesting facts Abhinava Gupta,

who wrote the Lochana, the great commentary on the Dhvanyaloka, care-

fully distinguishes between the author of the Kārikā and the author of the

Vrtti and refers to the former as "the author of the original text"

(Mulagr anthakrt) and the latter simply as "the author" (Granthakrt)

Abhinava has, at least on three occasions, to try hard to reconcile the

conflicts in the views expressed by these two He also takes care to point

out certain features of the theory developed in the Vrtti as not expressly

taught in the Kārikā The tentative conclusion drawn by scholars is that

the Kārikā was composed by a writer of the eighth century But it was

Ananda Vardhana who, through the Vrtti, stabilised the theory as a fully

and brilliantly reasoned statement Kshemdra in the eleventh century,

Hema Chandra in the twelfth and subsequent writers like Jayaratha,

Visvanatha, Govinda and Kumaraswamin regard Ananda Vardhana as the

author of the complete work, Kārikā as well as Vrtti Since it was he

who built up a complete theory from scattered ideas and cues, and since

the author of the Kārikā is a shadowy figure whom we can refer to only

as the Dhvani-kara (formulator of the concept of Dhvani), we too shall

regard Ananda Vardhana as its founder for all practical purposes

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THE DOCTRINE OF SUGGESTION

119

The basic implications of Bharata's great formula are these The poetic context is a creatively organised context for the communication of feeling Feeling cannot be communicated through propositional statement In fact, the term 'communication' is itself misleading For the poet is not the donor who can donate feeling, as a man can donate money or some physical object, to another The feeling ultimately experienced by the reader is his it is the movement of his sensibility, the stirring of his heart Now, we cannot arouse a feeling or a mood by naming it The poet builds up a system of objective correlatives, essentially identical with the context of stimuli in life which can elicit the emotional reaction Bharata had used the word Nishpatti, emergence or outcome, for the appearance of Rasa when the prime and the ancillary stimuli, etc were creatively organised Ananda Vardhana claimed that this Nishpatti really meant Abhivyakti, manifestation, as the emotional reaction was ever-abiding, as latent reactivity, in the reader And since what made the Rasa manifest itself in the poetic context was not the communication of a propositional meaning but the presentation of a sensitively organised complex of stimuli, he affirmed that stimuli and reaction, Vibhavas and Rasa, stood in the relation of suggestor (Vyanjaka) and suggested (Vyangya) Poetry operated basically through the power of suggestion (Vyanjana)

There were uncipient, faint movements towards this formulation in earlier thought also In his analysis of literary ornament (Alamkara) Bhamaha2 had spoken of implied or suggested similarity (Gunasamya Pratiti) and of imbedded, implied sense In Udbhata we find (in his discussion of the figure known as Parayokta) a clear mention of a significative capacity called suggestion (Avagama), a capacity which is different from the denotation of words or the meaning as a whole But it was Ananda Vardhana who first decided to accept the full implication of Bharata's psychological analysis of the poetic context This came close to the affirmation made by Tillyard3 that "all poetry is oblique there is no direct poetry" Ananda Vardhana would modify this to say that all good poetry should be oblique

In the further analysis, we have to proceed very carefully, for it is often assumed that Ananda Vardhana's theory of resonance (Dhvani) is a statement of this basic obliquity of poetry, emerging from the facts that poetic transfer cannot be mediated by propositional statements and that it is essentially the elicitation of an emotional reaction through the creative organisation of sensuous stimuli As in relativity, we have to distinguish here between the general theory and the special theory The general theory, although it needed the brilliant mind of Ananda Vardhana for its clear formulation, derives directly from Bharata's basic postulates The special theory was a refinement, a brilliant one, but carelessness in seeing the strict limits of its application would and did lead to the rejection of much genuine poetry as inferior poetry It is against this rejection that the critics of

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Ananda Vardhana rebelled Our task, therefore, is going to be a difficult

one We have to realise the fine critical insight revealed in the theory of

resonance and pay our homage, which can never be too excessive, to Ananda

Vardhana , at the same time we have to pay close attention to its limits

of applicability which were clarified by his critics

Ananda Vardhana must have been fascinated by the basic miracle in

poetry-the concrete, sensuously palpable stimulus inducing an emotion,

the material entity leading to an immaterial reality, actually a mode of

being This was a quantal leap. It seemed impossible to follow every

phase of the transition as a continuous process, for at one critical point

the track entered a tunnel, was lost to view, and the discontinuous transi-

tion was effected from the material stimulus to the immaterial emotion

Under the spell of this fascination Ananda Vardhana extended the concept

of the quantal leap to within the poetic fabric itself This fabric is a

linguistic texture, because it is woven out of words (Sabda) which are

phonetic entities , it is also a web of meaning, semantic meaning (Artha)

The contours of the expressed sense of a linguistic construction can be

precisely fixed, for language has its well-known laws for manipulating the

communication of meaning Into this basically logical context, Ananda

Vardhana introduces the key concept of quantal transition and thus flings

wide the windows of a magic casement opening on a landscape full of

shadows, but luminous shadows, and filled with bird-voices that seem

clear in their intimations but with an articulateness that transcends the

means ordinarily available to language

This, briefly, is the statement of his theory of suggestion (Dhvani) If,

after the appearance of the expressed sense, either the sound (Sabda) or

the meaning (Artha), completely subordinating itself, gives rise to another

sense, it is said that, in those cases, word and meaning suggest another

sense Semantic meaning does not contradict poetic meaning, nor is it

necessarily inadequate for poetic feeling. The poetic reaction, in any case,

is a process further to the grasp of semantic meaning, the result of letting

that meaning soak into the emotional reactivity so that it can generate the

miracle of its activations there But Ananda Vardhana concentrates on

those poetic constructions which have both a semantic meaning and a

further suggested meaning In some cases the suggested meaning may be

less relevant to the poetic intention than the direct meaning He classes

such instances as inferior poetry. In his opinion, it is the poetic construc-

tion where the suggested meaning is the strategic instrument of poetic

stimulation that incarnates the supreme poetic power This, of course, is

not universal For this rise of the suggested sense can be likened to two

phenomena resonance (Anunada) and echo (Pratidhvani) It is only

such metals as bronze which, when struck, give rise to ripples of resonance

and it is only a few special spots like caves where the voice produces an

echo, similar yet so subtly different

Poetic creativity and experience have been variously defined Thus,

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121

Hema Chandra, following Abhinava, summatively described them as awakening of poetic charm (Chamatkarannvesa), relish (Rasana), taste (Asvada), fruition (Bhoga), accomplishment (Samapatti), fusion (Laya) and repose (Vişranti) Grammarians, who were primarily concerned with the semantic meaning of language, had no objection to raise here, for they were willing to admit that poetic experience was really a further process which was outside their domain, grammar, in the sense that emotional reactivity received the semantic meaning and allowed itself to be activated by it But Ananda Vardhana was formulating a quantal theory within the semantic system itself This provoked grammarians, and writers on poetics also, to examine whether suggestion (Dhvani) was really a new principle, and what was more important, whether it was really necessary Were not the familiar powers of semantic constructions adequate to explain the phenomenon of suggestion? Stormy controversies were unleashed and the Dhvani school fought hard in trying to establish that suggestion did not come under the province of denotation (Abhidha), nor of import (Tatparya), nor of indication (Lakshana), nor of inference (Anumana), the categories clarified by grammarians and epistemologists

The grammarians and logicians had laid down that the primary meaning (Mukhya Artha) of a word is its denotation (Abhidha) Why a word, which is a phonetic entity, should denote an object, is explained as due to the convention (Samketa) established by the practice of the world (Vyavahara), by the age-long association of the two If suggestion is a reality, if the apprehension of a new sense follows after the apprehension of the denoted sense, could it not be regarded as the long-range action (Dīrgha Vyapara) of the denotative power (Abhidha-Vritti) of the word, asked the grammarians and philosophers of the Mimamsa school, who were committed to the literal interpretation of the texts The single arrow discharged by a strong man, in a single movement, penetrates the armour and reaches the heart of another, similarly the apt word enables the apprehension of the suggested sense also through its denotative power, so ran their argument

The controversy is launched and there will be many sallies and withdrawals and fresh formations by the opposition The battles were episodes, in order to understand them fully, we must be very clear as to what the war was about The grammarians were willing to accept that the emotional reaction to the linguistic representation was something which lay outside their field In Sanskrit poetics, the opposition—clarified by analysis in the dissection of the unitary reality, we should add—was never between word and meaning, Rasa was the soul of poetry, both word (Sabda) and meaning (Artha) together formed the body of poetry (Kavya Sarīra) The connective tissues in this body, the bonds between word and meaning, were very much their concern, the grammarians felt Meaning may later undergo a sea-change into feeling But it emerges first from words Logical continuity rather than quantal transitions should govern this phase,

16

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argued the grammarians, and not unreasonably But poetics countered by affirming the speciality of the poetic mood where physical stimuli mature into emotional experience, where objects are not stolid or neutral but objective correlatives It is because the poetic sensitiveness is there that the object undergoes this miraculous transformation The logic and rationality of the workaday world cannot make a chari an ideogram of inner tension, but this miracle happens when the sensitive temperament confronts the creativity of Van Gogh If objects themselves are thus transformed, their evocation through a literary medium also transcends grammar, and ceases to be a matter of mere logic, in the poetic context The denoted sense, the Dhvani theorists pointed out in countering the Mimamsakas, brings a mere cognition, the suggested a surprise The denotation of a prime stimulus, Vibhava, which gives rise to Rasa, is not a denotation of the Rasa itself The connection between word and object is a convention The connection between the object denoted by the word and the word itself, regarded as an object with its texture and shape, on the one side, and the feeling nuance evoked, on the other, is not a matter of mere convention Denotation exhausts itself with the literal meaning But poetic creativity and receptivity give it a halation If grammar objects that the poetic mood need not be invoked as the basic reality here and that suggestion can be regarded as the extension of denotation, it might as well annex the final emotive reaction also as the long-range action of denotation But it is the universal experience that poetic relish needs poetic sensitiveness, knowledge of grammar alone is not sufficient for the grasp of poetic meaning

When suggestion could not be annexed by denotation, an attempt was made to see whether it could be absorbed by indication ( Lakshana ) This is the power by which a word yields a meaning other than its denotation, though based on it Thus, when one says, "the country rejoices", one refers to the people living in the country, not to the terrain Gautama,4 the founder of the philosophy of logic, has given an exhaustive analysis of the contexts in which a word can yield such a transferred sense Bhartrmitra, as quoted by Mukula,5 also gives a summary The power of indication really belongs to the sense ( Artha-vyapara ) Indication, therefore, is sometimes called the tail, as it were, of denotation ( Abhidhappucchabhuta ) Bhatta Nayaka6 includes it under denotation, as only an extension of it

Mammata counters the attempt to absorb suggestion into indication by pointing out that in the poetic context the conventional bond between word and meaning is not relevant and that just as denotation is a worldly convention ( Vyavaharika Samketa), indication also is a convention, based, as he proceeds to clarify, on three conditions - it is built upon the expressed sense ( Artha-nistha ), but it swings into action when the primary sense is exhausted or incompatible ( badhita ), it is sanctioned by a valid reason for resorting to it ( Prayojana ) In many cases, usage ( Ruthi ) makes

indications rest as securely on convention as denotation The special motive (Prayojana) though most often prosaic confluence, can sometimes be poetic The Dhvani theorists therefore concede a resonance based on indication (Lakshana-mula Dhvani) But it is the suggestive power of the poetic mood that counts here, not the power of indication acting autonomously An instance cited is the expression 'a hamlet on the Ganges' (Gangayam ghosha) Here we must add that this type of expression, very conventional in English (like Stratford-on-Avon) is not usual in Sanskrit The usual expression should be 'a hamlet on the bank of the Ganges' (Gangatire) Here, analysis proceeds to show, Ganges, which denotes a river, means its bank by indication The question now is the motive for not using the word 'bank' In the poetic context, the ellipsis, made possible by the use of indication rather than denotation, suggests the ideas of the coolness and holiness of the hamlet

A third power of the language of ordinary discourse is now invoked to absorb suggestion This is purport (Tatparya) The Mimamsakas had admitted that denotation gave the meaning of individual words (Padartha) only The individual words of a sentence arouse individual images isolated from one another If an integral meaning of the sentence as a whole (Vakyartha) is to emerge, as it does emerge, the semantic organisation of words in a propositional statement has to be conceded a power which the Mimamsakas call purport Even if, now, a meaning other than the expressed (Vachyad abhikta) emerges, it is not necessary to regard it as suggested (Vyangya), they argued Where this idea, which is other than the one that is expressed, is primary (Pradhana), it is as good as expressed So it must also be called the expressed sense, the expression being intended to mean that Here, the Mimamsakas argue, the primary sense which is realised first is the means for the realisation of the subsequently realised, deviant, meaning

The connection and patterned mobilisation (Anvaya) of denotations are the instrumentation by which the purport establishes itself Mammata, stating the views of the theorists of Tatparya, analyses this instrumentation 'When the denotations of words are connected in accordance with expectancy (Akanksha), compatibility (Yogyata) and proximity (Sannidhi), another sense arises, called purport, which has a distinct form and which, though not constituting the sense of words, is yet the sense of the sentence' In the attempt to absorb suggestion under purport, the fallacy of confusing prose and poetry reappears Purport here hugs the earth as a grammatical category It cannot wing its way into poetics The expectancy, mentioned as a principle of mobilisation is a subtle value But it can stand for wholly different things in different contexts In ordinary discourse, it can point forward only to a restricted realm of possible completions, the limitations being fixed by the nature of the word, whether it is a substantive or preposition, by the nature of the object that the word stands for, which can enter into relations with the

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other objects that other words indicate only within a logical or causal nexus But the expectancy of the poetic mood can accept a far vaster world of subtle affinities and connections, condensed images and symbolic validities The power of purport exhausts itself with the literal meaning, even if it be many-layered The quantal leap to a poetic meaning cannot be powered by the grammatical resources available for mobilising denotations of words into purport of sentence. The theorists of purport are sometimes called the theorists of the "conscious manipulation of grammatical order for the farthest reach of meaning".

( Abhihitanvaya Vadins ) It is true that, in a very profound and very generalised sense, suggestion is purport, for poetic suggestion is part of the poetic intention, an instrumentation of the purport of the poet But against such appetites for vast generalisations one has no defence. Vakıoktı, indirect utterance, is sometimes used by Kuntaka to stand for all figures of speech and ultimately for poetic utterance which even dispenses with figures, in fact, all poetry. In that way, we need not even move on to purport from denotation to annex poetry For instance, Bhatta Nayaka sometimes uses denotation ( Abhidha ) to mean the poet's expression as a whole But generalisations of such spread can be very dangerous when what is being evaluated is a contest between grammar and poetics

The most formidable opposition to the theory of suggestion came from Mahima Bhatta He claimed that there was no need to establish a separate function, called suggestion ( Vyañjana ) by the Dhvani theory, because poetic intention was realised here actually through inference ( Anumana ) The expressed sense is never a suggestor ( Vyañjaka ) It is very wide in its scope ( Maha Vishaya ) and its range includes what is regarded as suggestion, where the expressed sense functions as a ground of inference Mahima claims that, since the word exhausts itself after denoting its literal or primary sense ( Abhidha ), even the indication ( Lakshya-artha ) is something which is inferred from the primary sense. The further reach of meaning, for which the function of suggestion is invoked, is also made possible by the extension of the inferential process It must be very clearly understood that Mahima does not deny the realities of poetic experience to which the Dhvani theorists pointed He only differed in the interpretation of the exact nature of the processes involved He was also ready to concede that the inferential process in poetic experience was distinguished from that in ordinary discourse by especial sensitiveness and delicacy Therefore he called the process poetic inference ( Kavyanumiti )

But he claimed that it was inference that explained the poetic experience of the further meaning, not a separate function of suggestion

The spearhead of Mahima's attack was his argument that a sequence ( Kıama ), both temporal and experiential, could not be denied between the expressed sense ( Vachya ) and what the Dhvani theorists called the suggested sense ( Vyangya ). According to him, this only showed that

the two senses, expressed and unexpressed, were sequential and, being such,

bore the relation of premise and conclusion12 Here certain ambiguities

in the elaboration of the Dhvani theory were being fully capitalised by

Mahima The really poetic perception seemed to reach at the suggested

meaning through the layer of words, the layers of expressed meaning

built up by denotation, indication and purport, “with the ease with which

a needle could pierce a hundred lotus leaves placed upon one another,

apparently simultaneously” Suggestion here seemed to be of an

“imperceptible process” (Asamlakṣya Kāma) But there were difficulties

here There were instances of clearly perceptible process (Samlakṣya

Kāma), which, in terms of the genuinely poetic quality of the ultimate

meaning and the remoteness from the expressed meaning, could not be

denied the status of resonance or Dhvani Pratīharendu Rāja,13 in his

commentary on Udbhata, therefore admitted both the suggestion of

imperceptible process (Asamlakṣya Dhvani) and the suggestion of

perceptible process (Samlakṣya Dhvani) which latter has a distinguishable

sequence of transition (Kāma Vyavahāra) from expressed to suggested

meaning The latter was a form based on the resonance of the expressed

meaning (Artha-sakti-mulanurana-rupam) Inference, thus, is admissible

in poetic experience

But, were not the instances of imperceptible process also cases of

inference? Mahima argued that the Dhvam theorists could at best claim

that the process was so swift as to be imperceptible , they could not

totally deny the sequential nature of the reality , they did not deny a

process , the needle had to penetrate the lotus leaves one by one Their

diffidence was real and understandable If the Dhvani theorists shifted

the centre of poetic significance from the expressed to the suggested

meaning, the expressed meaning was still the instrument for the evocation

of the suggested meaning and the leap of sensibility in poetic experience

from the former to the latter could not but be a transition, a process

Further, although Ananda Vardhana himself had said that, while the

semantic meaning was fixed by the limits of the actual expression, the

suggested meaning could be manifold, he had also indicated, as the factors

determining its specificity, the speaker, the person addressed, the context

Mammata11 expanded this into a formula “Suggestion is that reach

of meaning, which, owing to the speciality of the speaker, the person

addressed, the modulation of voice or intonation, the sentence, the proxi-

mity of another, the occasion, the place, the time and the like, becomes

the cause of the apprehension of another sense in the case of persons

possessing poetic sensibility” Should not all these conditions be regarded

as cues for inference?

