A story within a story , also referred to as an embedded narrative , is a literary device in which a character within a story becomes the narrator of a second story (within the first one). Multiple layers of stories within stories are sometimes called nested stories . A play may have a brief play within it, such as in Shakespeare's play Hamlet ; a film may show the characters watching a short film; or a novel may contain a short story within the novel. A story within a story can be used in all types of narration including poems , and songs .
214-582: Karna ( Sanskrit : कर्ण, IAST : Karṇa ), also known as Vasusena , Anga-Raja , Sutaputra and Radheya , is one of the major characters in the Hindu epic Mahābhārata . He is the son of Surya (the Sun deity) and princess Kunti (later the Pandava queen). Kunti was granted the boon to bear a child with desired divine qualities from the gods and without much knowledge, Kunti invoked the sun god to confirm it if it
428-445: A Sūta , while some other versions describe him failing to string the bow by the "breadth of a hair". In the end, Arjuna succeeds in the task, However Karna objects that the competition is only meant for Kshatriyas , and Brahmins such as "the mendicant who just strung the bow" should not be competing for the hand of Draupadi, a Kshatriya bride. Duryodhana supports him. The gathered Kshatriyas too angrily support Karna, for they against
642-475: A flashback of events leading up to the murder. Within this flashback, an unreliable narrator tells a story to mislead the would-be murderer, who later discovers that he was misled after another character narrates the truth to him. As the story concludes, the " Tale of Núr al-Dín Alí and his Son " is narrated within it. This perennially popular work can be traced back to Arabic , Persian , and Indian storytelling traditions. Mary Shelley 's Frankenstein has
856-468: A rakshasha lineage, and his powers of illusion to confuse the enemies grew to enormous proportions as the war dragged deeper into the fifteenth night. Duryodhana and Karna's Kaurava friends plead that they are finished unless Karna does whatever it takes to kill Ghatotkacha. Karna hurls the "Indra missile" to kill Ghatotkacha. Karna thus saves his reputation among his soldiers, launches the missile and kills Ghatotkacha. Duryodhana and Kaurava army rejoice with
1070-496: A "bonus material" style inner story is the chapter "The Town Ho's Story" in Herman Melville 's novel Moby-Dick ; that chapter tells a fully formed story of an exciting mutiny and contains many plot ideas that Melville had conceived during the early stages of writing Moby-Dick —ideas originally intended to be used later in the novel—but as the writing progressed, these plot ideas eventually proved impossible to fit around
1284-405: A "choice between irreconcilable obligations", between two good or two poor choices, where complex circumstances must be considered. These circumstances make the evaluation of the choices complicated and a decision difficult, subjective. When circumstances lead to a conflict between two choices that are both right in their own premises, then following one duty becomes "contrary to the duty according to
1498-401: A Brahmin to divest him of his earrings and breastplate, and thereby his immortality. Karna disregards this warning and says that if the king of gods Indra comes to beg before him, and if he charitably gives to Indra, it will bring him "renown and fame", then argues that "fame is more important to him than anything else". Indra appears as predicted, and Karna cuts his birthmarks of immortality with
1712-550: A birth mother (Night) who abandons him in the Vedic texts and he too considers his adoptive mother (Dawn) who raises him to his bright self as the true mother just like Karna. This idea was first discussed by the philologist Georges Dumézil , who remarked that similar mythology and details are found in other ancient Indo-European stories. Karna resembles various famous characters found in Hindu texts. The attributed author of Mahabharata,
1926-488: A brutal stage, according to the Mahabharata verses in sections 7.150–156. On the fourteenth day, Arjuna took revenge of his own son's death, while Bhima and his son Ghatotkacha wreaked havoc on numerous Kaurava battalions. The war that previously started after sunrise and stopped at sunset, did not stop on the fourteenth day's sunset as both armies continued a ferocious war to kill each other. Bhima's son Ghatotkacha had
2140-466: A caring friend and resourceful supporter when almost everyone is bent on ridiculing and disowning him. Karna evolves into a character who shares Duryodhana's view that Pandavas are bad and enemies, though for different reasons. Karna participates with Duryodhana in schemes to effect the downfall of the Pandavas. Duryodhana provides the goals, Karna conspires the means to get there. In the final year of
2354-408: A couplet that was added, possibly by religious zealots intent on giving the play extra moral gravity, are said only on the night that Oedipa sees the play. From what Pynchon relates, this is the only mention in the play of Thurn and Taxis' rivals' name—Trystero—and it is the seed for the conspiracy that unfurls. A significant portion of Walter Moers ' Labyrinth of Dreaming Books is an ekphrasis on
