Chhanda or measured poetry: 1

|| shriihariH ||

Prerequisite

Knowledge of Hindi/Sanskrit alphabets.

Transliteration

All the Sanskrit-in-roman transliteration follow the iTrans scheme. Please visit www.aczoom.com/itrans for the transliteration table and www.aczoom.com/itrans/online for creating your own Sanskrit documents.

Motivation

The motivation behind ``measuring'' the sentences in a poem is to make it ``tunable'' to standard tunes. The concept and rules of measuring will be presented in this post. The prime motivation behind measurement is to make the poem tunable, i.e., its principle should be deeply rooted in the vocals or pronunciation of syllables. In Sanskrit, syllables, the fusion of a consonant and vowel, can be classified as short or long (1 or 2) according to the pronunciation time. Roughly, the pronunciation times for all long syllables are same and about twice as much of short syllables. The exact classification of long and short follows shortly. The reader must note that this is a unique ability of Sanskrit not present with other languages, for example, English.

Once the pronunciation time is fixed, pronunciation length of a sentence is synonymous with the pattern of syllables used. Thus the measurement in terms of pronunciation time creates a link, more technically mapping, between the singing time and the measured syllable lengths. This is a central idea in Sanskrit chhanda poetry. We now discuss the detailed rules of classifying syllables as short or long.

Long and Short Syllables

Essentially there are only two rules:

1) The vowels or the consonants following in the vowels a, i, u, and RRi are short or 1. All other vowels or the consonants following in these other vowels are long or 2.

2) If a consonant or vowel, either short or long, follows into an incomplete consonant, sanyukt-akshar, then the consonant or vowel together with the incomplete successor is considered long, regardless of whether it was short or long. For example: In viShNu, the syllable vi is short. However, it follows in Sh, an incomplete consonant. Thus, viSh is considered as a long syllable. Nu is short; thus viShNu is 2 1. Similarly, in kuurma, the syllable kuu is long and it follows in an incomplete consonant r; kuur according to the rule is a long syllable. Thus kuurma is again 2 1.

Parsing a Sentence

With the aforementioned rules, any sentence in Sanskrit can be parsed uniquely into a string of long and short symbols. For example,

jaya raama ramaa ramanaM samanaM

parses into

ja-ya-raa-ma-ra-maa-ra-ma-naM-sa-ma-naM

or

1 1 2 1 1 2 1 1 2 1 1 2

As another example, consider the famos ``Krishna-AshtakaM''

bhaje vrajaikamaNDanaM samastapaapakhaNDanaM

parses into

bha-jev-ra-jai-ka-maN-Da-naM-sa-mas-ta-paa-pa-khaN-Da-naM

or

1 2 1 2 1 2 1 2 1 2 1 2 1 2 1 2

Exercise

Parse and verify that the following from ``SankaShTanaashanaM Stotra''

namo matsyakuurmaadinaanaaswaruupaiH
sadaabhaktakaaryodyataayaartihantre

parses into

1 2 2 1 2 2 1 2 2 1 2 2
1 2 2 1 2 2 1 2 2 1 2 2.

Aside

Each pattern of long and short syllables is usually given a name. The {1 1 2} X 4 pattern is called toTaka, the {1 2} X 4 or {1 2} X 8 pattern is called paMchachaamara or vibhaavarii, and the {1 2 2} X 4 pattern is called bhuja~Ngaprayaata.

What next?

Next we will focus on definition of chhanda poetry and some examples.