It was the basic recognition in Sanskrit poetics, dating back to Bharata,

that poetic experience was fundamentally identical—in its derivation, not

ultimate reach—with general human experience in the varied contexts of

living, that had made Ananda Vardhana, Mammata and others insist that

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poetic meaning was communicated by the entire context and not by the expression through language alone Isabel Fry once said

"Language is, in its widest sense, a part of the act of living Tear it from its setting and it will, to a greater or less extent, become meaningless"15 But we are dealing with contexts where the cues of the setting can be perceived only by a poetic sensibility That is why Mammata has specifically mentioned that only persons possessing poetic sensibility will be enabled by the various cues to penetrate through the expressed meaning to the suggested Viśvanātha takes his firm stand on the basic requirement :

poetic sensibility He asserts that Mahima's syllogistic method and his reliance on logical inference are entirely inadequate as explanations for the communication of meaning in the poetic context And he cites this verse as an example :

"O neighbour, could you keep an eye on our house ? The father of this child does not like the tasteless water of the house ? Though alone, I go quickly to the river whose banks are covered with Tamāla trees Let the densely growing reeds bruise my body "

Here, the woman's going alone to the river bank with its screen of trees and her anticipating a plausible explanation why her body may seem bruised when she returns, all suggest that she is going to meet her paramour But, Viśvanātha points out, these cues in the expressed statement, although they help to reveal the unexpressed sense, are not invariable, for dalliance with a gallant is not, from the logical point of view, universally predicable of a woman going alone to the river bank with its dense trees and reeds or from her returning bruised

The instances cited by Mammata are even more subtle If knowledge about speaker, addressee and context are absolute requirements for full understanding here, the suggested meaning still escapes logical inference acting in isolation, and yields itself only to poetic sensibility

"See, motionless and throbless glows the heron on a leaf of the lotus, like a conch-shell standing in a vessel of spotless emerald " The speaker is a woman and she is addressing a man By the throblessness, which is the expressed sense, an absolute sense of security on the part of the bird is suggested And by that tranquil confidence, which is thus suggested sense, the fact that the place is lonely, safe from the possibility of human intrusion, is further suggested Hence the woman is suggesting to the man that this is an ideal place for an assignation Or, if we know from the context that the two had earlier fixed this place for a meeting, the woman is accusing the man, who had arrived late but claimed that he had come earlier and gone away because she had not arrived, that he is uttering a lie For if he had come here earlier, the bird would have flown away16 Another example cited by Mammata illustrates the blending of poetic suggestion and preciosity which is a speciality of Sanskrit poetry :

"At that time you would not take anywhere else your glance, riveted on my cheeks Now I am exactly the same and the checks are the same, but the glance is not the same "

The words are

spoken by a girl to her lover The context is very complex The lover,

when he saw his beloved once in the company of another girl, fell hard

for the latter He did not want to be caught staring at her But when

his glance was riveted on the cheek of his beloved, he was relishing the

image of the girl reflected on its glowing surface An incipient figure is

also suggested here, that the cheek of his beloved is lustrous like a mirror

But, today, the girl is not present and the cheek of his beloved has no

precious image to reflect17 The issue here is whether, even with the

knowledge of the entanglement of the lover, the cryptic suggestion of the

expressed meaning here will be understood automatically through inference

Sanskrit poetics affirms that it will not be understood and that the suggested

meaning will reveal itself only to the stirred poetic sensibility

An illustration from another poetic tradition, the Chinese, and comment

on it by a Western critic, will help in establishing the universality of the

use of suggestion as a power of poetry Here is a translation of Li Po's

poem, The Jewel Stairs' Grievance, by Ezra Pound

The jewelled steps are already quite white with dew,

It is so late that the dew soaks my gauze stockings,

And I let down the crystal curtain

And watch the moon through the clear autumn

These are Pound's notes to the poem. "Jewel stairs, therefore, a palace

Grievance, therefore there is something to complain of Gauze stockings,

therefore a court lady, not a servant who complains Clear autumn, there-

fore he has no excuse on account of weather Also, she has come early,

for the dew has not merely whitened the stairs, but has soaked her

stockings The poem is especially prized because she utters no direct

reproach "18 Here too, poetic sensitivity has to be a reality before the

suggested meaning is realised , it transcends the reach of the purely logical

process

The findings of contemporary analysis can shed light on the controversy

between Mahima and the Dhvani theorists We have seen that Pratiharendu

Raja conceded that inference could also be used by the poetic intention

But Mahima's claim that all suggestion is really inference can be valid

only if what we may initially call poetic intuition is not a reality This

issue has been fought out in our own times regarding the problem of how

we become aware of other selves, as their reality seems never realisable

in the way our own reality can be experienced by us in introspection

The inference school holds that any experience of mental process in another

can only be inferred and is inferred from structure, situation, history and

behaviour only when a similar experience is or has been associated with.

similar structure, situation, history and behaviour in oneself It is further

claimed that the probability of the inference will be proportional to the

degree of similarity, a point urged by Adams19 The relevance of these

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claims and their refutations to our own enquiry must be clearly understood

In poetry, we are trying to establish contact with the mind of another, the

poet's intention and his emotive experiences. In drama, we are striving

to feel as the character feels in a situation or at least understand his

feeling, the cues before us being the actor's word, gesture, facial expression

The issue is whether the feeling is intuited by us from the Vibhāva (the

prime stimulus, here the actor in a role) or whether the Vibhāva serves

merely as the ground for inferring the feeling

Against the inference school it has been urged that understanding seems

to occur even in the absence of relevant previous experience Stern20

points out that at the age of one year or less infants register appropriate

response to expressions of which they have had no conceivable experience

This is because latent reactivity—the Naisargika Vāsanā of Sanskrit

poetics—is a reality and it enables the recognition of emotion from expres-

sion, the organism being a psychophysical unity where emotion determines

the expressive act of the body Kohler21 gives many instances of apes'

understanding of expressions without the background of relevant previous

experience He argues that emotional comprehension is directly aroused

by the structure and definition of the sensory field, without the help of

association

Even in the case of perceptions, where, due to the presence of similar

funded experiences, association can be claimed to account for comprehen-

sion, the objection has been made that the awareness is not factorised in

the way the inference theory prescribes The reading of suffering in

another face—in the aesthetic presentation he may be an actor—has all

semblance of being a unitary act; it does not seem to be an inference

from the perception of the lines on his face by the accrual to this sensory

core of an associational context where similar lines on one's own face are

remembered to have been brought about by one's own suffering

Inference cannot be saved as the sole reality by arguing, as Mahima22

does, that even the imperceptible process (Asamlakṣya Kramā) is a

process, a mediating sequence Explanation of emotional comprehension

in terms of empathy, which is simply kinesthetic inference or unconscious

identification,23 as confronted with similar difficulties Empathy demands

overt or incipient motor mimicry of another as a necessary condition of

comprehension of another's mood, as Hirn24 has pointed out Paralytics

should therefore lose their capacity to understand people to some degree.

Allport25 shows that this cannot be taken for granted Against the

argument that emotional comprehension follows upon a process of uncon-

scious emotional identification, it has been urged that a mood, which is

temporarily dominant in one, would rule out the comprehension of an

opposite mood in another by identification Feeling grief, one cannot,

according to this hypothesis, identify oneself with another's elation26

Then, how is the understanding of an opposite mood to be explained ?

It is not the intention to deny that inferential processes ever take place

in comprehension

ceptions also occur

the reality of another self which, as given, becomes the object of knowledge

But while empathic and analogous inferential processes demand an associa-

tional self-reference as an intermediate act before the mood of another

is comprehended, intuitive perceptions are immediate

In fact, Kohler

goes to the extent of claiming that the “Thou” is a prior perception to the

“I”; because it is a gestalt of clearer definition

Kohler also points out

that when we intuitively see that a man is melancholy or embarrassed, it

is clearly he and not we ourselves who seems to have these qualities , they

are luminously objective in location

The Vibhavas, and the poem

itself, which is a literary representation (Vachaka Abhinaya), must therefore

be attributed an objective power to suggest

The facts that it is the poet's

subjectivity that gifted words with this power and that it can act only if the

subjectivity of the reader is sensitive enough, do not negate the truth that

the power has come to dwell in the creatively moulded poetic tissue

Lossky, Croce and Bergson have made elaborate defences of intuition

Lossky regards intuition as the capacity for knowledge of an object in its

integrality

The several qualities of an object are perceived by different

sense organs, which are however unable to mediate the unity of the whole

complex of perceptions

While it is possible for one to see the colour, feel

the shape and taste the sweetness of an orange, it is impossible to see, feel

or taste its unity

Likewise, intuition and not construction out of atomistic

fragments is the process by which the unity of personality is grasped

Similarly, in the aesthetic context, the poem is reacted to as a unity

The

components are not reacted to individually and the total meaning obtained

by an additive or logical process

Croce also stresses intuition as the

perception of particularity or unity

He feels that sole reliance on asso-

ciationism involves the sacrifice of the perception of unity

Bergson

claims that the operation of the intellect is indirect, being composed of a

number of fixed states, which, when combined, give rise to inferential

knowledge, while intuitive understanding is immediate

According to

Bergson, art and artists are enough proof that intuition exists

This claim is not mere rhetoric, for it has been subjected to experimental

verification

The experiment is that of S G Estes

The investigator

made two-minute motion picture records of the behaviour of eight

subjects, whose personalities had been intensively studied by a group of

twenty psychologists over a period of one year

In these films the

subjects performed briefly certain “expressive” tasks (such as divesting

themselves of coat, tie and shirt, playing slap-jack and wrestling with an

opponent, etc )

These films were seen by a group of judges who made

ratings with the same schedule of variables that had been employed in

the intensive one year investigation, so that direct comparisons could be

made between the judgments based on the film records and upon the

prolonged experimental and clinical study

This experiment showed that

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judgments of psychiatric social workers having at least two years’ practical

experience in addition to their formal training were much less valid than

those of artists.

In the battle with the grammarians and the epistemologists on several

fronts, what the Dhvani theorists were trying to win for poetic experience

was the validity of intuition If they did not altogether deny a process in

the realisation of the suggested meaning, it was because between the

cognition of the expressed meaning and the birth of wonder (Vismaya)

and sudden expansion of the heart (Chitta Vistara) when the suggested

meaning was realised, intuition itself could be said to mediate But this

process was imperceptible (Asamlakṣya), a quantal transition, unlike

the phased progression of inferential and analogous processes. Govinda

Thakkur,33 the fifteenth century commentator on Mammata, affirms

"It is direct apprehension that yields the experience of beauty

(Chamatkāra) and not mere inference " Again, it was because Bharata

had insisted that the poetic context was the representation of a living

context and because poetics had evolved from dramaturgy, that linguistic

expression was seen, not as the sole or total reality, but as an element

of the living context, which moulded the meaning of language over a

wider range than the limits fixed by a literal analysis that took into

account only the functions of denotation, indication, purport, inference,

etc Logan Pearsall Smith34 has emphasised the new powers of significa-

tion, the inwaidness, which language develops in the living context "If

I were advising any youth of high aims, who might entertain the ambition

of reviving the dead art of the English drama, or the dying art of the

English novel, I should suggest to him that he should study above all

the speech-rhythms, the syntax, the hesitations, the tricks of phrase and

verbal sing-song of the people with whom he talks, for this shimmering

texture of speech, significant as it is both with the states of the soul

and with the meanings and tensions and clashes of human beings in their

relation with each other, is, for the writers of drama or fiction, the very

stuff of life . . "

The human context determines mood and tension and these in

turn determine, in linguistic expression, the drift of suggested meaning,

which may deviate widely from the literal purport Theorists of Dhvani

have listed seven main differences between expression and suggestion35

There is the difference in the mode of apprehension : the expressed

meaning, the only one the grammarians admit, results from the rules of

grammar, the suggested meaning can originate from the context or from

extra-linguistic cues like glances and gestures36 There is the difference

of linguistic means · the expressed meaning emanates from the words ; the

suggested meaning may reside in a part of the word, in a phoneme, in the

arrangement of letters, in the style itself Suggestion takes colour from

the speaker and the person addressed The same utterance of a woman

may have an expressed meaning for her husband and a suggestive meaning

for her lover There is difference of time in the apprehension of the two

meanings - the suggested meaning is grasped only after the expressed

meaning, in other words, it is at the moment when the direct denotation

has exhausted itself or is perceived as inadequate that the new value

springs forth in the mind The transition here may be relatively smooth

or abrupt, as Jagannatha37 points out The expressed meaning may pass

over into another sense ( arthantara-samkrama-vachya ) or the expressed

sense may be made to 'disappear entirely' ( atyanta-tiraskita-vachya )

There is the difference of number the expressed meaning is one for

example the sun has set The suggested meaning is multiple According

to the circumstances, the reference to sunset may suggest that it is now

the time to attack the enemy, or to start for an assignation, or to take

rest or to begin the evening worship The expressed meaning may ordain

where the suggested prohibits, assert where the latter denies Thus

suggestion can completely contradict the literal sense sanctioned by deno-

tation, grammar and syntax As Wagenknecht38 says, "even when we

use words, their meaning may be profoundly modified, or even completely

transformed, by their inflections and by the gestures, or even the cast of

countenance, that accompany them 'You rascal, you !' is often spoken

with real affection while words of endearment may be uttered in so sinister

a manner that they seem more malevolent than a curse" A sensitive

instance of the poetic use of contradiction between expressed and suggested

sense, often cited, is this verse "Depart, my dear ! May your paths

be safe ! Let me be also born again in that place where you go" It

is addressed by a girl to her lover just when he is about to leave on a

long journey The expressed meaning permits the lover to leave But

the suggestion is that separation will surely mean death for her and there-

fore a prohibition is implicit39 Finally, there is the difference of effect

between expressed and suggeted meaning which has the greatest signifi-

cance for poetry The expressed meaning brings a cognitive perception

( Pratiti ) pure and simple, while the suggested meaning creates a joyful

feeling of surprise due to the sudden perception of beauty (Chamatkriti )40

By steadly resisting the claim that denotational meaning is the physical

cause ( Kavaka-hetu ) or logical cause ( Jnapaka-hetu ) of poetic reaction,

the Dhvani theory emphasises that, in poetic communion, sensibility is

the indispensable basic requirement But, as sensibility is sparked by the

word, the poetic tissue, resonance has to be regarded as an objective power

which language comes to possess in poetry, just as sensibility has to be

an objective feature of the spirit in poetic experience Valéry holds the

same views "The essence of prose is to perish—that is, to be 'under-

stood', to be dissolved, destroyed once and for all, wholly replaced by

the image or impulse that it signifies, according to the conventions of

language For prose always assumes the universe of experience and acts

the universe in which—oi thanks to which—our perceptions, actions and

feelings must tally with one another or respond to one another in a single

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way · uniformly The practical universe is reduced to a totality of ends

When a given end is attained, the word dies. This universe excludes

ambiguity, eliminates it , it demands procedure by the shortest routes, and

it stifles at once the harmonic relationships of each event generated in the

spirit But poetry demands or suggests a ‘universe’ that is quite different :

a universe of reciprocal relations, analogous to the universe of sounds, in

which musical thought arises and moves In this poetic universe, reso-

nance triumphs over causality, and the ‘form’, far from dissolving into its

effect, is as it were reinvoked by it"41 If resonance triumphs over

causality, it is because the sensibility is there, with the power to resonate

But with what does it vibrate harmonically ? With the suggestive power

of the poetic word or form Elsewhere also Valéry emphasises that the

form survives in poetry whereas it perishes in prose "The power of poetry

lies in the return to form, its conservation"42 The resonance of poetry

is as objective a reality as the power to resonate of the sensibility that

receives its intimation in relish, for the poetic word acquired this power

in the first place from the creative act of a poetic sensibility.

II MUSICAL POWER AND LIMITS OF POETRY

In the very opening section of his classic, Ananda Vardhana summarises

the various views about suggestion There were thinkers who denied its

reality altogether , others sought to resolve it into the familiar functions

of language like denotation, indication, purport, etc. But there was a

third school, which preferred a cautious agnosticism. These critics

recognised its reality and also felt that the attempt to derive it from

denotation, etc was not convincing. Therefore they took the line that

suggestion lay beyond the province of words, though a great testimony of

its reality was available in the fact that it was perceived by men of refined

sensibility (Sahrdaya-hrdaya-samvedyam)43 To the extent that this

school recognised the reality of suggestion, it supported Ananda Vardhana

But the poem, as distinguished from the drama, worked solely with words,

Anubhavas like glance and gesture not being actual presentations There-

fore, to agree that suggestion lay beyond the province of words would be

to deny the reality and efficacy of poetic action (Kavī Vyāpāra) through

the poetic transmutation of the word Here Ananda Vardhana points out

that even if the concrete ancillary stimuli of the dramatic presentation are

absent in a poem, language need not be judged as inadequate for the

function of suggestion That blind alley is reached only when the reality

of suggestion is sought to be resolved into functions like denotation that

clip the wings of words and make them hug the earth But words are

not only signs , they are objects too in their own right. They have

shape and texture and these have resonance which can be mobilised to be

in harmony with, and to reinforce, the suggestion of the episodic context

or of the poem as a whole.

THE DOCTRINE OF SUGGESTION

133

Here, the tempered classicism of Sanskrit poetry and poetics should be

noted Ananda Vardhana did not swing to the other extreme and rely

solely on the word as pure phonetic entity, abstract musical sound, for

suggestive evocation to poetry That would have totally destroyed the

language their utility communicability of poetic experience Denotation, indication and purport

were all assimilated into poetry But in crucial contexts these powers

were transcended and the suggestive values of words as phonetic entities

were also utilised The temptation to discard the normal use of language

is strong and certain European movements have wholly succumbed to it

Valéry, in a very interesting passage, indicates the increasingly specialised

demands made by the poet on language which ultimately make him

impatiently want to recast it “In all language sooner or later a mandarin’s

language appears, sometimes far removed from the customary language,

but generally this literary language is derived from the other, from which

it draws words, figures of speech, and phrases, best fitted to express the

effect which the literary artist aims at” But the poet gets increasingly

impatient with the intractability of the medium Valéry instanced

Mallarmé who made up “a language entirely his own by a refined choice

of words and by using exceptional turns of speech he invented or adapted

always, refusing the immediate solution suggested to him on every side”

Mallarmé's aim was to defend himself, “in the details and elementary

functioning of mental life, against automatism” He was maintaining the

integrity of his art by keeping faith with his intuitions “In order to

remain faithful to the inner language of form, the poet must invent words

and create images, he must mishandle and stretch the meaning of words”

Further, it is a mistake to demand an explanation of this honest subjectivity

“The poem must be received directly, without questioning, and loved or

hated. until the strange words are accepted without questioning, but

always with fresh recognition ”44

The danger here is that the words may be so strange that recognition of

the poet's intention becomes well-nigh impossible This may not have

happened in Mallarmé whose cryptic utterance can always be decoded by

sensibility and patient effort But it has happened with many others We

may be genuinely amused by the nonsense of Edward Lear who, merci-

fully, does not pretend to have scaled the heights of poetic intensity We

may not even object to T S Eliot's reading that Lear's nonsense is not

“vacuity of sense”, but rather “a parody of sense” According to Eliot,17

the Jumblies is an expression of “nostalgia for the romance of foreign

voyage and exploration”. Yongy-Bongy Bo and Dong with the Luminous

Nose are poems of unrequited passion, “blues” in fact But serious diffi-

culties arise when the poet claims oracular seriousness Alexander

Kruchenykh wrote “The lily is beautiful, but the word ‘lily’ (‘liliya’ in

Russian) is atrocious, it has been handled a great deal and raped There-

fore I name the lily ‘yeouyi’ and the old beauty is restored.” Restored for

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SANSKRIT POETICS

whom, we may ask Unless the poet is going to give a glossary of all

his new words, his neologisms will leave the reader cold. He is more

likely to think of murder than lily Aldo Palazzeschi wrote a poem about

enjoyment :

Tı tı tı

Fıu fiu fiu

Ihu ihu ihu

Uhi uhi uhi

One hopes that the poet at least, unlike the reader, was happy with his

effort Marinetti wished to destroy syntax, to get rid of adjectives "because

the naked substantive keeps its essential colour", and to replace existing

systems of punctuation by mathematical and musical signs The Mani-

festo, aggressively entitled A Slap in the Face of Public Taste, issued by

Mayakovsky and his group in December 1912 demanded respect for the

poet's right "to enlarge the vocabulary with arbitrary and derivative words-

neologisms, to uncompromising hatred for the language used hitherto . . .

And if our lines show the dirty traces of your 'common sense', yet the

first lightnings of a New Dawn of Beauty are already trembling upon

them"46 But the upshot of all the heroics was that the attempt to

liberate language finally enclosed it within the prison of hermeticism, of

purely private significance which the reader could not share Wilson47

gave this verdict on Gertrude Stein "She has outdistanced the symbolists

in using words for purposes of pure suggestion, she has gone so far that

she no longer even suggests We are the ripples expanding in her con-

sciousness, but we are no longer supplied with any clue as to what object

has sunk there" We might also recall here the opinion expressed by a

psychologist like Adler48 that undue obsession with "a private language is

a symptom of insanity"

Ananda Vardhana49 has analysed the danger of the private language

briefly but with brilliant clarity He says that words have two different

aspects, the one inferable (Anumeya) and the other communicable

(Pratipadya) When the intention (Vivaksha) of the speaker takes the

form of an idea communicated through a word, through speech, the

meaning is both inferable and communicable, for human evolution has

made speech an instrument of communication But the intention may be

unconscious, purely expressive ; it may take the form of an ejaculation

The excitement of the speaker can be inferred from it by analysing it as

an expressive act But, Ananda Vardhana points out, such expression is

a common characteristic of all animals, including man , it does not come

within the sphere of speech which is a specifically human means of

communication50

Support for this analysis can be mobilised from the thought of our own

times Allen Tate51 felt that the attempt to use language directly and

THE DOCTRINE OF SUGGESTION

135

solely as expressive sound instead of as a vehicle of meaning was a superstition. He refers to "that idolatrous dissolution of language from the grammar of a possible world, which results from the belief that language itself can be reality, or by incantation can create a reality". Jacques Rivière52 has, similarly, pointed out . "It is only with Romanticism that the literary art began to be conceived as a kind of assault on the absolute and its result as a revelation--not the genuine revelation involved in poetic knowledge, but rather a pseudo-prophetic revelation bound up with magic and the search for transmuting reality through the power of words, which was to be made in the surrealist theory of the magical revelation of absolute knowledge " Maritain53 brings out the complete abdication of poetic control ( the Kavi Vyapara of Sanskrit poetics ) implied in the automatism of surrealism which was the inevitable result of the dogma that words must be used as unconscious, symptomatic expressionism rather than as controlled expression operating with meanings of many levels "The genuine revelation aimed at by poetry--that revelation, in a work of art, of the spiritual depths of the human subjectivity awakened to the world by intuitive emotion--becomes the message of the hasard objectif, of the mysterious intentions ascribed to chance, and the torrent of dark forces in which man and the world communicate, transmitted by automatic writing "

If the theorists of Dhvani fought for establishing the incantational power of poetry, it must be very clearly understood that they resisted a regression to magical concepts What was suggested was not a closed world of private meaning It was Rasa, as we shall see in the discussion of the later phase of the evolution of the theory They did not surrender the poet's control over what was definitely his creation or regress to an automatism where nothing was creatively shaped, but where unselected fantasies and impulses and images burst forth in a stream which was too turbid to reflect the distant star De54 has very rightly said "Sanskrit poetry does not aim at leaving the unexpressed to be darkly gathered, nor does the theory of Poetics regard it as indeterminate The unexpressed is bound up by means of definite links with the expressed, without which it cannot exist , but it is wrapped up in such a manner as to make it possible only for the initiated in the poetic hieroglyphics to comprehend it in its subtlety The unexpressed is not understood by those who know grammar and lexicon, but only by men of taste and literary instinct who know the essence of poetry It is the province of the Sahṛdaya, the connoisseur, who is expert in discerning through the intricate meshes of veiled words and sense into the aesthetic relish of deeper significance "

Mahima Bhatta65 who wanted to reduce suggestion to inference claimed, as part of the strategy of his attack, that only the meaning of the word was relevant in this process, not the word itself as a phonetic entity This was a consistent position for him to take up, for if the word as a phonetic entity was conceded a direct power, the case for inference would be

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weakened, for inference is the logical processing of meaning and it cannot

handle elusive values like the sensuous qualities of words But Ananda

Vardhana claimed that while the expressed sense resided in the denota-

tion, indication and purport of words, the suggested sense could inhere in

the arrangement of letters or of sounds, in words as phonetic entities, in

their position Here the Dhvani theory insists on the sensuous power of

language, though it is accommodated within a classical system which

accepts the normal functions of language as the vehicle of meaning, and

discourages erratically private handling of language, believing as it does

that the poet should transcend semantic meaning, not destroy it, in the

leap towards poetic meaning

Whitehead56 has said that the whole basis of the art of literature is

"that the emotions and feelings directly excited by the words should fitly

intensify our emotions and feelings arising from contemplation of the

meaning" Sanskrit poetics, we have seen, has always affirmed that

feeling is the soul of poetry, while sound and meaning together form its

body (Kavya Sarira) The concept of the parity of the two implies that

sound as such also arouses nuances of feeling Likewise, since Sanskrit

poetics insists that all literary ornaments should serve feeling and as, in

the verbal figure, replacement by synonyms is ruled out, it is clear that

word as phonetic entity is functioning directly as a poetic cue Analytical

findings that soft vocables and vowel music suit the erotic sentiment while

explosive consonantal combinations are ideal for the sentiments of anger

or heroism also confirm that Sanskrit poetics realised that feeling tones

could be directly excited by words Montague57 has a fine analysis of the

sensuous qualities of words "The writer's mind will finger single words

and caress them, adorning the mellow fullness or granular hardness of

their several sounds, the balance, undulation or trailing fall of their

syllables, or the core of sun-like splendour in the broad, warm, central

vowel of such a word as 'auroral' Each word's evocative value or virtue,

its individual power of touching springs in the mind and of initiating

visions, becomes a treasure to revel in " Description (Varnana) enshrines

the Vision (Darsana), to recall Bhatta Tauta, through a perfect sensuous

concretisation where this direct power of words, in addition to their

meanings, is also used It is this power which Lowes58 refers to as

connotation "Poetry, though it speaks to the intellect, is directed equally

to the emotions And that which scientific prose is bent on ruthlessly

excising--namely the suggestions, the connotation of words--that consti-

tutes in large degree the very stuff with which the poet works For words

stir our feelings, not through a precise delimitation of their sense, but

through their enveloping atmosphere of associations 'Not poppy, nor

mandragora, nor all the drowsy syrups of the world'--read that and the

hovering associations merge and blend, and not one word produces its

effect through what a dictionary can afford . For over that which we

call the meaning of the words a poet uses, there goes on an incessant play

of suggestion, caught from each user's own adventures among words—

flashes that come and vanish, stirrings of memories, unfoldings of vistas—

and the poet builds up his fabric out of both the basic meaning and the

overtones " Wyndham Lewis50 said of Villon that he possessed the word

and the magic formula "by which words are changed into something beyond

themselves and their arrangement transmuted into the language of another

world , a language in which the very shape and size and texture of words,

their resonance, their position and significance, become, as it were, faery,

charged with tremendous or mysterious, or ravishing music" The affinity

between Sanskrit poetics and these views is so astonishing that they read

almost like footnotes to the Dhvanyaloka Especially significant is the fact

that verbal resonance is not allowed to become a fetish but is steadily

regarded as operating in conjunction with the sense The poetic tissue

is woven out of both the basic meanings and the overtones When

Abercrombie60 refers to poetry as incantation, he is referring to the power

which poetry develops when meaning is reinforced by the direct sugges-

tion of words and rhythms, not the incantation of surrealism which

destroys semantic meaning

Aananda Vardhana referred not only to the intrinsic suggestive qualities

of words but also to their modification due to their position Walter de

la Mare61 clarifies this There is an inexhaustible variety of verbal sounds,

"since each such sound either in prose or verse has not only its relative

accent, stress or emphasis, or lack of them, but also its quality, volume

and pitch—its intonation—and is affected by those of its more or less

immediate neighbours" Since Sanskrit poetics started with a fundamental

equation of art and life and accepted as its basic psychological postulate

that the sensuously palpable is the stimulus for the emotive reaction, it

did not make a special investigation as to why the sounds of words should

have this power of suggestion Dandin62 notes that some sounds—quite

apart from their meanings—can have vulgar resonances due to quite acci-

dental sexual puns It is a pity, however, that a more thorough analysis

was not attempted But we can gather helpful cues from our own times

Walter de la Mare says that good writing is the result of a natural taste

and impulse, "bringing into play two sensuous activities, speech and

hearing" According to Raleigh,63 if poetry has favoured the way of the

ear and has given itself zealously to the tuneful ordering of sounds, it is

because sense was conveyed by sound before words were invented and

this primitive power still survives in life as well as in letters Ananda

Vardhana also recalls this phase in his reference to non-verbalised utterance

as expressive reaction, which man shares with the species below him in

evolution Valéry64 wrote "What is sung or articulated in the most

solemn or the most critical moments of life , what we hear in a liturgy ,

what is murmured or groaned in the extremity of passion , what calms the

child or the afflicted , what attests the truth of an oath—these are words

of a particular tone and expression which cannot be resolved into clear

18

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SAN̄SKRIT POETICS

ideas . Such words incite us to become, rather than excite us to

understand." Inducing states of being, of becoming, is the highest function

of poetry. The creative poet makes use of these deeper intimations of

words also "For a sensitive reader," says Duhamel,65 "each word changes

its quality and its resonance and perhaps its meaning according to whether

it is used by a poet or a prose-writer, a master or an apprentice. . . "

The expressive functioning of poetry, said Prall,66 "does not take place

through linguistic symbolism alone, which is common to verse and the

least artistic prose discourse, but also through its whole artistic character,

including its strictly aesthetic surface, which by means of sounds and

rhythms is a verbal and auditory specification of the exact emotional

effect that it embodies and thus expresses And the vitality and life of

art and or its aesthetic surface depend almost wholly on this expressive-

ness If the 'significant form' of modern critics has any meaning, this is

it " The auditory pattern in poetry is no casual accident but a

created reality with a functional significance Margaret Boulton67 called

it the "phonetic form". But one has to be careful in the exploitation of

the sensuous qualities of sound in literature Prall claims that of all the

arts music is, in the matter of emotional expressiveness, "the deepest and

richest, of the widest range and the greatest power, as well as the most

flexible and most delicately precise". T S Eliot68 gave this advice -

"Let the neophyte know assonance and alliteration, rhyme immediate and

delayed, simple and polyphonic, as a musician would except to know

harmony and counterpoint . . " He also advocated the purely musical

exploration of language "Let the candidate fill his mind with the finest

cadences he can discover, preferably in a foreign language so that the

meaning of the words may be less likely to divert his attention from the

movement , for example, Saxon charms, Hebridean folk songs, the- verse

of Dante, and the lyrics of Shakespeare-if he can dissociate the voca-

bulary from the cadence " The danger here is that poetry may become

pure musical incantation and rupture those links with meaning and there-

fuc with life that are intrinsic to literary expression which utilises both

the sound and sense of words, not the former alone It is clear, of

course, that Eliot advocates this specialised exploration only as practice

For he concludes with the caution given by Duhamel and Vildrac in their

treatise on versification "But you must be a poet to begin with" . poet,

not musician, the poet cannot ignore the denotational meaning of words

and work solely with their sensuous qualities as sound The suggested

meaning (Vyangya) is the overtone (Dhvani) of the expressed (Vachya),

not a total cancellation of it

So strong has been the fascination of music for poetry and so clear is

the strength of this fascination in the theories of French Symbolism and

Indian Dhvani that the issue needs a clarification which will remove all

ambiguity If Walter Pater claimed that all art aspires to the condition

of music, it would be dangerous to accept that claim without keeping in

mind the very important qualification made by Bremond that, in aspiring

thus, each medium—words, notes, colours, lines—has to work within the

range of evocative power proper to it 69 An elementary fact which is too

often ignored is that the medium of poetry is not pure sound, but signifi-

cant sounds with predetermined meanings, which the poet may alter but

never violate 70 This is why Eliot could not accept Mallarmé's claim

of the identity of poetry and music He realised that sense could not be

sacrificed to sound, nor—which complicates the problem—sound to sense

"Words are perhaps the hardest of all material of art for they must

be used to express both visual beauty and beauty of sound, as well as

communicating a grammatical statement" 71 He did not underrate the

importance of suggestion but he came to the conclusion "that the sugges-

tiveness of poetry . is the aura around a bright clear centre, that you

cannot have the aura alone"

Words are the hardest material of art because they are at the same

time linguistic symbols as well as art symbols This can be clarified with

the help of an early analysis like that of Eugène Veron, 72 one of the

writers who influenced Tolstoy's aesthetic views Art, said Veron, is

essentially a language. The ordinary language of the spoken word ori-

ginated from the expression of emotions by instinctive, natural reactions

mentioned by Ananda Vardhana also—cries of pleasure and pain, anger

or desire, vocalisations of mood and mental disturbance But as men

matured in the capacity for abstract thought, they began to develop a

language of purely conventional signs which served for the communication

of facts and ideas This became the language of prose, informative and

scientific speech, Bhamaha's Loka Vāita and Sāstra Vānta From a form

of natural expression no different in essence from other bodily gestures

language became an artificial means of communication But at the same

time the language of mimetic signs for the expression of concrete feelings

and emotions was also developed and elaborated, becoming the language

of art Prose or scientific language is communication of thought, art

language is expression of mood 73 The word as linguistic symbol operates

by denotation The word as art symbol is a direct expression of feeling

and may arouse that feeling in another by sympathetic induction

Music seems the ideal art symbol because musical sound, unlike the

sound of a word, has completely shed all denotation and functions as

pure expression As Combarieu said, music "translates the dynamism of

the psychic life" Deryck Cooke 74 clarifies this A musical tissue is

built up of purely musical "tonal tensions" and the vitalising, characterising

agents of rhythm, tempo, dynamics, texture and tone-colour Music

"conveys the naked feeling direct", it is "emotion-converted-into-form"

Cooke analyses the Gloria theme in Beethoven's Missa Solemnis It

expresses his joy in the thought of God's glory "Beethoven might have

jumped for joy or shouted for joy and thus communicated his sense

of joy to a few people living in Vienna at that time Being a composer,

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SANSKRIT POETICS

he was not merely content to transform his powerful emotional energy

into such ephemeral forms of physical energy, but felt the need to convert

it into a permanent, stored-up, transportable and reproducible form of

energy—a musical shout for joy, as it were, that all the world might

hear

"

A subtle new aspect is now revealed in the situation. The art symbol

is not mere unconscious expression It may be direct expression of

feeling but it is moulded in such a way as to be able to communicate that

feeling to others Susanne Langer,75 who has ably elaborated Veron’s

distinction between linguistic and aesthetic symbolism, points out that

if the composer forgets the need to communicate he is merely “emoting”,

merely letting off steam, and hence failing to make the vital distinction

between the symptom, the manifestation of a mere affect, and the articulate

symbol which “lets us conceive its object, imparts insight and the emotion

which insight brings” Cooke also emphasises this He affirms that when

Beethoven composed the Gloria theme his “joy in the thought of God’s

glory” was “converted by the act of the creative imagination, just as,

without the intervention of this faculty, it might be converted into a vocal

utterance or a physical movement” His superb analysis of the Gloria

theme (“ that swift breathless rush in fast triple time, driving through

the five notes of the basic term from a barely established foothold on the

tonic straight up to the dominant . . .”) brings out how the affect, even

while it is being directly expressed, uses what Langer calls “factors of

possible expressive virtue” in musical sound considered as a medium for

moulding an articulate symbol.

Thus we return to the nature of the medium, “the factors of possible

expressive virtue” which are intrinsic to it and which therfore are also the

determinants of the limits to which it will allow itself to be plastically

moulded as an aesthetic symbol Now the difficulties one confronts when

using language as an instrument of evocation emerge from the fact that

though it functions generally as a denotational symbol, it has not wholly

lost its inheritance from the days of racial infancy when it commenced

its evolution first as a vocal gesticulation Carnap, following the analysis

of linguistic symbolism by Wittgenstein,76 wrote: “Many linguistic

utterances are analogous to laughing in that they have only an expressive

function, no representative function Examples of this are cries like ‘Oh,

oh’, or, on a higher level, lyrical verses The aim of a lyrical poem in-

which occur the words ‘sunshine’ and ‘clouds’ is not to inform us of

certain meteorological facts, but to express certain feelings of the poet

and to excite similar feelings in us”77 Carnap, I am afraid, does not

distinguish clearly between lingual gesticulation which is symptomatic of

feeling and lingual communication of feeling The poet feels the benedic-

tion of sunshine, is thrilled by the vision of huge clouds sailing by. In a

very broad sense, the poem he writes is an ejaculation But if he uses

symptomatic expressions like “Oh, Oh”, he cannot build up his whole

THE DOCTRINE OF SUGGESTION

141

poem on such expressions If he attempts to do it he is not handling

language for poetic communication but regressing to the non-verbalised

ejaculation which, as Ananda Vardhana pointed out, belongs to the level

of animal behaviour Poets who think that this is what poetry should

really try to do are satirised thus by Wyndham Lewis

I sabotage the sentence ! With me is the naked word

Return with me where I am crying with the gorilla and the bird

The poet, in Carnap's example, uses words like "sunshine" and "clouds"

While Carnap can justly claim that these words are used as poetic cues

and not as facts about the weather, he is wrong in denying them represen-

tative function and equating them with ejaculatory cries The words have

clear denotational reference, although, if the poet rested at that level of

power, he would not be writing poetry, but only reportage, Bhamaha's

Vṛtta The poet has to use the denotation but also achieve a quantal

leap towards poetic resonance and suggestion Here, if he exploits the

music of the sound of words, he cannot rely solely on that alone, nor

can he ignore the meaning of the words Julien Benda78 analyses the

whole issue with greater clarity if we ignore the meaning of words, the

musical quality of the word—which is profoundly different from that of

the note of music—is too feeble to evoke, by itself, the feeling in us ; if

we understand the meanings of words, they impose their significations on

us which cannot be ignored "Words," as Bowra79 has said, "are limited

by their meanings The most melodious and associative poetry cannot

hope to snatch his honours from the musician Attempts have been made

to justify Mallarmé's belief, but the facts are against him His own con-

fession 'Mon art est une impasse', his failure to write his great poem, the

failure of his apologists to show that poetry can achieve effects comparable

to that of music, the unalterable truth that words cannot be divorced from

their meanings, all show that his doctrine was faulty " Mallarmé80 him-

self admitted at last that "syntax is essential as the guarantee, the pivot,

of intelligibility" in the musical use of language

Thus we come back to Eliot's caution that the aura of words cannot be

used in isolation from their core of meaning Lamartine81 said that the

word would merit the name of Logos only when it synthesises all its

qualities, which he enumerates The musical and aesthetic qualities are

sound, colour, rhythm, harmony , the referential qualities are idea and

image , the emotive qualities are feeling, enthusiasm Poetry should

unify all these powers of the word Valéry82 wrote "Poetry is not

music, it is still less discourse It is this ambiguity that is the basis of

its delicacy One should say, not that poetry sings, but that it is always

about to sing " Valéry wants the poet to be always fashioning a purer

language out of ordinary language, by revealing and activating the affective,

emotive resources of language which are mixed up in ordinary discourse

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with its functions of ordinary and superficial communication in practical,

day-to-day living 83 He defines absolute poetry as "a search for the effects

resulting from the relationships of words, or rather of the interrelations of

their resonances, which suggests, in sum, an exploration of the whole

domain of the sensibility that is governed by language" 84 The sensibility

that is governed by language is not exactly the sensibility that is governed

by music, for the word, unlike the musical sound, is not only emotive but

both emotive and referential Poetic handling of language ever seeks to

accent its emotive capacity This can be done, as both Valéry and the

Dhvani theory claim, by sensitive handling of the resonances of words.

But their referential aspect cannot be ignored, for poetry is not pure music,

the word is not just sound.

Ames 85 gives a balanced view about the whole issue which perfectly

expresses the outlook of Sanskrit poetics as well "Language has texture

to be respected like the grain of wood or the flow of oil, while what can

be signified (he means suggested, not denoted ) is like light and shadow

playing over surface and drawn into design As chiaroscuro comes into

the composition of painting, as highlights become accents in sculpture,

as sunlight strikes openings in architecture, so the flash and nuance of

meaning brighten and shadow a structure of words Yet meaning is not

merely added to a neutral stuff and framework, because what is there for

sense (he means what is sensuous ) is not more structural than what is

there for a self The trick is to internalise designation within a rhythm

of thought and feeling, so that the furthest sweep of discourse does not

go out of bounds of art This is possible so far as the life-reference of

language is amenable to arrangement . . . What is said coalesces with

a complex effect caught in a pattern transcended by its reference (he

means . the suggestive reach of poetic reference or meaning ) There is

no contradiction, since language requires words to be patterned, and so

much of man's life is lingual that to talk or to write is not to press exis-

tence into alien terms but to let it speak with its own tongue." The

physical behaviour of characters in a drama is, according to Sanskrit

poetics, Anubhava, expressive cue revelatory of the inner emotion Lan-

guage is lingual behaviour and Bhoja classed poetic diction and style as

an Anubhava The life-reference of linguistic behaviour, thus, is never

allowed to be forgotten. The Dhvani theory related suggestion basically

to the living context of the utterance and used the perception of that

context to decode the exact suggestion from the expression What is there

for the senses, the sensuous resonance of words, cannot cancel the expressed

meaning, but it can help in the transcendence of the expressed sense and

it should do so in delicately orchestrated poetry But the transcendence

is also willed, the poetic power operating at its farthest reach, beyond the

intimations of the pure sound and the direct meaning, though utilising

both What Myers 86 has written on this issue can be a fine summing up

"In poetry of the first order almost every word . continues to be an

articulate sound and a logcial step in the argument, but it becomes also

musical sound and a centre of emotional force . What is meant by

the vague praise bestowed on Virgil's unequalled style is practically this,

that he has been, perhaps, more successful than any other poet in fusing

together the expressed and suggested emotion , . His thoughts come to

us on wings of melodies prepared for them from the foundation of the

world "

III. SYNTHESIS AND RESTATEMENT

So far we have covered only the initial stabilisation of the concept of

Dhvani, its establishment as a reality of poetic experience, against various

lines of critical attack which sought to reduce it to the logical and familiar

functions of language We have now to follow the further elaboration of the

theory Briefly, this is what happens The heady delight in having dis-

covered this subtle power of poetry leads initially to a cult, a dogma, that

very nearly commits poetry to preciosity Then the great old insights

return to forge again strong links with life This arrests the preciosity,

but the reshaped theory, even with its new accents, is valid only for a

special type of poetry, though it is a type with a genuine and subtle power

The final statement, however, has elements which can be used to make

the special theory accommodate, though by implications and not explicitly,

all types of poetic endeavour

The Dhvani school had established suggestion (Vyanjana Virtti) as a distinct

power acquired by language, when handled by the creative poetic

intuition, a power which was not a derivative of the functions of denotation,

indication, purport and inference established by the grammarians The

Dhvani is applied when it is predominant, is now definitely posed as the

soul (Atman) of poetry But there are ambiguities here The Dhvani-

kara's verse,87 in which this view is set forth, appears, when literally taken,

to state that "the sense (Artha) which is practised by men of taste and

which has been established as the soul of poetry, has two subdivisions, the

expressed (Vachya) and the suggested (Pratiyamana)" The implication

here seems to be that the whole complex poetic sense is the essence of

poetry, that it does not consist of the suggested meaning alone but also

includes the expressed sense But in the very first line of his work, the

Dhavanikara, as Visvanatha pointed out later, had claimed that the sug-

gested sense alone was the essence of poetry The opposition between

the special theory and the general theory, thus, is inherent in the first

formulation itself It is the special theory that gained precedence in the

first triumphant flush of the analytical progress Thus, Abhinava tries to

reconcile the contradiction in the Dhvanikara's very first statements by

claiming that his real object in the verse quoted is to distinguish between

the expressed and suggested sense, and not to establish both as the soul of

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poetry. And thus the theoretical exposition unfolds, steadily shifting the

centre of gravity in poetry from the expressed to the suggested. The

Agnı Purana would claim “Words attain preeminence in science

(Sastra), meaning in epic history (Itthasa) and suggestion in poetry.”

Types of poetic endeavour are now categorised in the light of the

principle of the supremacy of suggestion. The best poetry is that in which

the suggested sense predominates and supersedes the expressed. This is

called Dhvani-Kavya, poetry of resonance, because the suggested sense

(Vyangyartha) is “echoed” perfectly in this class of poetry Visvanatha⁸⁸

confirms this as the etymology of the term : here beauty resides in the

suggested sense, not the expressed. The commitment of theory, here,

should be noted. The Dhvankara⁸⁹ had said. “The learned call that

particular kind of poetry Dhvani (Dhvani Kavya) in which the (expressed)

word and sense, subordinating themselves, manifest that (other suggested)

sense”. But now it is not just a particular kind of poetry, it alone is

the highest poetry · for Dhvani is the soul of poetry. A poet may use

suggestion, but the suggested sense may not predominate over the expressed.

This type of poetry cannot be the highest but can be given only the second

rank This second class in which the suggested sense is not the predominant

is called the Poetry of Subordinate Suggestion (Gumbhuta Vyangya

Kavya) ⁹⁰ Lastly, there is the poetry without any suggested element This

is reckoned as the third and the lowest kind, being merely “pictorial” in

word or sense Therefore it is called Pictorial Poetry (Chitra Kavya).⁹¹

There is even some reluctance to recognise this class as poetry at all. In

deference to Ananda Vardhana, Mammata admits it as poetry, though of

the lowest kind But Visvanatha altogether rejects its claim as poetry

After categorising poetry in terms of the role of suggestion, accorded the

status of the supreme poetic value, the Dhvani theory concentrates atten-

tion on the nature of what is suggested and this yields another system of

categories The suggested sense has three different aspects It may be a

matter or an idea (Vastu Dhvani) This is the case when a distinct

subject or thought (a matter of fact) is suggested Or it may be a poetic

figure (Alankara Dhvani) Here the suggested sense constitutes some-

thing imaginative (not matter of fact) which, if expressed in so many

words, would assume the form of a poetic figure Or what is suggested

may be a mood or feeling (Rasa Dhvani) Abhinava⁹² points out that

this doctrine is not expressly taught in the core of gnomic formulae

(Karıka) of the Dhvanyaloka, but is sanctioned by Ananda Vardhana’s

treatment⁹³ in his exposition (Vritti).

The heady excitement of the discovery of the suggestive power of poetry

had so filled the foreground of critical perspective that realities in the back-

ground had been temporarily forgotten But when suggestion and feeling,

Dhvani and Rasa, were thus linked in the further analytical exploration,

remembrance of the already established supremacy of feeling in poetry

returned like a flood and compelled a subtle but radical reshaping of the

entire doctrine In the Indian tradition, feeling had supreme status in

poetry, it was the soul of poetry, no other poetic value could dislodge it

and capture that status Vamana, excited by the discovery of the pro-

foundly integrative significance of diction (Rīti), called it the soul of

poetry and was curtly dismissed by critics like Viśvanātha, who pointed

out that nothing other than Rasa could be the soul of poetry Suggestion,

likewise, could not be claimed to be the soul of poetry, however great a

poetic value it was It is to the great credit of Ānanda Vardhana that,

when remembrance returned, he accepted the supremacy of Rasa without

the slightest reservation in spite of his commitments regarding suggestion

Affirmations about the supremacy of Rasa are scattered generously through-

out the Dhvanyāloka There is no glory in poetic endeavour which does

not seek to realise Rasa94 The genuine poet's primary intention should

be the evocation of Rasa95 Neither poetic figure nor ornament nor the

mere narrative, but the suggestion of Rasa should be the guiding principle

of the poet in his composition of word and sense96 Rasa is in fact the

essence of poetry, as it is of the drama97

Thus begins the subtle reshaping of theory Ānanda Vardhana dis-

tinctly says in one place98 that his object is not merely to establish the

doctrine of suggestion (Dhvani) but also to harmonise it with the theory

of the aesthetic emotion (Rasa) This synthesis, however, is completed

only with Abhinava's contribution In Ānanda Vardhana, the return of

Rasa to supreme status, which Dhvani had tried to usurp for a while, is

reflected in the special stress given to the suggestion of feeling (Rasa

Dhvani) as against the other two categories of the suggestion of matter

of fact or of poetic figure Abhinava starts by affirming the supremacy of

Rasa This value is the essence of poetry99 There can be no poetry

without Rasa100 The admission of the two categories of the suggestion

of matter of fact and of poetic figure need not create any difficulties For

Abhinava is certain that these two categories of suggestion (Vastu Dhvani

and Alamkāra Dhvani) resolve themselves ultimately into the suggestion

of Rasa which is in fact the essence of poetry101

Let us see how the suggestion of matter of fact resolves itself into

suggestion of feeling Viśvanatha, later, argues that the suggested matter

(Vyangya Vastu) cannot by itself constitute the essence of poetry He

analyses the example of material suggestion (Vastu Dhvani) given in

Dhvanyāloka102 and argues that it is admissible as poetry because the

evocation has a touch of feeling (Rasa Sparśa), it is not a neutral evoca-

tion or reference But Jagannātha103 objects to such interpretations He

argues that nothing is gained by this clumsy subterfuge of an indirect

reference to Rasa, because such a reference may also be construed in

phrases like "the cow moves" or "the deer leaps" Jagannatha here ignores

the most important factor whether the context is that of prose or poetry

In the genuinely poetic context, the apparently matter of fact description

plays a really functional role in the evocation of mood It is in the

19

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SANḰRIT POETICS

desolate landscape, where "the sedge has wither'd from the lake and no

birds sing", that the poet comes across the Belle Dame Sans Merci.

All that we noticed earlier, substantiating the evocative quality of poetic

naturalism (Svabhavokti), can be recalled to support the view that material

suggestion ultimately resolves itself into the suggestion of feeling. But it

should be noted that the argument can be carried over only analogically.

For the material image, relevant to the analysis of the Dhvani theorists, is

not the direct image of poetic naturalism (Svabhavokti) but an indirect

image, emerging not directly from the expression, but from what is suggested

by the expression. Here, contemporary insight into the condensation of

imagery, especially dream imagery, yielded by psychoanalysis, should be

utilised for a fuller understanding Prescott104 develops the analogy between

dreams and poetry and shows that the language of poetry also reveals

condensation "Of these various meanings one may be the primary denota-

tion, the other secondary, suggested or connoted. But often the surface

meaning will be of less importance than the latent ones, the idea having

true poetic significance and bearing the emotional emphasis will not be

said but suggested, and the real poetry will be between the lines, the

secondary meaning may be the one of prime importance " The suggested

image can be charged with feeling through the condensation that is the

result of the projection of inner experience upon outward reality, a pheno-

menon which Abercrombie105 regards as an important feature of romantic

poetry Fausset,106 in his study of Coleridge, has pronounced The Ancient

Mariner to be a projection into imagery of the poet's own inner tensions

Of the images of the stagnant calm and of the subsequent effortless move-

ment of the ship, Fausset says they were "symbols of his own spiritual

experience, of his sense of the lethargy that smothered his creative powers

and his belief that only by some miracle of ecstasy which transcended all

personal volition, he could elude a temperamental impotence". In fact

this poem and its imagery are ideal instances of what Sanskrit poetics

terms Vastu Dhvani The becalmed ship is the expressed reality It sug-

gests a matter of fact or an idea, the poet's realisation of his inadequacy,

of the ebbing away of his creative energies This suggested reality is not

a mere datum in a psychiatrist's report, it is saturated with feeling. We

feel with the poet in his frustration as we rejoice with him in his recovery

of ecstasy

In the case of suggested poetic figures (Ālambana Dhvani) also, the

ultimate reality is the feeling Kathleen Raine107 refers to the juxtaposition

of images which "This elaboration refines the sensible image by association with other sharp and sensible images,

to produce a highly sophisticated and delicate way of looking at the visible

world " This of course refers to the normal association of images in

poetic figures and not specially to the image that is suggested, which is

the specific concern of the Dhvani theory and therefore our concern also

in the present context Nevertheless, what she says further is applicable to

suggested imagery also “Perceptual images, however intense or refined,

lack a dimension without which we soon begin to feel an intolerable

claustrophobia” She demands “a synthesis of the symbolic and the con-

temporary”, that is, the image, expressed or suggested, should be an

objective correlative of inward feeling This is what Baudelaire108 also

demanded “Do not ever confuse the phantoms of reason with the phantoms

of imagination the former are equations, the latter are being and memo-

ries” Baudouin109 notes that in the poems expressing the “tortured and

tragic phase” of Verhaeren’s life, the failure of the impetus towards the

real world, debility, and withdrawal into the self are expressed by images

of “broken” and “flaccid” things There is also an obsession with images

of reflection in water, especially in foul and stagnant water—the water of

mires and marshes Kuntaka emphasised that in poetry we deal, not with

mere embellishment (Alamkāra) but poetic embellishment (Kavalamkāra)

Ruyyaka pointed out that if elements of doubt and inference are involved

in figures like Samdeha and Anumāna, these should be “poetic” doubts

and inference, that is, they should incarnate poetic beauty which in Indian

tradition is definitely related to feeling The demand holds good for

imagery and poetic figures which are not directly expressed but suggested

With aesthetic feeling restored as the centre of gravity of poetry, the

Dhvani theory escaped the serious danger of hermeticism and preciosity to

which the doctrine would have drifted if the initial position which made

suggestion as such the soul of poetry had not been modified But it should

be noted that even the modified theory, though it claimed to be the basic

principle of evaluation of all poetry, successfully defined only a special

type of poetry For, in the poetry, which the theory preferred and regarded

as the best, obliquity and indirect approach were cardinal requirements

The suggested image was more important than the expressed image Even

in the case of factual references and ideas, things should not be what they

seemed to be or the things that mattered were other than the things denoted

The exclusion by this theory of other forms of poetic expression will be

critically evaluated later But we should note here that the special type

of expression favoured by the theory was a valid poetic expression and

was indeed an astonishing anticipation of the ideals and practice of French

Symbolism The affinities here are so great that they deserve to be studied

in some detail Such a study would further clarify the point of view of the

Dhvani theorists

Stéphane Mallarmé is the Ananda Vardhana of nineteenth century

France Rémy de Gourmont110 said of him “Like Verlaine, he believed

in the suggestive power of poetry, declaring that higher realities could be

expressed only through the medium of musical verse For his vehicle he

created a new kind of language, freed of many of the trammels of formal

grammar, and a new vocabulary likewise, with these weapons he set out

to translate his inner visions that have nothing to do with logic, but cons-

titute a kind of superior reality based for most part on analogy His

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ŚANSKRIT POETICS

intention was to create a poetry that could be understood only by another

poet . ” However, since we cannot attempt a study of his poetry here,

Mallarmé the theorist is more important to us in the present context than

Mallarmé the poet He defines his own poetic ideals through an opposi-

tion to the practice of the Parnassians like Leconte de Lisle and Heredia

who had reacted to Romantic effusion with a finely sculptured, marmorean

verse “As far as content is concerned,” wrote Mallarmè,111 “I feel that

the younger poets are nearer than the Parnassians to the poetic ideal The

latter still treat their subjects as the old philosophers and orators did . that

is, they present things directly, whereas I think that they should be

presented allusively Poetry lies in the contemplation of things, in the

image emanating from the reveries which things arouse in us The

Parnassians take something in its entirety and simply exhibit it, in so

doing they fall short of mystery , they fail to give our minds that exquisite

joy which consists of believing that we are creating something To name an

object is largely to destroy poetic enjoyment, which comes from gradual

divination The ideal is to suggest the object It is the perfect use of this

mystery which constitutes symbol An object must be gradually evoked

in order to show a state of soul , or else, choose an object and from it

elicit a state of soul by means of a series of decodings.” Like the Dhvani

theorists, Mallarmé opposes direct expression, the naming of an object, for

poetic enjoyment comes from divination. He prefers the suggested image

( Alamkāra Dhvanı ) , the image emanating from the reveries which things

arouse in us He prefers Vastu Dhvani , an object must be gradually evoked.

He also believes that the suggested object is ultimately valuable because of

its charge of feeling , the gradually evoked object must show a state of

soul He gives the most succinct yet comprehensive definition of Symbolism

which is perfectly valid for the Dhvani Kāvya as well : distıl the material

world, volatilise it , do not reproduce it ( realism, naturalism ), because the

Creator has done that for us , then set this nothingness to perfect music ,

the poet should deal only with the essence of the material world.112

It is true that a degree of hermeticism is unavoidable in this type of

poetry But the Dhvani theorists had asserted that the Dhvani Kāvya was

hermetic only for those who approached it with grammar and lexicon, not

for those who approached it with a sensitive heart. Rivière113 gives a fine

evaluation of this type of poetic expression which could be hermetic or

evocative depending upon whether poet and reader possessed genuine sensi-

bility “The Symbolist first invents a story, but he does not have the time

to tell it He does not see any reason for telling it . . . It is behind him.

And since he himself has reached this far, why should not the reader, too ?

. Hıs true métier begins when he has gone beyond what he had to

say : when all he has in front of him is the fleeting radiations emitted by

the work he has suppressed ”

If the Dhvani theorists resisted Mahima Bhatta's attempt to reduce

suggestion to inference and analogous logical processes, Mallarmé also

denied that reasoning of the type relevant to prose discourse had any ultimate

validity in symbolist poetry "The supreme musical moments are born of

fleeting arabesques, and their bursting is more true, more central, more

brilliant than any reasoning When we consider their matchless efficacy, we

feel unable to translate them into any language save that of the listener's

ideas Their contact with our spirit is direct and fitting "114 Poetic

apprehension does not need the mediation of processes like inference

( Anumana ) , it is direct, of imperceptible process ( Asamlakshya Krama )

"We renounce," Mallarmé wrote, "that erroneous esthetic ( even though it

has been responsible for certain masterpieces ) which would have the poet

fill the delicate pages of his book with the actual and palpable wood of trees,

rather than with the forest's shuddering or the silent scattering of thunder

through the foliage "115 It is because poetry sought to seize these elusive

impressions and sensations that the Dhvani theory asserted that the familiar

functions of language like denotation, etc had to be transcended

Nevertheless, the poet's instrument for such evocation is still the word

At times, the poverty of the word, debased by so much of rough handling

in the discourse of prose, tempts the poet to discard it altogether, impatiently

While commenting on the direct action of suggestion on our sensibility,

Mallarmé wrote "We feel somehow that words would be discordant and

unwelcome " But he does realise that the poet has to work with words

The only solution is for words to transcend denotation and acquire another

power, the power of direct suggestion which music has "Mystery is said to

be Music's domain But the written word also lays claim to it The

written word, which is the ideal in noiseless flights from earth, regains its

rights as it stands beneath that fall of virginal sounds Both Music and

lyric call for the previous discarding the spoken word, of course, in order

to prevent mere talking "116 The spoken word that is discarded, it should

be carefully noted, is the word limited to its narrow range of functions in

prose discourse But the word can acquire a higher power And the

reality of this power, of the halation which denotation acquires in the con-

texts of poetic suggestion, is affirmed by Mallarmé in a passage which must

be read with care lest his love of paradox seriously distort its real meaning

for us "For what is the magic charm of art, if not this - that, beyond the

confines of a fistful of dust or of all other reality, beyond the book itself,

beyond the very text, it delivers up that volatile scattering which we call

the Spirit, who cares for nothing save universal musicality If the poem is

to be pure, the poet's voice must be stilled and the intuitive taken by the

words themselves, which will be set in motion as they meet unequally in

collision And in an exchange of gleams they will flame out like some

glittering swath of fire sweeping over precious stones, and thus replace the

audible breathing in lyric poetry of old-replace the poet's own personal

and passionate control of verse The inner structure of a book of verse

must be inborn, in this way, chance will be totally eliminated and the

poet will be absent "117 Suggestion and resonance are generated where

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SANSKRIT POETICS

words with various functions, denotation, indication, pure musicality, are

creatively welded and patterned. In such a poetic context the hard contours

of denotation melt in the ambient halations they develop, like gems bathed

in the liquid fire of their own radiance. This new power is as objective as

denotation The initiative is taken by the words themselves. Dhvani theory

also insisted that suggestion (Vyanjana Vritti) is as real a power of words,

of language, as denotation. This discountenanced any tendency towards the

automatism of the type that would be raised to the status of the prime princi-

ple of artistic creation by Surrealism Only if chance is thus totally

eliminated will the poetry of suggestion be something wholly other than

erratically subjective, completely hermetic utterance and become a genuine

creation of the poetic spirit.

Then why does Mallarmé lay down that the poet should be absent, his

personal and passionate control of verse should be replaced? Mallarmé

is against the obtrusive presence of the poet which is inevitable in rhetorical

flamboyance, the passion that remains as an excess since it is not fully

enshrined in the poem, caught in the net of words, the stertorous breathing

of the toiling poet that can be heard in the verse since his craftsmanship is

not adequate. When Mallarmé affirms that the inner structure of verse

should be inborn, he also affirms that even the greatest marvel of suggestion

is not a gift of chance but willed and achieved by the creativity. If now he

wants the poet to be absent, his voice to be stilled, it is because the poet

has finished speaking and the poem must henceforth speak for itself,

without needing any further reference back to the poet beyond what he has

enshrined of himself in the poem. This is Mallarmé's last curt dismissal

of any possible charge that suggestive power does not reside in the poem

as such. It does, because the poet has donated that power to the words

The Dhvani Kavya is built up with the suggestive power (Vyanjana Vritti)

of words, just as prose discourse and even some types of poetry are built

up with the familiar functions of language like denotation. T.S. Eliot118

has said that the creative intuition can be regarded as having succeeded only

if the emotion has its life in the poem and not in the history of the artist

And Flaubert119 said. "The artist should not appear any more in his

own work than God in nature. The man is nothing, the work is everything."

IV. TOWARDS INCLUSIVE HORIZONS

Ananda Vardhana and Mallarmé, the Dhvani theorists and the French

Symbolists, between themselves, fully establish the case for the poetry of

suggestion, the subtly evocative shaping of language. But both groups

proceed further, to claim for suggestion the supreme status in poetic expres-

sion. This is where the enthusiasm betrays itself as excessive. If a work

like Kafka's Castle is a very great achievement, it still does not follow that

other types of creative expression are inferior. The Dhvani theorists

demanded that the centre of gravity in the literary creation should lie in

THE DOCTRINE OF SUGGESTION

151

the plane of the suggested, definitely not in the expressed The poetry of

subordinated suggestion ( Gunbhuta Vyāngya Kāvya), and pictorial poetry

( Chitra Kāvya), which did not use suggestion at all, were relegated by them

to inferior status Mallarmé also preached this hierarchical principle But

all French poetry is not symbolist, nor the bulk of the world's great litera-

ture oblique in the specifically oblique way demanded by the Dhvani theory

or European Symbolism The verdict on these types of expression, there-

fore, needs to be reconsidered.

The Dhvani theory demanded that the suggested should be what is em-

bellished ( Alamkārya) and the expressed the embellishment ( Alamkāra)

When the roles are reversed, the suggested becomes the embellishment 120

This yields the poetry of subordinatd suggestion, which, according to the

Dhvani theorists, is inferior to the poetry of pure suggestion (Dhvani Kāvya)

It is very interesting to note here that Edgar Allan Poe, who was one of

the great formative influences behind French Symbolism, really extolled the

poetry of subordinated suggestion rather than the poetry of pure suggestion

advocated by Mallarmé later Poe asserts that what matters in poetry is

not its meaning but its mystery, or rather what he calls its "suggestive

indefiniteness of meaning" He says "Give to it any undue decision,

imbue it with any very determined tone—and you deprive it at once of its

ethereal, its ideal, its intrinsic and essential character You dispel its luxury

of dream You dissolve the atmosphere of the mystic upon which it

floats "121 The word "mystic" can be tricky and Poe hastens to clarify it

"The term 'mystic' is here employed in the sense of Schlegel and of most

other German critics It is applied by them to that class of composition in

which there lies beneath the transparent upper current of meaning an under

or suggestive one It has the vast force of an accompaniment in music "122

This was cited, not to deny the validity of the poetry of pure suggestion,

the completely oblique expression, but to show that the poetry of subordinated

suggestion, where the suggested is an accompaniment, not the centre of

gravity of the poem, has also been rated highly, not necessarily relegated to

an inferior status A rethinking which leads to this type of accommodation

can be seen in Sanskrit poetics also Mallarmé, committed to complete

obliquity, wrote "The poet must establish a careful relationship between

two images, from which a third element, clear and fusible, will be distilled

and caught by our imagination "123 This is a fairly correct definition of the

way the suggestion of an image (Vastu Dhvani) or of a poetic figure

( Alamkāra Dhvani) is evoked But, both for Mallarmé and the Dhvani

theorists, this suggested element is more important than the expressed ele-

ments Now, let us take the case of a small poem which has been used as

illustration in the controversy about suggestion It is a description of the

rise of the full moon in all its glory on a clear evening Ordinarily, the

approach of night is marked by two distinct stages twilight and dusk

But the beauty of the poem is that it records that rare benediction - a clear

evening when the bright moonlight begins to flood the sky even before red

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SANSKRIT POETICS

twilight has ebbed away, with the result that the darker stage of dayfall, the dusk, is not noticeable even in the eastern quarter. The clearly expressed drift of the verse is this “The moon so illumined the red commencement of night, with a few twinkling stars, that the phase of mixed light and darkness after the twilight, the dusk, was not at all noticeable even in the east.” The key words used here, however, have double meanings. The word for moon in Sanskrit, Chandra, is masculine, unlike as in the European poetic tradition where the moon is feminine. Night, Nisa, is feminine Nisamukha is a recognised expression for the commencement of night, but it can also stand for the visage of Lady Night Raga means red, the red of twilight, it can also mean erotic passion, the red of blush Thus, as Poe would say, there lies beneath the transparent upper current of meaning an under or suggestive one “Lover Moon so caught to kiss the red lotus-like face of excited Night, the beloved, with tremulous eyes, that she did not notice, because of the intensity of his love, that her thin dark garment became unloosened and slipped down in front.” This is an instance of a well-known figure, Samasokti A poetic expression, which arouses another image besides the one directly stated, because adjuncts possess double meaning and, therefore, are applicable to the suggested, is called Samasokti, because the two meanings have been condensed into one expression.

It is clear that the second image is a suggested one, a resonance, Dhvani (Purists can of course argue that since the evocation is through the second meanings of words and since these are really denotations like the first meanings, the poem is not an instance of Dhvani. But we are concerned with the realities poetically experienced ) Instances of this type of incipient or suggested imagery are so numerous in poetry that some critics of the Dhvani theory felt that there was no necessity to invoke Dhvani as a special concept and that it could be accommodated in a theory of latent imagery (Alamkara antalabhava) Pratiharendu Raja124 takes this line in his gloss on Udbhata Now, in the present poem, if the reader analyses his experience and tries to find out through introspection the relation in which the two sets of images stand to each other, he will realise that it is the image constituted by the first meanings that figures predominantly in the consciousness 125 The suggested image is the embellishment (Alamkarya) It is here that difficulties arise For the Dhvani theorists demand that, in order to qualify as the finest poetry, the centre of gravity should have been shifted to the suggested meaning When the suggested meaning is the embellishment rather than the embellished, lower, as an instance of the poetry of subordinated suggestion But the fact remains that the suggested meaning has, in the words of Poe, the force of an accompaniment in music Poetic naturalism by itself—a literal (but also literary) description of twilight—might have been adequate to arouse feeling here But that is not the point The quality of the suggested image blends with the quality of the literal image and what we experience is a

THE DOCTRINE OF SUGGESTION

153

feeling which is both unitary and enriched The Dhvani theorists themselves, after first raising Dhvani or suggestion to the status of the supreme

poetic value, restored feeling or Rasa to that status later An enriched feeling

is contained in the poem Why should it be relegated to an inferior status,

just because the centre of gravity of the poem does not lie in the plane of

the suggested meaning, but is found in the stratum of expressed meaning ?

Let us take the case of a remarkable Vedic poem It is the evocation of

the forest, poetically personified as Aranyani, the forest nymph The

strange sounds that emanate from the heart of the woods, especially at the

hour of twilight, the dim shapes that the eye seems to discern in the depth

of the forest and, above all, the surging life of nature that attains to a

lush growth without the help of a tiller or plough, are caught in this poem

with a great suggestive power "Sounds as of grazing cows are heard, a

dwelling house appears to loom, the forest creaks like a cart at eventide

Here someone seems to call his cow to him, another there seems to be

felling wood Who tarries in the forest glade, thinks to himself, 'I heard a

cry' Sweet-scented, redolent of balm, replete with food, yet tilling not,

mother of beasts, the Forest-Nymph, she have I magnified with praise "126

Mallarmé rejected the "actual and palpable wood of trees" and wanted the

evocation of "the forest's shuddering and the silent scattering of thunder

through the foliage" They are here But Mallarmé also laid down "To

name an object is largely to destroy poetic enjoyment, which comes from

gradual divination The idea is to suggest the object" The Dhvani theo-

rists also ruled out direct expression In this poem the poet has divined

the shuddering of the forest But the suggestions of the sylvan milieu are

the content of his expression Suggestion is not his technique of evocation

He directly refers to his hallucinations Therefore, a strict analysis from

the point of view of the Dhvani theory would give the verdict that there is

no Dhvani, as they understand the concept, in the poem There is not even

any subordinated suggestion, as two layers of meaning, the expressed and

the suggested, are not distinguishable in the poem The poetic experience

is a rich reaction to the suggestions of the milieu, but the expression refers

directly to those suggestions The poem is satisfying from the point of

view of evocation of feeling Is it to be regarded as inferior purely because

the technique is not that of suggestion ?

When the Dhvani school recast theory to restore Rasa to supreme status in

poetry, a status which suggestion had threatened to seize in the enthusiasm

of the initial formulation, it managed a brilliant synthesis by making Rasa

the essence of poetry and Dhvani the instrument for its evocation Visvanatha

followed the same line, regarding suggestion (Vyanjana) as the function impor-

tant and necessary for evoking the aesthetic emotion (bodherasadunam ) How-

ever, in his theory, Rasa occupied the central position, almost to the exclu-

sion of all qualifying conditions Poetry is an utterance or sentence whose

soul is feeling (Vakyam rasatmakam kavyam ) When Ananda Vardhana

attempted a triune classification of the suggested and said that it could be

20

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SANSKRIT POETICS

a matter of fact (Vastu), a poetic figure (Alamkāra) or a feeling (Rasa),

there lingered an ambivalence in theory, for, here, suggestion does not

completely restore to feeling the status of supreme poetic value which it

had usurped Thus is because the formulation does not give an unambiguous

answer to the question that can be asked, whether the suggested image or

poetic figure is autonomous, whether they can have final poetic validity

without leading on to the suggestion of feeling, which, in this statement,

seems to be merely a special case, of Rasa Dhvani Abhinava came to

the rescue here by clearly affirming that that the suggestions of image and poetic

figure ultimately resolve themselves into the suggestion of feeling Neverthe-

less, the position cannot be said to have been fully clarified by the first

exponents of the Dhvani theory Visvanatha, on the other hand, decided

to accept all the implications latent in the cue given by Abhinava Since

feeling was supreme in poetry, the exact modality of its evocation was

secondary, there should not be any too hard dictation about it Thus,

even while accepting the high excellence of the poetry of pure suggestion

(Dhvani Kavya), Visvanatha does not believe that the poetry of subordi-

nated suggestion (Gumbhuta Vyāngya Kavya) should be relegated to an

inferior status The acid test is whether the composition evokes Rasa He

accepts without any serious reservation the poetry of subordinated suggestion

by arguing that the relish of Rasa alone is the true criterion and that the

centre of gravity of the poem for the evocation of Rasa need not necessa-

rily lie in the layer of suggested imagery If the emotional cues of the

suggested imagery reinforce and blend with the cues of the expressed image,

as it does in the poem on twilight we analysed, the poem is wholly accept-

able

It is very interesting to note that this relaxation of theory is implied in

the Dhvanaloka itself We saw earlier that when the Dhvanikara first

defined poetic sense, he mentioned its two sub-divisions, expressed (Vācya)

and suggested (Pratīyamāna), without necessarily implying that the latter

was superior to the former That shift came later as the doctrine began

to build up Later still, theory had to recant from the position that the

suggested sense was the soul of poetry This classical balance of view

seems to have been there very much in the Dhvanikara, though enthusiasm

in the elaboration of a new theory tended to obscure it, understandably

enough For he too gives primacy to Rasa When Rasa is primary,

whether its evocation is direct or through suggestion, whether the centre of

gravity of the poem lies in the suggested meaning or whether suggestion plays

a subordinate role, all become matters of detail, of secondary importance

Thus the Dhvanikara127 lays down that poetry of subordinated suggestion

(Gumabhuta Vyāngya Kavya) can become poetry of pure suggestion

(Dhvani Kavya) to the extent that it realises Rasa Thus is a very impor-

tant recognition, for it serves as a bridge to span the gulf between the

specialised poetry of suggestion which Ananda Vardhana and Mallarmé

had in mind and poetry in general. For it defines the poetry of suggestion

(Dhvanı Kavya) in a catholic, generalised sense What is, and should be,

suggested is the Rasa Whether it is evoked through predominantly direct

expression, where suggested elements are subordinately, or through wholly in-

direct means, through suggestion, becomes secondary, a matter of taste

Let us` see whether these profounder intuitions of the theory can be used

to restore the poetry of direct expression also to genuinely poetic status

from which it was expelled by the more doctrinaire formulation of the

Dhvanı theory That poetry, which is without any suggested element, is

reckoned by Ananda Vardhana as the third and lowest kind It is regarded

as merely "pictorial in word" or "pictorial in sense" and is called pictorial

poetry (Chitra Kavya) Visvanatha refused to regard it as any kind of

poetry at all We also saw a similar rejection by Mallarmé of the Parnas-

sians who "take something in its entirety and simply exhibit it"

But can pictorial poetry be attributed any intrinsic incapacity to evoke

feeling? Here the specialised study of Ruyyaka will prove helpful to us,

both in its reach and its failures It is clear that he takes his cue from

Kuntaka The latter claimed that the poet's intention need not always be

to suggest something unexpressed or even to awaken Rasa, but may be

directed simply to producing a certain strikingness of expression in the form

of an expressed poetic figure He analysed poetic expression and found

that the essential value of such a figure consisted of a peculiar turn of

expression (Vakrokti) which produced a certain charm (Vaichitrya or

Vicchitti-Visesha) Such figures, devoid of suggestion, were not studied by

the Dhvani theorists because they formed the stuff of pictorial poetry which

the Dhvani school regarded as the lowest type of poetic expression But,

Ruyyaka, following Kuntaka, felt that they covered an extensive field and

decided to supplement the work of his predecessors by making a special

study of it

The key concept in this type of approach is poetic charm (Vicchitti)

Ruyyaka feels some difficulties in defining it "Then again, a poetic figure

(Alamkāra) incarnates the charm (Vicchitti) of sound and sense, and it

is not possible to define this charm exactly, in as much as it is of infinite

variety, being identical with the play of the poetic imagination, which is

itself infinite in scope"128 Now, the concept of this charm, and the specia-

lity of utterance which generates it, are often used in such a generalised

sense as to mean poetic expression in all its sweep The "charm" of

Kuntaka and Ruyyaka is the "beauty" (Saundarya) of Vamana

Abhinava129 uses the term to stand for the source of beauty (Kamanıyaka

or Charutva hetu) Ananda Vardhana refers to the speciality of utterance

(Ukıı Vaichitrya)130 and also affirms the infinite scope of poetic concep-

tion131 which Ruyyaka cites as the generator of poetic charm Kuntaka

himself related poetic charm to the power of imagination of the poet (Kavi

pratıbha nıvattva) The question now rises whether poetic utterance or

charm, used with such generalised signification, can exclude emotive power,

even if it does not adopt the technique of suggestion We saw earlier that

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the concept of beauty (Chārutva) is definitely linked, in the Indian tradition, with the power to stir the heart (Hṛdyata)

Ruyyaka's great contribution was his specialised analysis of various poetic figures The difficulties he ran into, in distinguishing between three figures,

Svabhavokti, Bhavika and Rasavad, have great relevance to the present discussion Svabhavokti is poetic naturalism Bhavika is more or less the

same, but applies specifically to the evocation of the past or the delineation of a future which is life-like in power Rasavad is the direct portrayal of

emotions Ruyyaka fumbles badly here He says that in the Rasavad a universalisation (Sadhāraṇikaraṇa) takes place which is not present in

Bhavika132 What he is referring to is the liberation from immediacy and practical contexts, the endowing of the particular with universal significance

whereby the love of a couple in a poem resonates as the love of all persons for their beloved, which occurs in poetic experience But why should the

poetic evocation of the past or delineation of the future necessarily exclude it? Ruyyaka himself indirectly admits that it need not For he says

that when this universalisation occurs in the Bhavika, it becomes Rasavad There is quibbling here But it cannot conceal the tacit admission that

pictorial evocation of the past or of an ideal future can have emotive power Ruyyaka, likewise, seeks to distinguish Svabhavokti from Rasavad by

claiming that while the former rouses only a mental image (Vastu Saṃvada) in us, the latter creates an emotional image (Chittavitti Saṃvada)137

Drinkwater also lapsed into the same fallacy, as we have seen Naturalism can evoke emotion, and is poetic only when it does so All genuinely

poetic pictorialism is really Rasavad

The most important point for us which emerges here is that pictorialism and direct expression cannot be condemned as unpoetic in themselves The

test should be whether or not the mental image is also an emotional image Friedrich Schleiermacher134 has some very valuable suggestions to offer

here which help in analysing how the objective image gets saturated with emotion and becomes an emotional image Language has two functions -

its musical sound and its logical meaning Poetry is, first of all, sound, a "totality of euphony" which Schleiermacher conceives, on the analogy of

music, as expressing the stream of self-awareness, "the inner changeability of being, the pure subjectivity of the inner mood" At the same time

poetry utilises the meaning of language, which is always general, to represent the individual The poet evokes an individualised, completely single, definite

image Poetry is thus double - it is plastic, representing the "pure objectivity of the image" and it is musical, representing "the inner mood". If

Mallarmé dismissed Parnassian poetry, which was plastic, almost three-dimensional and sculpturesque, it is because he failed to notice that the

Parnassian image is a perfectly expressive objective correlative The earth baked under the flaming noon, in Leconte de Lisle, is the poet's heart

squarely meeting the harsh realities of life and finding in the shock of that contact the source of a profounder ecstasy His Condor, soaring high above

THE DOCTRINE OF SUGGESTION

157

the Andes, in the heat of noon and the freezing cold of night, is the poet

who detaches himself from the attitude of practical involvement with

experience in order to be able to relish it aesthetically Even while dis-

missing the aesthetics of fully plastic expression as erroneous, Mallarmé

has to concede that "it has been responsible for certain masterpieces"

Dhvani theory also cannot establish that the pictorial or material image

can never evoke feeling Let us take the case of the suggested material

image (Vastu Dhvani) Abhinava closes a gap in the earlier theoretical

formulation by affirming that the suggestion of the material image also

ultimately resolves itself into the suggestion of feeling The miracle is here,

in the leap from image to emotion The fact that the image itself has been

suggested is not relevant as an explanation for that miracle and, therefore,

the dictum that it should be invariably suggested, not directly expressed,

cannot be anything more than the statement of the preference of a certain

taste and temperament If the image can evoke emotion, the expressed

image can do that as well as the suggested image It is not the technique

of suggestion that arouses the emotion but the fact that the image, whether

direct or suggested, is an objective correlative The opposition is not really

between direct expression and suggestion but between prosaic denotation or

reportage and the emotive image As Nami Sadhu135 has pointed out,

whereas factuality (Vastava) means only a statement of a thing as it is,

poetic naturalism implies a living evocation that can create an experience

of the thing in our sensibility

Poetic naturalism or pictorial poetry dispensed with suggestion as defined

by the Dhvani theorists and therefore one can understand why they were

extremely unhappy about it But their case against it is weakened by their

own admission that the image—they specifically refer to the suggested

image—can evoke emotion When, after their initial enthusiasm, they felt

the need to restore to emotion the supreme status in poetry which they

had temporarily seized for suggestion, they had to change their ground

subtly to vindicate their opposition to pictorial poetry Adroit as the

strategy was, it did imply a retreat from their position Ananda

Vardhana136 describes pictorial poetry (Chitra Kavya) thus : "Not aimed

at the evocation of feeling and sentiment (Rasa-bhavadi-tatparya-rahitam),

not exploiting the special illuminating power of suggestion (Vyangyartha-

Visesha prakasana-sakti-sunyam), basically dependent on the strikingness of

expression and meaning only (kevala-vachya-vachaka-vaichitrya-mathasray-

enopambaddham), this poetry merely looks like (avabhasate) a picture

(alekhyam)" Abhinava137 defined it as "solely dependent on metrical and

other skills for its impact, only a picture (Alekhya-matraivad), merely

arty (Kala-matraivad), only an imitation of poetry (Kavyanukarivavad)"

While the Dhvani theorists admitted it as poetry, though of the lowest

kind, Visvanatha refused to recognise it on the ground that it was entirely

devoid of emotion and was therefore incompatible with his own definition

of poetry, that it is an utterance whose soul is emotion

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There is very subtle quibbling here In the initial formulation of theory, suggestion was the only supreme poetic value recognised and pictorial poetry was relegated to the lowest status because it did not use suggestion but relied on direct expression When the Dhvani theorists recalled the importance of feeling and this led to second thoughts about their own theory, they were really operating with two independent variables, suggestion (Dhvani) and feeling (Rasa) Theory now does not have the confidence to base its verdict against pictorial poetry solely on the ground that it lacks suggestion This defect is indeed mentioned in Ananda Vardhana's definition But he also mentions lack of evocation of feeling and sentiment Poetry in this clever definition does not descend to the pictorial level merely because it lacks suggestion Earlier this defect alone would have been sufficient to condemn it But now it must also show the defect of failure to evoke emotion Visvanatha accepts this position and so does Abhinava when he defines pictorial poetry as that which merely imitates genuine poetry which latter has to enshrine feeling Embarrassing questions can now be asked Since suggestion and feeling are independent variables, what is the status of poetry which uses suggestion but is not emotive in quality? Again, what is the status of poetry which is pictorial, which does not use suggestion, but which incarnates feeling? The questions are legitimate because theory has had to admit the independence of the two variables In the reformulation of theory, feeling regains its prime status and suggestion becomes the technique of its evocation That is the final result of Ananda Vardhana's synthesis If feeling is the prime value, why should suggestion be the invariable technique? Does the theory dare to assert that the pictorial image cannot arouse emotion? It cannot, because Abhinava says that the suggested image is really an emotional image Can theory claim that only the suggested image has this power, not the directly expressed image? It cannot For one thing, there is all the weight of the luminous clarification of the emotive power of poetic naturalism (Svabhavokti) Secondly, even in the poetry of suggestion, does not the image acquire its emotive power because it is an objective correlative and not because it has been suggested instead of directly expressed? If suggestion as such is the principle of evoking emotion, all suggested imagery would be invariably emotive In other words, the poetry of suggestion would invariably be genuine poetry Success would be guaranteed in this field as it would be impossible for a poet to write bad poetry if only he had the sense to resort to the technique of suggestion

The Dhvani theory and the theory of French Symbolism added a great legacy to our poetic heritage by the luminous clarification of the evocative power of suggestion Even in this specialised achievement, the record of the Indian tradition is far more impressive than that of the theorists of European Symbolism For one thing, Mallarmé seems to have extended the technique of cryptic and elusively allusive suggestion from his poetry to his theoretical exposition as well This has created difficulties When

one argues and explains, it would be fairer to accept the rules of prose,

of logical discourse Mallarmé’s theoretical discourse itself often reads like

a symbolist poem and this leaves too many ambiguities scattered all round

But, in their theoretical exposition, the founders of the Dhvani theory were

painstakingly scholastic, massively logical, as will be readily admitted when

we recall their defence of suggestion against linguistic functions like denota-

tion, indication, purport, inference Secondly, even when Mallarmé asserted

that suggestive power, when once it has been donated by the poet to the

word, comes to reside in it as an objective power, in his poetic practice

he became impatient with the responsibility of charging the word of prosaic

discourse with this new energy and indulged freely in neologisms This

made his poetry obscure and that of his followers completely hermetic, even

to genuine poetic sensibility The Dhvani school successfully resisted this

temptation They preferred the harder discipline whereby the poet had

to take words current in the contexts of living and charge them with a new

power This way the communicability of poetry was safeguarded even

while the communication was raised to higher levels, of revelation

It is, however, in safeguarding theory from becoming a dogma and com-

pletely closing off the vision of other horizons, that the essential superiority

of the Dhvani theory over symbolist theory lies Mallarmé was dogmatic

in his rejection of other forms of poetic endeavour It is true that the

Dhvani theorists do not declare their acceptance of the legitimacy of other

forms of poetic expression from the housetops The special loyalty to their

own preference has to be accepted as forgivably human But it cannot be

denied that their integrity and thoroughness of analysis enabled them to

accommodate within their theory certain important recognitions— like, for

example, the recognition that the material image can be an emotional image,

even though they meant the suggested material image—which neutralised

their verdict on the poetic approaches which they themselves may not have

rated highly

Lastly, we owe them a debt of gratitude for at least indirectly emphasising

that all poetry is really suggestion Suggestion here has to be understood

in a more generalised sense than what they meant by Dhvani Nevertheless,

when they said that suggestion can inhere in the denotation of words, in

their phonetic texture and position, they were pointing to the power of

poetic expression in general, for even in what they called pictorial poetry,

sound and texture and rhythm play this magically evocative role This

helps us to fling a bridge from their special theory to the general theory of

poetic expression Poetic intention is realised through “the way the assertion

is made”, said Susanne Langer 138 “And this involves the sound, the tempo,

the aura of associations of the words, the long and short sequences of ideas,

the wealth or poverty of transient imagery that contains them, the sudden

arrest of fantasy by pure fact or of familiar fact by sudden fantasy, the

suspense of literal meaning by a sustained ambiguity resolved by a long-

awaited key word, and the unifying, all-embracing artifice of rhythm”

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Every one of these values has been recognised and studied in detail by Sanskrit poetics as we have seen in the earlier chapters of this work. The poetry of suggestion has a subtle delectability But its theory should form part of a larger theoretic system, valid for all types of poetic expression. And it will be seen to do so if we see the Dhvani theory in the right perspective, against the background of the tradition of Indian poetics in its entirety

CHAPTER SEVEN

The Significance of Structure

I PLOT AS THE POET'S METAPHOR

WE have seen that Indian thought assimilates poetic experience into the general pattern of human experience, in terms of an interaction between the world and human sensibility, the former being the womb of all stimuli and the latter of all response, though the poetic response is profoundly different from the practical response This outlook has implications which demand structure in a poem and expect that structure to be sensitive to the configuration of reality

Recent Western thought has moved to an identical outlook Lerner1 points out that poetic experience "is made up of experiences of exactly the same kinds as those that come to us in other ways" And he quotes from John Dewey 2 "An experience has pattern, structure, completeness, and the further these are clarified, the more it is an aesthetic experience" Pattern, structure and completeness, if they are to be clarified in experience, suggest that if ordinary human experience is to mature as aesthetic experience, the emotional experiences generated by the world have to stand the test of rational validity or intelligibility and the rational understanding of the world has to have a place for a rich life of the emotions In fact, the three theories of literature which Lerner elaborates are really hierarchical, a series of progressively inclusive conceptual systems, though he himself seems to have felt the truth of this only dimly and unconsciously Thus, the theory of literature as expression is acceptable as a basic, but not as a complete statement

Lerner notes that expression individualises experience, it is not satisfied with broad categories of experience Each poetic experience is a unique complex of emotions But encysted experience, however intense remains private Lerner's second theory, that literature is emotive expression, demands communicability of experience The movement of thought to this level is already foreshadowed in the distinction he makes, while elaborating the first theory, between betraying and expressing emotion In the latter case the writer is fully conscious of what is being expressed The shaping of the experience into some sort of communicable form is already implied here "The poet is the best of all critics", wrote

21

161

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Baudelaire3 and the self-critical role is demanded from the poet by the

need of his work to be communicable The third theory deals with the

cognitive aspect of literature The Augustan framework, that art should

be true to nature, to human nature, to commonsense and common experi-

ence, is found basically acceptable, though human nature and experience

reach down to greater depths than neo-classicism suspected. Lerner admits

that the truths we learn from literature may often appear as platitudinous

as proverbs, but, he points out, literature makes us experience imaginatively

what, in a sense, but in an unvital way, we knew already Proust4 clarifies

this. "As for the truths which the intelligence—even that of the finest

minds—garners right out in the open, lying before it in broad daylight,

their value may be very great, but they have harsher outlines and are all

on the surface, with no depth, because no depths had to be penetrated

in order to get to them and they have not been recreated " Truth as a

generalisation by the intellect becomes, in art, profound experience This

experience has to be true to reality with a just correspondence Particularly

relevant here is Lerner’s analysis of sentimentality This is associated

with a certain unnatural stridency, a forcing of note Lerner deals with

the death-bed scenes of Dickens where he either describes what could

not have happened or is too blinded by tears to describe what could

We can understand now why any ambitious aesthetic construction has

to have a very complex structure Basically, this requirement emerges from

the fact that poetic experience is, initially, identical with any other type

of human experience Such experience is not autonomous, purely inward

happening, it has its origin in a context of interaction, of the world and

sensibility Even in purely lyrical situations which can rest on a single

episode and do not need a network of episodes ( which are “single-minded,

single-minded, transparent and uncomplicated” in the words of Day Lewis )

the intensity of poetic reaction has to be just in terms of general human

experience Otherwise, instead of genuine feeling, running clear and deep,

we get turbid sentimentality Here, the clarification of the concept of

intensity by Winters5 is very relevant and helpful “The intensity of the

work of art, which is different from the intensity of the crude experience,

lies in this, that what we call intensity in a work of art is a combination

of the importance of the original subject and the precision of the judgment,

whereas that which we call intensity in life is more often the confused

and therefore frightening emotion resulting from a situation which we have

had not yet time to meet and understand ” Intensity in art is contributed

by emotional sensitiveness, reacting, not alone, but in cooperation with

the other important aspects of human nature, especially those with an

evaluatory function “The poet,” says Winters, “tries to understand his

experience in rational terms, to state his understanding, and simultaneously

to state, by means of the feeling which we attach to words, the kind and

degree of emotion that should properly be motivated by this understanding

. . What I desire of a poem is a clear understanding of motive and just

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF STRUCTURE

163

evaluation of feeling, the justice of the evaluation persisting even into

the sound of the least important syllable"

When the poet is said to be trying to understand his experience in

rational terms, it means that he is equipped with a world-view, an ethical

and philosophical outlook, in his confrontation of experience But the

poem is not the exposition of that view or outlook Valery6 said

"Philosophy and ethics flee the works to place themselves in the reflections

which precede them" The experience also may modify the world-view,

but the modification is not an aberrant, erratic change, but a rational

growth which will donate a higher perspective in the next confrontation of

significant experience and its creative, poetic handling What is emphasised

here is the fact that the poetic reaction to life-experience cannot have the

highest value unless it is the reaction of the whole personality, of reason

also, and not only feeling This truth makes totally unacceptable a view

like the one expressed by Melchiori7 "There is a truth which is seldom

sufficiently realised in most cases the poet's faculties centre round the

creation of poetry When he works out a theory of politics or history,

of magic or metaphysics, he is but trying to unravel the mystery and

wonder of man's existence and of man's mind Now, the mystery and

wonder of the poet's nature and his mind is the ability to write poetry

His search (whatever his subject) will unconsciously be, all the time, for

the nature of poetry and the mode of its creation The value therefore

of the 'philosophical' or 'cosmological' or 'political' systems devised by

the poets is that they may give us the key to their poetics They may

be wild as cosmology, ridiculous as philosophy or positively criminal as

politics, but if we consider them as statements about the nature of the

poetic process, we shall find them substantially true "True, of course, for

the poetry of the particular poet who made them" No meaning of any

significance remains in this pretentious analysis when one analyses it

What it asserts is a tautology--that a man with criminal political views

and ridiculous philosophy can also sometimes turn out poetry, which will

then indicate the poetic process in him But when Melchiori defends this

type of poet by arguing that the poet is trying to unravel the mystery and

wonder of man's existence, he forgets that the philosopher, the cosmo-

logist and the political thinker are also trying to do the same and the

various insights should converge Nobody can blame the poet for not

writing abstract philosophy or political theory But if the implicit philo-

sophy in his poem is ridiculous and the implicit political outlook criminal,

his poetry will be worthless No amount of involved argument can assail

the sanity of the assertion of Lewis8 that every poem whose intellectual

basis is "silly, shallow, perverse, or illiberal, or even radically erroneous"

is crippled by that fact Melchiori would be right only if poetry meant

merely the ability to versify But actually poetry has to be--and is--

profound insight into the meaning of man's existence, as Melchiori him-

self claims, though without understanding the obligations implicit in that

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claim If Sanskrit poetics affirmed that knowledge ( Vyutpatti ) could not

create poetry in the absence of imagination ( Pratibha ), it also agreed

that the former could extend the range and depth of poetic insight Rudrata

defined Vyutpatti as understanding of 'metre, grammar, the modality of

art, the science of words as well as the science of matter (padartha vijnana)'

Hema Chandra defined it as "discriminatory understanding of the world,

science, and art (loka-sastra-kavyeshu-nipunata)" Bharata wanted not

only the poet but also the reader to be well-versed in history (charitabhyana),

and the various sciences (nana-sastra-vicakshana) Indian poetics does

not accept poetry as mere "emoting", completely detached from the res-

ponsibilities of rational thought

Even lyrical expression, thus, has to have structure, understood here

not as complex formal organisation but as rational balance between the

intensity of feeling, primarily a function of the reacting sensibility, and

the motivating context which primarily belongs to the world of external

reality But the demands for complexity in structure are comparatively

less in lyrical expression which rests on single episodes--seeing a river-

bank full of daffodils, listening to the nightingale in the darkness, seeing the

skylark soaring high The writer may sometimes present extended forms,

but the structural organisation may remain simple. Middleton Murry

feels that this is the case with Tchekov "The short story of Tchekov was

an innovation in literature The immediate consciousness remains the

criterion and the method is based on a selection of those glimpses of the

reality which in themselves possess a peculiar vividness and appear to

have a peculiar significance To present such episodes with a minimum

of rearrangement, as far as possible to eliminate the mechanism of inven-

tion, was Tchekov's aim This is not to suggest that Tchekov invented

nothing, but his constant effort was to reduce the part of invention He

strove to link moments of perception, rather than to expand the perception

by invention "

Linking moments of perception would give lyrical sequences but not a

complex structure which, we should always keep in mind, is not sought

for its own sake, as abstract pattern, but because a faithful mirroring of

the interaction between sensibility and reality will necessarily have to be

complex This is because the world stimulates desires in sensibility that

mature into motivations and actions which in turn impinge on reality and

change its pattern It is these changed patterns that confront the sensi-

bility later and generate fresh emotive reactions which will be related to

the original reactions in meaningful ways, as fulfilment or frustration The

arabesques traced by the flow of external events are thus closely intertwined

with the evolving pattern of emotional life with its wishes and fantasies,

fulfilments and frustrations, temptations and transgressions, responsibilities

and martyrdoms Therefore, if the poet is not to be isolated in a world

of private fantasy, completely alienated from the world of external reality,

the interaction between sensibility and the world has above all to be just

“Imagination,” Strong10 emphasises, “is based upon experience experi-

ence is its taking-off ground and the more solid this basis—the stronger

and deeper the poet's understanding of reality—the further the leap ” The

fabric of a narrative poem or novel is a mesh of events and of human

reactions to them The events have to be possible and probable in terms

of the world's reality The moment it tries to substitute reality by fantasy

it alienates itself from the world and ceases to have any message for man

who has to live in this world and confront its vicissitudes “The story-

teller,” wrote Sherwood Anderson,11 “has taught himself to observe He

wants, for the purpose of his craft, to develop to the highest possible pitch

his own senses, to constantly see more, hear more, feel more The

imagination must constantly feed upon reality or starve ”

Skelton12 has suggested that there is no point in presenting patterns of

trivial aspects of life, however complete those patterns may be, if the only

result is to give the reader a picture of an unimportant event or subject

and by this means induce in him an illusory feeling of well-being This

is acceptable, with the condition that we should always be sensitive in

our evaluation and see whether what would ordinarily be considered

trivial has been transformed into the significant by creative imagination

There is another, and closely related, aspect to this “All truths lie waiting

in all things”, wrote Walt Whitman 13 The poet's endeavour to pattern

one aspect of life, whether focussed upon a physical object, upon a sensa-

tion, or upon a moment in time, may be an endeavour to perceive all

truth by means of a complete understanding of all the implications within

and surrounding that focal point The aural experience of a nightingale's

song in the darkness, the visual experience of the decorative motifs on a

Grecian urn, may thus lead to the profound perception of the timeless and

enduring quality of the experience of beauty Thus, an ode by Keats,

growing round a single rich sensation, may be able to reveal briefly but

luminously all that Malraux14 needs a book to discuss

Nevertheless, since experience is essentially polyphonic in structure and

texture, a web spun by the interlaced contrapuntal lines of maturing

sensibility and the arabesques of the world's events, a fuller statement

needs the complex organisation of episodes, where character, action, the

consequences of action and the emotional reactions and adjustments to

them are rationally linked From this point of view, it is significant that,

today, there is a reaction from the verbal or segmental approach in literary

evaluation One poet15 writes

Oh our mistaken teachers —

It is not a proper respect for words that we need

But a decent regard for things,

those older creatures and more real

Holloway1G has taken the robust line that talk about imaginary ambigui-

ties, associations and poetic textures is really a ritual evasion of the

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genuinely critical response He points out that it is no good looking at

a local sample of a work before you have examined its trajectory Even

with the short poem, verbal texture is not the only or even the first thing

for the critic to concentrate upon Hough,17 likewise, regards the

Imagists' attempt to build up long poems by a collocation of images as

a negation of method 'Whatever tradition Imagist poetry may have

recalled us to, the most important tradition of all, that of a natural

community of understanding between poet and reader, has been

lost ' According to Hough, 'a poem, internally considered, ought to

make the same kind of sense as any other discourse and a poem of

any length needs a principle of connection no different from that which

would be acceptable in any other kind of discourse' Theme and

plot are not outmoded, old-world apparatus The fabric of theme is spun

by experience and reflects the pattern discovered or created in experience

by the aesthetic sensibility 'Our talk of themes,' wrote Knights.18 'is

simply a way of pointing to centres of consciousness that exert a kind of

gravitational pull, to the dominant tones and emphases of a living mode

of experience ' Allen Tate held the poet responsible both for the just

seizure of reality and its expression, 'for the mastery of a disciplined

language which will not shun the full report of the reality conveyed to

him by his awareness, he must hold, in Yeats' great phrase, 'reality and

justice in a single thought' ' The poet, according to Tate, 'must recreate

for his world the image of man, and he must propagate standards by

which other men may test that image and distinguish the false from the

true' 19 And no image of man can be valid if it shows him in isolation

from the life of the world that pulses around him in eddying

currents

As far back as 1923, Middleton Murry,20 who, as the husband of

Katherine Mansfield, was certainly not unfamiliar with, or unmindful of,

the merits of psychological fiction, voiced a strong plea for plot, for story,

on the ground that art is necessarily concrete Devoting attention to

characterisation alone, in isolation from incident and action, may lead to

distinguished psychography, but not to the fiction which is a seizure of

reality In fiction of this type, Middleton Murry concludes, spiritual

realities must be externalised , you can realise your characters and resolve

your conflicts only through plot If we can concede that great art always

implies the search for, or the creation of, a meaningful image of man and

a meaning in reality and experience, we can also concede Heilman's claim

that in an art form like the drama the plot is a metaphor 'A series of

dramatic statements about one subject,' writes Heilman.21 'does constitute

a bloc of meaning which is a structural part of the play This bloc may

be understood as one of the author's metaphors It is a metaphor just

as a body of recurrent images, with its burden of implications, is a meta-

phor The dramatist's basic metaphor is his plot All of his metaphors

are valid parts of his total meaning, the search for which must include a

study of the relationship among the parts All the constituent metaphors

must be related to the large metaphor which is the play itself

II LITERAL NARRATION, ALLEGORY, MYTH

If plot is a metaphor, it can still take diverse forms the literal ( but also

literary ) story, the allegory, the creatively rehandled myth Let us study

each type with the help of an example

We now return to the significant parable of the creative process in the

Ramayana whose wealth of meaning was not exhausted in the earlier dis-

cussion, which was confined to the genetic relation between stirred emotion

and rhythmic utterance Latent in the episode is also the realisation that

art is not pure spontaneity or lyricism Conscious thought unites with

spontaneous emotion and the unconscious activity of inspiration triggered

by the emotion, to give form to mood, body to feeling, plot and structure

to emotion The introspective power of Valmiki, which made him analyse

the unconscious link between stirred sensibility and rhythmic expression,

led him to think further on the problem of finding objective correlatives,

creating the artistic form, building up an organic complex where a logi-

cally connected sequence of episodes would at once give body to emotion

and make it meaningful Here Valmiki makes a very important demand

on poets including himself the poetic creation should have meaning for

all, for scholar as well as layman

An aristocrat like Valéry would oppose this and prefer poetry to be “inaccessible to the crowd, the luxury

of a few” with the finest sensibility

T S Eliot

also is an aristocratic type and one is therefore pleasantly surprised to see him to be in agree-

ment with Valmiki “The most useful poetry, socially, would be one

which could cut across all the present stratifications of public taste-

stratifications which are perhaps a sign of social disintegration” He

brings out the universal appeal of Shakespeare “In a play of Shakespeare

you get several levels of significance For the simplest auditors there is

the plot, for the more thoughtful the character and conflict of character,

for the more literary the words and phrasing, for the more musically

sensitive the rhythm, and for auditors of greater sensitiveness and under-

standing a meaning which reveals itself gradually” Eliot adds “I

myself should like an audience which could neither read nor write’ The

chances of an unlettered mind getting any meaning out of the Waste Land

are, to say the least, remote But throughout the centuries, Ramayana

recitals have been the most felicitous educational influence on the minds

of the Indian masses Valmiki’s work has inspired great traditions of

folk poetry, art and drama while, for the poets, he has been the First Poet

( Ādi Kavi )

Let us return to the study of Valmiki’s creation of a web of episodes

which was the objective correlative of the feeling which was his initial

inspiration It was the tragic cry uttered by the bird when it was sepa-

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rated from its mate by the cruel blow of destiny that first stirred the poet's

heart And this episode, of parting and separation, lives on as the core

of the story, in numerous transformations, like a poignant theme whose

recurrence in varied forms links together the vast spread of a Beethoven

symphony

King Dasaratha who was very fond of the chase hears a sound in the

forest which he interprets as that of an elephant drinking water and

shoots an arrow in the direction But it was really the sound of a boy,

the son of an old hermit couple, filling his pitcher His helpless parents

do not want to survive their son and before they themselves leave the

world they curse the king that he too shall die of the sorrow of separation

from his son Years later, the king wants to crown Rama, his eldest son

through the senior queen Kausalya, as heir-apparent But the other queen,

Kaikeyi, insists that her son, Bharata, should be made the heir-apparent

and Rama exiled to the forest Dasaratha does not survive the separation

There are subtle variations of the leading motif here Bharata is devoted

to Rama and his mother's intrigue, though intended to benefit him,

separates him from his brother who was his hero Mother and son are

also alienated by this episode After a spell of quiet happiness in the

forests, Rama has to suffer the anguish of separation from his wife Sita

because Ravana, the aggressive tyrant of Lanka, abducts her After long

preparation a battle takes place and Sita is recovered They return to

their kingdom and Rama is crowned king But when his subjects whisper

calumny about a queen who was in the power of Ravana in Lanka, Rama

feels that he has no choice but to abandon a wife who is unacceptable to

his people even though it will break his heart Exiled to the forest, Sita

gives birth to two sons There is a final reunion, but it is tragically short

The ground opens and goddess Earth, the mother of Sita, takes her away

from an existence which had offered to her the brimming cup of suffering

again and again

There is no space here for a study in depth of Valmiki's great poem,

which, besides, has been attempted elsewhere, in this writer's history of

Sanskrit literature But it can be shown that all the acceptable conclu-

sions of current thought, which we have briefly reviewed, were brilliantly

anticipated by Valmiki Artistic expression, in Valmiki, synthesises all

the three theories indicated by Lerner Primarily it is emotional expres-

sion The parable of the origin of the epic emphasises this It is also

the communication of expression In his further meditation over his

spontaneous reaction to the bird's death, Valmiki states that the form

which grows out of the emotional experience must have the highest virtues

of communicability The language should be grammatically flawless,

intelligible to scholar and layman The narration should be in stanzas of

spacious metres, flawless in phonetic structure Above all, it should be

limpidly clear, communicating its meaning and feeling to the reader, and

musical like a melody on strings. But one cannot stop with texture or

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF STRUCTURE

169

metrical·music or any other segmental value Art has to be cognitive too,

in the sense of being capable of yielding a vision of life This vision,

says Vālmīki, takes in all the values of human life, but recognises a

hierarchy among them It should give its due place to the satisfaction

of sensuous but legitimate impulses, to Eros ( Kāmāthaguna samyuktam ).

But the dominant accent should always be on man as a moral being

Dharma thaguna ( viśiṣṭam ), on moral responsibility, on the dignity which

man gains when he accepts the obligations implied in an ideal character

The serious poem which seeks enduring human significance should, thus,

deal with the idealised man because it seeks to make man move nearer

to the ideal 25

Only the contours of the magnificent ordering of experience which

Vālmīki achieved in his aesthetic creation can be sketched here He

refines the first lyrical impulse he received, the profound but still raw

intensity of the experience of separation through sudden and tragic death,

into an extended pattern woven out of interrelated incidents, where the

incidence of tragedy is genetically related to character and the interaction

of characters The experience does not shed its pain , but in becoming

analysable it does shed its power to stun the sensibility into a blind stupe-

faction The initial experience, standing in isolation, could not have borne

a heavy load of lyrical emotion without running the danger of degenerating

into sentimentality Here reality, understood as the natural and probable

reactions of characters, becomes the springboard of the imagination which

is thus able to leap to an all-embracing vision of life The theme of

separation is continually recurring But it is given innumerable variations

There is psychological alienation between Rāvana and Mandodarī, his

queen who is as chaste as a figure as Sītā From the dictatorial, near-

tribal social structure of Laṅkā, a character like Vibhīṣaṇa, the brother

of Rāvana, is seen struggling hard to separate himself and alienation here

is really alignment with the progressive urges of the human spirit

But the profoundest insight in the whole poem is revealed in its con-

frontation of the problem of the transience of all things earthly The

separation that death brings about has no solution on its own plane, for all

things living have at last to confront the reality of death The manner

of its advent, therefore, is relatively insignificant It was the hunter's

arrow that brought death to the bird Kaikeyī's inordinate ambition shot

the arrow that carried off Dasaratha who could not survive the separation

from his son when the latter was exiled to the forests When Bharata

goes after Rāma to persuade him to come back and also to give him the

tragic news of their father's death, Rāma tries to comfort him “Man

cannot do as he pleases He is not wholly his own master All

acquisition ends in loss, all rise in fall, all union in separation, all life

in death Bodies become infirm by age like mansions Night passes

like a flood and returns not Man forgets death in the exultation of

living But death is man's shadow, sitting with him when he sits down,

22

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SANSKRIT POETICS

walking with him when he walks, hastening with him when he accelerates his pace, lying by his side when he lies down Every sunrise and every season we greet take away a part of our life Beings come together and separate in life like logs of driftwood on the sea. One cannot wait for another, even as a caravan cannot stop for a wayfarer Our father has lived a righteous life and has attained heaven We need not grieve over him because he has laid down here his decrepit body Wise and firm men ought not to grieve "26

If the mood is sombre here, the image of man created by Vālmīki is not one of a helpless being drifting in the vast flood of the world's currents This is made clear beyond the shadow of doubt by a scene that follows immediately The sage Jābāli was listening to the advice given by Rāma and also to his final answer that he was not returning to Ayodhyā He tries to turn Rāma's own arguments against his decision and as a basis for a philosophy of hedonism. If beings meet and part like driftwood, "he who thinks 'this is my father, this is my mother', and becomes attached to this relationship is without sense Dasaratha is nought to thee as thou to him" Why then be bound to a promise given to Dasaratha or the latter's promise to Kaikeyī? "O Rāma, be wise There exists no world but this, that is certain. Enjoy that which is pleasant and abandon that which is unpleasant Adopting this universally valid principle, receive the kingdom offered thee by Bharata "27

Rāma's reply shows how profoundly existential, how much akin to that of Sartre or Camus in certain respects, was Vālmīki's vision of life An extensive analysis for substantiating that statement cannot be undertaken here, but if any reader feels sceptical about it, he might keep in mind the generic features of "humanistic existentialism" listed by Hazel Barnes28 after a detailed study of Sartre, Camus and Simone de Beauvoir and read the Rāmāyaṇa to see for himself whether or not these features are found in that great poem too Barnes enumerates the features as being "the concept of the absurdity of existence, the concern to justify man's resolve to live meaningfully in the face of an indifferent universe, the ideas of authenticity and bad faith, the refusal to accept a society based on the assumption of absolute Good and Evil a feeling for the absolute value of the individual combined with the recognition that one cannot today live wholly innocently—all this based on an explicit or implied psychology which holds that every man is free but that we are responsible for the situation within which a freedom must 'choose itself' " Rāma, in his reply to Jābāli, affirms his conviction that the man of high ideals can and should create meaning even if it be that life lacks meaning in itself In the last analysis, life is not obedience to exterior command, but a self-attestation "It is his conduct that renders man virtuous, a coward or a hero, and transmutes impurity into purity The self in our heart is the witness of all our good and bad thoughts and deeds With my five senses contented I lead my life in this world without deceit, with

faith . in values and with competence to distinguish right and wrong

The sea will overflow its shores before I transgress a promise given to

my father " If the world is a casual drift, the accidental can yet be trans-

formed into the significant When that happens, man's character creates

meaning out of the neutral drift of events, just as an artist creates a

meaningful form out of line and colour, in themselves neutral in meaning

The inner movement of the epic is from the tragic as the imposed to

the tragic as the sought and accepted. Rama and Sita are suddenly sepa-

rated from their happy life at the court and sent out into the forest because

of the foolish promise given by Dasaratha to his wife, the tragic implica-

tions of which for himself are accepted by Rama Here, Valmiki also

suggests that what seems casual may not be so, that through a far-

sighted integration of such disparate elements as the folly of some and

moral discipline of others, the thoughtless promise of Dasaratha and the

unquestioning acceptance of its terrible implications for himself on the part

of Rama, some vaster power is plastically mobilising the drift of events

for great purposes For Dasaratha's weakness, Kaikeyi's ambition, Rama's

high moral perception and Sita's loyalty to her husband which made her

go with him on exile, all move steadily towards the clash with Ravana

and to the final emancipation of the earth from his tyrannical rule

Descending again to the plane of personal destiny, when all the travails

seemed over, Rama has to take the decision to exile Sita, because a king

cannot have a queen unacceptable to the people whom he serves And no

quick death follows as with Dasaratha when he had to exile Rama His

personal life stepped in grey twilight, he has to go on attending to the

duties of state through the slowly dragging years Both in the acceptance

of exile, earlier, and of a life which would ever afterwards be irredeemably

bereft, now, Rama was exemplifying through his life the truth that the

tragic is not the repugnant, that it can be something to be sought rather

than shunned, that in this seeking and acceptance lies victory, for the

pain is conquered and values are realised that are lifted far above the

order of things that decay The whole web spun out of the interactions

of character and events constitutes the plot of Valmiki and the plot is

his metaphor for an integrative vision of life I A Richards29 has said

that we read "to discover how life seems to another, partly to try how his

attitudes will suit us, engaged as we also are in the same enterprise" The

poet's attitude to life can affect us as genuine only when his involvement

with reality is intimate and, above all, true in a profound sense The

predicaments in his plot must be genuinely human predicaments

Impossible idealism is as much to be ruled out as morbid surrender to

pessimism Valmiki saw the tragic context as a salutary challenge to the

human spirit for a self-attestation The plot of his epic is the large meta-

phor in which this vision is embedded

It has been said that art is inspiration formalised and science is intellect

methodised 30 an attractive antithesis which could, however, be danger-

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ŚANSKRIT POĒTICS

ously misleading Inspiration and formal elements are being recognised

today as playing no less important a part in science than in art And the

searching explorations of the intellect contribute as much as poetic reactivity

to the formation of the poet's world-view More specifically, in structural

articulation the intellect plays a very important role

When we referred to the plot as the poet's metaphor, the expression was

used at that level of generalisation which would cover all narrations of

interwoven incidents and trajectories of personal destinies As this is the

most usual approach, the analysis of Vālmīki's narration can apply to a

whole type of creative writing which would embrace the short story and

novel, drama, the narrative poem and the epic But the plot can become

a metaphor, in all these forms, in a more special sense. This is what

happens in allegory And just as we studied Vālmīki's epic as the ideal speci-

men of one type, the literal representation, we can profitably study Vyasa's

Maha Bhārata as the ideal specimen of the allegorical approach

In a very perceptive study of the allegory as a form, Honig says .

"The progression of an allegory is spiritual—virtuously simultaneous in

three directions, backward to the thing represented (the story, the literal

description of reality), which is itself symbolic, pregnant with signification,

and forward and upward to the consummation of its meaning in the whole

work" Honig's distinction between the prophetic and the apocalyptic

will also be very useful to us for the study of Vyasa's epic When the

allegory takes its authority from the voice of God, when it is directly con-

cerned with enforcing the truth of a traditional text, and when it calls

attention to man's moral obligations, it is prophetic When it derives

from the dedicated experience and judgment of the individual, "when it

concerns the personal vision supported by pre-literary lore, apocalyptic

books, the anonymous symbolism of the dream, or, more significantly, the

knowledge derived from the contradictory nature of experience, the em-

phasis is apocalyptic" Bunyan represents the prophetic allegory, Kafka

the apocalyptic But Vyasa synthesises both For, if he seems prophetic

in the authority he seems to derive from the religious and philosophical

texts of the Hindu tradition, he is apocalyptic in the extremely unorthodox

and intensely personal reinterpretation he gives to them and also in his

ultimate reliance on his own vision of life which is a poetic vision

This is the philosophical background An antithesis between transcen-

dence and immanence, soul and nature, absolute reality and historical

existence, had developed in many currents of thought The Upanishads,

the great meditations of thinkers who had taken refuge in the quiet forests,

away from ritual-ridden religion, had not denied the reality of this world

But there did linger an impression that the world implied a lower plane

of reality, as contrasted with the changeless, ever-enduring Absolute In

some of the post-Buddhist texts, like the Maitrāyana Upanishad for example,

the balance is indeed upset and thought becomes oppressed with the

transience of things Sāmkhya thought had kept the soul or Purusha com-

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF STRUCTURE

173

pletely aloof from nature or Prakṛti But Vyasa, the poet, could not

accept the relegation of historical existence, of the world, the arena of

storm and stress and myriad challenges which alone could furnish man

with an existential context for a self-attestation, to an illusory or even

inferior plane As consciousness dawned with birth only to perish in

death, which also seemed to be the utter extinction of personality, meta-

physical thought was caught in a quagmire, and was inclining to the con-

clusion that unconsciousness was a higher state than consciousness and

that the idea of personality—even in the profoundest sense of the concept,

which rules out all anthropomorphism—should not be associated with

the Absolute

Vyasa moved to a radical interpretation all along the line He posited a

Supreme Self—not impersonal but sublimely personal—and this Self stands

higher than even the immutable Absolute, for the transcendent, withdrawn

Absolute and the immanent world-soul are but aspects—and not neces-

sarily higher or lower aspects—of the Supreme Self At best there is

only the contrast of static and dynamic aspects between the two, while,

reigning above and integrating both, is the Supreme Person The world

is no longer a negation of absolute existence Vyasa uses the Ṛig

Vedic image of the world as a mighty tree with roots above and branches

spreading below 32 Soul is not aloof from matter, God from nature

God is the vital force that sustains all life 33 He is the principle of crea-

tivity that launches nature in her tremendous drama of evolution Flux

is seen, not as irrevocable transience or as continuous perishing, but as

the dynamism of process, as a trend towards a goal and fulfilment His-

torical existence, therefore, is not a degradation or a pale reflection of

absolute existence It is the realisation of God's programme in time and

man marches with the hosts of God when he aligns himself with this

programme

Isolated by analysis from the living tissue of the epic, this vision need

only have been one reached by the intellect, however brilliant its integration

But actually it is embedded in a rich poetic tissue, integrated with its

substance Ambition grows to mountainous proportions and the dark

flames of bitter hatreds shed weird light on intrigues and treacheries,

though there are also many quiet pools unruffled by the winds of passion,

in Vyasa's vast epic of the rivalry of two warrior clans for empire The

clans are close blood relations, in fact first cousins Identical human

material, Vyasa indicates here, can shape itself in widely divergent lines

The Kurus take the path of inordinate ambition and amoralism The

Pandavas are also moved by the normal human ambitions But they are

tempered by social consciousness and moral conscience

Right in the centre of this teeming world Vyasa places his magnificent

pivotal personality, Kṛṣṇa With incredible daring he makes Kṛṣṇa an

incarnation of the Supreme Being And the lesson he teaches is the lesson

of activism The epic gives clear indications of a long prior contest

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between asceticism and activism as exemplified in a tension between the

Brāhmin and the Kshatriya (warrior class) for higher social status If

asceticism will win heaven, the warrior too is assured, as in the Chanson

de Roland, a high place in heaven if he falls in the field These beliefs,

nursed to strength by the group mind of each community to support its

ethos, can be seen to endow with a rare dignity even the fall of the villains

But, as yet, heroic activism remains the ethos of a class, though it is a class

with an important function in society, the maintenance of social, political and

economic order The greatness of Vyasa lies in the fact that he deepened

the ethos of a class to make it a profound philosophy for man At this

depth, the synthesis becomes truly dialectical, for the ascetic attitude is

also purified by Vyasa to contribute to his integral vision

Krishna is the figure through whom Vyasa achieves this deepening of

meaning He is the relative of both the Kurus and the Pandavas and both

groups ask for his help in the clan war He leaves the choice to them

The Kuru prince Duryodhana wants the armies of Krishna and he gets them

The Pandava prince Arjuna is content to choose Krishna by himself,

without his armies, without even the right to be a combatant Krishna

promises to be his charioteer in the battlefield The metaphor of the soul

as the charioteer of the chariot that is the body, drawn by the team of

horses which are the five senses, is one which has recurred in previous

religious poetry Here it develops into a crucial episode of the epic, at

once dramatic and symbolically significant

In the battlefield, just before the vast armies are locked in mortal

combat, Arjuna experiences a profound crisis of spirit He begins to

wonder what use an empire would be if it is to be won by lifting arms

against one’s own kinsfolk It is at this critical moment that the spiral

progression of allegory, emphasised by Honig, makes its greatest upward

leap to the consummation of the meaning of the whole work, while at

the same time clearly referring backward to the story, the literal depiction

of reality, which is the vesture or embodiment of that meaning. A pinnacle

of thought has to be ascended towards an integrative vision, because the

highest insight is needed to take the decision, here and now, to fight or not

to fight Arjuna’s chariot of war suddenly becomes a cell of meditation

He is the tormented human soul and Krishna is the soul’s charioteer, God

The only religious figure to select the battlefield as the venue for spiritual

instruction. Krishna—or Vyasa through him—thereby clearly indicated

that the crisis of action was an existential crisis which could be resolved

only by profoundly moral decisions

Arjuna’s desire to withdraw from the war was really a rationalisation

He had not examined his own motives If he was fighting for empire, his

reluctance to fight his kinsmen, however unjust they were, is understand-

able, for a dynastic empire is in one sense only an expansion of the ingroup

attachment expanding from ego and family to clan Therefore, a

dynastic empire to be won by the slaughter of one’s kinsmen does look

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF STRUCTURE

175

repugnant. But this is not the issue at all Arjuna is told that he is not fighting for an empire for himself and his brothers, but is being called upon to fulfil, primarily as warrior, more profoundly as man, his duty, which is to resist evil, irrespective of whether he will win an empire or lose his life When the realisation dawns on Arjuna, the thunder of the battlefield, which was stilled during the interior dialogue between man and God, once again storms into consciousness like a peremptory call of the world demanding immediate attention to its crisis and the epic action is resumed If the upper convolution of the spiral scales the pinnacles of thought and touches the stars, the lower curve is moored in the earth, deeply embedded in the sensuous substance of the story which is the embodiment of allegorical meaning

The dialectical profundity of Vyasa's synthesis is revealed in the fact that at this depth he resolved the opposition between activism and asceticism and integrated into the final vision an essential truth which was morbidly distorted in ascetic extremism The shallower type of asceticism was really a panicky withdrawal from life, prompted by its continuous perishing, its transience and decay Samkhya philosophy dealt with the situation with a more penetrating subtlety, but still not with a classical justness of vision Samkhya indeed anticipates Nietzsche who suggested that the wisest way to view the world is as an aesthetic and dramatic spectacle A commentator on Kapila, the founder of the system, wrote "The evolution of nature has no purpose except to provide a spectacle for the soul" And Isvara Krishna, another great thinker in the Samkhya tradition, states "As a dancer, after showing herself to the audience, leaves off dancing, so does nature reveal herself to the soul and then disappear" But there does linger the impression that the aesthetic attitude here had an inherent weakness, because it excluded active participation in life And this exclusion was probably a shying away from life because it seemed corroded by a transience that damped the spirit Kapila's thought was indeed touched by a pessimism that bordered on defeatism "Few indeed are these days of joy, few are these days of sorrow Wealth is like a swollen river, life is like a tree on the crumbling bank"j1 Samkhya seems to have posited an absolute dichotomy between soul and nature because it wanted to maintain the spirit uncontaminated by the vicissitudes of matter, of historical existence which seemed such a sorry mess after all The world, in this attitude, might become an aesthetic spectacle, but the participation of the witness in the drama witnessed is lacking here

Vyasa has no illusion about the permanence of things earthly The central episode in the whole epic is the battle for empire That empire, however, goes the way of all empires and the epic, instead of stopping jubilantly with its winning, goes on to describe the confrontation of all the Pandava heroes with the ultimate confrontation of man death But since moral action is a value by itself irrespective of what happens to the moral agent later, this death is as irrelevant as was the probability

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of defeat when the battle was about to break Vyasa prolongs his epic

to this terminal to show that his vision is unclouded by fond illusions

and he can afford to do this because the fact of the transience of matter

cannot assail the imperishable values which the spirit can realise Above

all, he moves far beyond the terminal of Samkhya thought and imposes

upon the individual the difficult, but heroic, obligation to be a participant

and witness at the same time. His hero participates energetically in the

dramatic action of the world But he has the detachment of the aesthete,

because, for one thing, he is not pursuing personal ends, and secondly

because he has reached the pool of quiet waters within himself beyond

the reach of the hurtling currents of the maelstrom of the world's troubled

sea, because he has acquired poise, "being steadfast and unshaken by

even the heaviest of storms"35 Vyasa, with his genius for synthesis,

reconciles the doctrine that "action is superior to non-action",36 with the

claims of the aesthetic attitude And because he was not a philosopher

who turned to poetry, but a poet who mused profoundly on nature and

man, historical existence and man's destiny, he was able to write one of

the world's greatest allegorical masterpieces where full-blooded story and

subtly soaring sense have become a unity in presentation The Gita, the

dialogue between Krishna and Arjuna, which is the timeless dialogue bet-

ween God and Man that takes place in the secret recesses of every soul

in every epoch, is most usually read as an independent religious text But

this is seriously wrong For the dialogue is an episode in a vast epic and

it is a strictly functional episode, for it takes place at the central crisis

of the epic action and is meant to resolve that crisis so that the epic

action can flow forward Isolating the allegorical meaning by analytical

dissection is to deprive ourselves of a complex experience which is

fundamentally poetic Lawlor37 has pointed out that correspondence with

reality may sometimes be better achieved through myth and symbol than

through unwavering adherence to "deeds and language such as men do

use" Vyasa's greatness lies in the fact that his epic is as valid, considered

purely as a heroic poem, as a Chanson de geste, as it is when we penetrate

deeper and realise it as an allegory

The third type of presentation of the story, regarded as the poet's meta-

phor, is the myth Here we should distinguish between the myth that is the

unconscious creation of the group mind, especially in the racial infancy,

and the myth that is created, or creatively reshaped, by the poet Under

the impact of the Freudian revelations about the unconscious, the conden-

sation, displacement and substitutional gratification implied in dream

imagery, the belief in ritual as magically effective action on natural

processes and of Jungian speculations on the collective unconscious, our

age has taken a very great interest in the myth Perhaps, in some circles,

there has also been an unhealthy tendency to develop a mystique of the

myth Reacting against it, Richard Chase38 deplores the attempt to

make myth autonomous, "a religion without calling it a religion" Chase

does not want the hard-won results of the objective disciplines to be

relaxed and therefore insists that myth cannot perform the duties of

science and philosophy and that it cannot enable us to perceive reality

as the rational objectivity of the mind perceives it At the same time, he

fully recognises myth as art, literature Since he specifically studies the

myths associated with the sacraments, he comes to the conclusion that

myth is an imaginative statement which evokes a sense of the uncanny and

portentous in “the crises of birth, infancy, initiation, marriage, death and

so on” The marriage of Charles and Emma Bovary in Flaubert's novel

is not mythical, but Edmund Spenser's Prothalamion and John Donne's

Epithalamion are “And they are mythical because they contain epiphanies

of the uncanny”

This is a fair assessment, but it does not quite bring out the vital

distinction between the racial myth and the creative rehandling of myth

in literature The racial myth is pre-reflective It embodies the realities

of the emotional life, not their evaluation and reshaping by rational

judgment But this evaluation can and does happen in the literary rehand-

ling of myth The “uncanny” element here is due to the recognition of

the urges and needs in the depths of our being and their gratification

through the acceptance of a pattern of belief and action Spenser and

Donne, with the strength of a complex body of Christian tradition behind

them, assert the beauty, sanctity and loveliness of marriage The symbols,

the rhythms, and the drama of the two poems give the assertion its

luminous quality, or as Rudolf Otto would have put it, its numinous quality,

its “epiphanies of the uncanny” The rational disciplines can be employed

to criticise the weight of this assertion, but they cannot supersede the

myth itself 30 The sacramental conception of marriage in the Vedas,

similarly, has back of it an exalted life-view Addressing the bride, the

bridegroom chanted thus · “I am the Sāman (melody of the hymn), you

are the Ṛk (lyric of the hymn) I am heaven, you are earth I take

your hand in mine that you may live to old age with me, your

husband ”

“In the myth”, William Troy40 has said, “the interplay is between the

principle of form and the principle of life” In the racial myth this inter-

play is unconscious But the literary myth can deepen it with the contri-

bution of reflection and judgment In fact, Troy's occasion for this

comment is a study on Thomas Mann, an analysis of the Death in Venice

as an initiation ritual and the Joseph novels as a complex social myth

“To Mann”, Troy says, “must be credited the abundantly fertile suggestion

that only in the myth do we get the dialectical process working itself out

on the whole ground of human reality ” Irrespective of whether or not

this is a just evaluation as far as Mann's achievement is concerned, the fact

remains that the creatively rehandled myth can deal with reality far more

exhaustively as well as penetratingly than the unconsciously evolved racial

myth It was primarily of such myths that Schorer11 wrote, in his study

23

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of the relation between the poet and myth · "The myths of one age are

better than those of another, that is, some myths include more of the

total experience of a culture than others, and in the great ages, ages of

amplitude and spaciousness, they include everything Then poetry attains

its full stature, its vitality is not lessened by shifts of sensibility, because

it has achieved density, strata of various meaning " Since the myth arises

spontaneously in response to the profound as well as universal need of

a whole group, there is some justification for Wheelwright's claim42 that

the loss of myth is the most devastating loss humanity can suffer. Myth-

consciousness, he proceeds to claim, "is the bond that unites men both

with one another and with the unplumbed Mystery from which mankind

is sprung and without reference to which the radical significance of things

go to pot" But if the myth emerges from what Bergson called the fonc-

tion fabulatrice of the human mind and which he defined as nature's

defence against domination by the intellect, there have also been myths

that weighed down on the spirit of man The creatively rehandled myth

can be more wholly positive Santayana43 wrote : "A rational poet's

vision would have the same moral functions that myth was asked to fulfil,

and fulfilled so treacherously, it would employ accurately the same ideal

faculties which myth used confusedly "

We have seen both the myth of ritual and the poetic myth that arise

in response to the profound need for transforming the social institution

of marriage into a sacrament, just as the biological urge was stabilised as

a social institution in the first place earlier in human evolution. This

union spontaneously becomes a symbol, in many climes and many epochs,

for an unplumbed mystery, the relation between God and the human soul,

their longing for each other In Europe we have Teresa of Avila and

St John of the Cross In India we have the tradition of Vaishnavite lyri-

cism represented by Chaitanya, Meera and others But the great fountain-

head of the tradition in India is the Bhagavata14 of Vyasa

There is an extraordinary story given in the opening section of the

Bhagavata about how it came to be written It reveals that the myth here

is not unconscious racial myth, but a myth created by a poet. The alle-

gorical presentation of the storm and stress of outward and inward exis-

tence in the Mahā Bharata had made its narrative full of violence Out-

wardly it was a story which told of gambling, dishonouring women,

treachery, attempted assassinations and a war where the flower of India's

chivalry fell in the field The sage Narada became acutely nervous about

the life and strength of this concrete imagery He told Vyasa "How-

ever much your ultimate idea may be the inculcation of moral duty, you

ought not to have given to the people stories with loathsome themes and

incidents By nature addicted to the obvious pleasures of the senses, they

revel in the doubtful material and miss the inner message " Narada called

for a devotional composition "Renunciation without devotion to the

Lord and action without dedication to Him are not good." Vyasa met

the demand by composing the Bhagavata, an idyll where God is the lover

and the human soul the maiden He sports with

He was creating a myth exactly in the same way that Eliot was creating

a myth in the Waste Land—a fact which has been completely missed in

the evaluations of Vyasa's great works But the myth in Waste Land is

a crazy quilt of motifs drawn from the lore of many peoples and epochs

and critics like Herbert Read have referred to the "archæological" nature

of the resulting amalgam Vyasa, on the other hand, was careful to develop

the germinal elements that were already available in the racial heritage

Therefore, in his work the myth has become an organic growth and for

centuries after his time, it has continued to spread its bouquet of leaves

and renew its crown of blossoms through folk poetry, art and drama as

well as innumerable literary creations

Poignant exchanges between God and the human soul, tender and mov-

ing like the murmured colloquies of lovers, were heard as early as in

Vedic poetry “God is the “dearest guest, bosom friend”15 Guilt brings

a troubled sense of alienation from this dearest friend “What has become

of our ancient friendship, when without enmity we walked together? If

he, your true ally, has sinned against you, still, Varuna, he is the friend

whom once you loved”16 Pure and movingly tender is this prayer “Cast

all these sins away like loosened fetters, Varuna, and let us be your own

beloved ” God becomes the lover and husband of the human soul “Like

the husband to the wife, may God, the upholder of the heavens, Lord of

all bliss, turn towards us ”17 Duality is at last forgotten in a close

embrace : “Thou art ours and we are Thine”18

While this tradition gave the cue to Vyasa for his central myth, the

conception of God and the human soul as lovers, another current gave

the cue for the sublimation of the vital urges which alone makes the

erotic symbol in this context truly poetic, because truly sensuous This

was the current that led to the emergence of the Soma deity The Soma

is the intoxicating drink crushed from the Soma plant But a fine web

of poetic associations begins to build up rapidly around this exhilarating

draught Its tonic action on the vital powers makes it the symbol of the

vital energy (the Dionysian life-force or the Bergsonian élan vital) by

which the universe itself is sustained Indra (the god of life-giving rain),

gets his energy in his mighty battle with the demon Vritra (drought) from

drinking deep draughts of Soma19 The moon, the golden gleaming drop

in the sky, now becomes identified with Soma It is a drop of the nectar

of the gods The phases of the moon suggest the moon-vessel filling

itself day by day with the precious liquor When the full moon over-

flowed then was the time of nature's supreme vigour, the time when men

would plant their seeds to ensure the highest fertility The Soma, now

identified with the moon, becomes the most potent of health-giving

medicines and the god of medicinal plants The web of poetic association

extends still further The plant world is preserved in health by the streams

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and rivers So Soma becomes the god of the streams also He is described

in one Vedic poem as rejoicing in the streams like a youngman sporting

with graceful maidens 50

The plenitude of vital existence, the Dionysian ecstasy of living, is now

made to resonate and yield harmonic vibrations on a higher plane of

meaning The bliss of vital existence is finite, but can become the

symbol of the bliss of a timeless existence "There is no bliss in finite

things, the infinite alone is bliss", the Chhandogya Upanishad51 had

asserted Whatever bliss there is, is borrowed from the Supreme Self.

"On a particle of this very bliss, other beings live "52 And thus Vyasa

creates his great myth, investing the figure of Kṛishṇa with new meaning

Here, again, Vyasa was attempting a radical poetic mutation in yet another

current, that of tribal lore and folk legend For Kṛishṇa was originally

a tribal god, of the tribes of Western and Central India, like the Vṛishṇis,

the Satvatas, the Abhīras and the Yadavas He was at first opposed by

the religion of the priestly classes and the memory of this opposition

lingers in the episode in the Kṛishṇa legend where Indra, the god of the

priestly class, sends rain to flood Kṛishṇa's village, Gokul But Kṛishṇa

lifted up the Govardhana hill like an umbrella and the episode ended in

the defeat of Indra Kṛishṇa thus got his access to the Hindu pantheon.

But the profoundest transformation took place when Vyasa used the

Kṛishṇa figure for musing on absolute and historical existence, earthly

life and divine life, man and God, in the Mahā Bhārata and later in the

Bhāgavata In the Bhāgavata Kṛishṇa speaks thus . "I am always present

in all beings as their soul That devotion is absolute which renders

a person fit to become one with Me"53 A lyrical-romantic myth is used

to indicate this union Kṛishṇa, the cowherd boy, enchants the maidens

of Gokul with his flute

The story of this dalliance is spun by Vyasa out of the loveliest material

that nature can furnish, moonlight on the river, the scented breath of the

night breeze flowing from the heart of the woods and the call of Kṛishṇa's

flute heard by the maidens even in their sleep The imagery used has

always a significant resonance. "The rains set in Clouds hid the moon.

even as egoism hides the soul Rain poured down like blessings The

fresh water, like the service of the Lord, provided a fresh richness and

beauty in all Then autumn came Sky and water became transparent

like minds in meditation, the mire of the roads slowly disappeared like

the false notions of the ignorant The sea was still like a self-realised soul

The moon shone like true knowledge" This repetition of imagery with

a deeper resonance, where the detail in nature is used to suggest a state

of the spirit, prepares the way for the entry of the flute, pouring out as

much longing as its listeners in the hushed hamlet felt for its player

"Wearing yellow silk, with a peacock feather on his head and a garland

of woodland blossoms, Kṛishṇa played his flute in the heart of the woods

The magic music fell on the ears of the cowherd lasses who became

jealous of the flute that drank the sweet breath from the ruby lips of the

Lord Cows stood still, drinking in the music of the flute with upturned

ears The sages sat, like the still birds on the boughs, listening in silence

to those strains The Yamuna eddied all the more and appeared to

stretch her waves, like arms to clasp the feet of the Lord "51 The human

soul is feminine to God, the eternal male This is brought out in a story

in the Naradiya Purana, which closely follows the Bhagavata in inspira-

tion and incidents The sage Narada seeks the help of Brinda in partici-

pating in the Orphic mystery of Gokul She asks him to take a dip in

the lake He suddenly finds himself transformed into a maiden And

it is as a maiden going to her lover, like an Indian St John of the Cross,

that he enters the presence of the Lord

But the uniqueness of the myth in Vyasa is that it embodies a classic,

integrated world-view, unlike those instances of the unconscious emergence

of erotic symbolism—St John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila—where there

may be intensity but not necessarily an all-embracing world-vision First

of all, Vyasa does not seek shelter in any amnesia about the transience

of all earthly phenomena, including the social and the historical But

instead of seeing helpless decay here, he sees the termination of a phase

of a programme If, for his aesthetic-philosophic purposes, Vyasa con-

ceived of Krishna as an incarnation, he still has to go when the purpose

of his intervention in a historical crisis is fulfilled If history is God's

programme, man is his instrument and the instrument cannot transcend

the transience of the natural condition Krishna acted on the plane of

history as a man and therefore he has to go Vyasa here gives a most

profound turn to his argument "The clan in which the incarnation of

Krishna had manifested himself became elated with pride and it became

necessary for the Lord to remove them before he himself departed from

the world " Vyasa here resolutely opposes the tendency, which has

created difficulties in certain religious traditions of the world, of making

what could be called legal claims to inheritance of charismatic authority

from a personality that is regarded as an incarnation The Gita carries

Krishna's august assurance that he shall return again and again when-

ever man needs divine help in a historical crisis It is the spiritual leaders

of humanity in every clime, epoch and race, who symbolise this return,

the recurring epiphany of the divine in man But they cannot transcend

their mortal condition, because history is not exhausted with their crises

and their solution History will move forward and present other challenges

to other generations Therefore, their mission over, they have to go and

the groups among whom they appeared do not inherit their authority

automatically The courageous opposition to the growth of exclusive

cults in this deliberately casual dismissal should be noted The sea

sweeps over his capital, Dwaraka The Yadava clan, who thought they

would inherit the earth because Krishna was born in their midst, move

to Prabhasa from their sea-wrecked city, indulge in heavy drinking, quarrel

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and fight each other to the last man Kr̥ṣṇa himself leaves when a hunter shoots him by mistake And with that, the great symbolic stage which Vyāsa's genius had structured revolves away from sight, lest it leave too concrete and legal a legacy, and takes its abiding place in the memory of men in its pure status as profound myth

We should remind ourselves again and again that here we are dealing with the myth of a poet and not a primitive racial myth In the poet's myth we see the "transition from unconscious creation to creative consciousness", a profound distinction which Dmitri Merejkowski emphasised when referring to the contrast between Puṣkin and Gogol Since Vyāsa rejects the doctrine that nature and history are degradations of absolute existence and asserts that they are fulfilment of a divine programme where man too fulfils himself by freely choosing to be the instrument of that programme, he boldly uses nature as a reservoir of mythical intimations, not of a flux where nothing abides, but of a symbolic teleology which changes the flux into a process, by aligning with which the free human spirit can find its fulfilment The world, the human soul and God form a perfect alignment Kr̥ṣṇa advises Uddhava, his cousin and minister "With senses and mind under control, see the world within your heart and your Self in Me, the Over-Lord The wise exalt themselves by their own self-endeavour The Self is the greatest teacher." When the world is seen in the heart with the poetic and mythopoetic imagination, it yields precious intimations "Learn from these objects of nature From these mountains which bear their minerals and other resources for the weal of the world, learn that you should live for others and not for yourself Persuasive, touching everything, yet itself untouched, the ether is indeed the best example of the Yogi You should be limpid, pure, purifying, pleasing and refreshing like water, effulgent with the lustre of knowledge like fire, reducing to ashes all impurity Like the sea, deep and unfathomable, neither swell up by what flows into you, nor get exhausted by what is taken from you Like a bee, take in little by little, and from good and bad, extract the essence even as the bee does the honey

Vyāsa saw that men's temperaments differed and they started their spiritual journey from different points Some sought certitude through the intellect Others were troubled by the perplexities of moral life Yet others yearned for an enriched emotional life Vyāsa wanted to integrate all these different trajectories so that they all converged to the same terminal The Vedas or scriptures were being used by all these types But Vyāsa felt that the approaches were not profoundly perceptive He dismissed the literalism of the orthodox with contempt "What use there is of a tank in a place flooded over with water, only so much in all the Vedas is the use for a knower of the Ultimate Reality, equipped with his higher knowledge"55 He exiled the impersonal Absolute and established in its place in men's adoration the Supreme Person "That which is to

be known in all the Vedas am I"56 All paths converge Knowledge,

when it attains the final vision, kindles into lyrical rapture The knower

cannot but be the adorer "He who knows Me worships me"57 Devotion

and emotional identification are the perfect understanding "Fix your

mind in Me, into Me let your understanding enter You shall surely live

with Me hereafter"58 The priests had exalted ritual as complete moral

action Vyasa's Krishna drastically simplified ritual, shifting the accent

from the obligatory ceremony to the devotion of the heart "Whosoever

devotedly offers to Me a leaf, a flower, a fruit or water-I accept the

pious offering of the man who is pure of heart"59 The spiritual act is

not the ritual deed, but moral action All life and action must become

an offering "Whatever you do do that as an offering unto Me

With your mind firmly set on the way of renunciation, you shall become

free and come to Me"60 Vyasa, the poet, does not want to restrict the

plenitude of life into ascetic grooves All legitimate impulses can be

gratified "In your pursuit of meritorious duty, material gain or emotional

gratification, take your stand in Me " If Krishna asks men to dedicate

themselves to him, it is because the self of man is identical with the

divine reality of which he is the incarnation and therefore dedication to

him is the same as dedication to the higher self in every man The

dedicated act cannot be the same as the act motivated by ego-centered

drives "I am established in every being That man of invidious percep-

tion who draws the line between himself and another, him Death pursues

with his dangerous fear Therefore, with charity and honour and with

friendship towards all, one should worship Me, the soul of all beings, as

enshrined in all beings Honouring them, one should mentally bow to