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#17327796833192568-580: A critical role during Duryodhana’s military campaigns, successfully defeating various kings like Drupada and Bhaggadatta and expanding the Kaurava domain. Karna also faced significant defeats that revealed his limitations. During the campaign against Drupada, launched as Gurudakshina for Drona , Karna and the Kauravas were unable to overcome Drupada’s forces. It was Arjuna who ultimately succeeded in capturing Drupada. Another notable loss occurred during
2782-468: A dead language in the most common usage of the term. Pollock's notion of the "death of Sanskrit" remains in this unclear realm between academia and public opinion when he says that "most observers would agree that, in some crucial way, Sanskrit is dead." Story within a story Stories within stories can be used simply to enhance entertainment for the reader or viewer, or can act as examples to teach lessons to other characters. The inner story often has
2996-464: A deeply nested frame story structure, that features the narration of Walton, who records the narration of Victor Frankenstein, who recounts the narration of his creation, who narrates the story of a cabin dwelling family he secretly observes. Another classic novel with a frame story is Wuthering Heights , the majority of which is recounted by the central family's housekeeper to a boarder. Similarly, Roald Dahl 's story The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar
3210-433: A focus on Indian philosophies and Sanskrit. Though written in a number of different scripts, the dominant language of Hindu texts has been Sanskrit. It or a hybrid form of Sanskrit became the preferred language of Mahayana Buddhism scholarship; for example, one of the early and influential Buddhist philosophers, Nagarjuna (~200 CE), used Classical Sanskrit as the language for his texts. According to Renou, Sanskrit had
3424-517: A gifted speaker and becomes a loyal friend of Duryodhana . He is appointed the king of Anga ( Bihar - Bengal ) by Duryodhana. Karna joins the losing Duryodhana side of the Mahabharata war. He is a key antagonist who aims to kill Arjuna but dies in a battle with him during the Kurushetra war. He is a tragic hero in the Mahabharata , in a manner similar to Aristotle's literary category of "flawed good man". He meets his biological mother late in
3638-446: A girl gives birth to a child before married are less likely to marry. So, she put the newborn baby in a padded basket, and set it adrift in the small river Ashvanadi by the palace. Later Kunti got blessed with children Yudhishtra, Bhima, and Arjuna, using this mantra. The same mantra was used by Kunti to allow her co-wife, Madri, to conceive Nakula and Sahdeva. The Spiritual "fathers" of the five Pandavas were Dharma , Vayu , Indra and
3852-585: A history compiled by several of the characters. The subtitle of The Hobbit ("There and Back Again") is depicted as part of a rejected title of this book within a book, and The Lord of the Rings is a part of the final title. An example of an interconnected inner story is "The Mad Trist" in Edgar Allan Poe 's Fall of the House of Usher , where through somewhat mystical means the narrator's reading of
4066-576: A knife, and gives the blood-soaked donation to disguised-as-a-Brahmin Indra. The leader of gods in return praises him and gives him a missile that can only be used once and will kill any mortal or immortal. Karna keeps the Indra's missile in reserve since it could only be used once, and aims to kill Arjuna with it. By the thirteenth day of the Mahabharata war, numerous soldiers, kings, brothers and sons of Kauravas (Karna's side) and Pandavas (Arjuna's side) had been killed, many by foul means. The war had entered
4280-591: A language competed with numerous, less exact vernacular Indian languages called Prakritic languages ( prākṛta - ). The term prakrta literally means "original, natural, normal, artless", states Franklin Southworth . The relationship between Prakrit and Sanskrit is found in Indian texts dated to the 1st millennium CE. Patañjali acknowledged that Prakrit is the first language, one instinctively adopted by every child with all its imperfections and later leads to
4494-658: A limited role in the Theravada tradition (formerly known as the Hinayana) but the Prakrit works that have survived are of doubtful authenticity. Some of the canonical fragments of the early Buddhist traditions, discovered in the 20th century, suggest the early Buddhist traditions used an imperfect and reasonably good Sanskrit, sometimes with a Pali syntax, states Renou. The Mahāsāṃghika and Mahavastu, in their late Hinayana forms, used hybrid Sanskrit for their literature. Sanskrit
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#17327796833194708-480: A man who finds a manuscript telling the story of a documentary that may or may not have ever existed, contains multiple layers of plot. The book includes footnotes and letters that tell their own stories only vaguely related to the events in the main narrative of the book, and footnotes for fake books. Robert A. Heinlein 's later books ( The Number of the Beast , The Cat Who Walks Through Walls and To Sail Beyond
4922-420: A more famous composer is told in a series of letters to his lover Rufus Sixsmith, which are interrupted halfway through and revealed to be in the possession of an investigative journalist named Luisa Rey and so on. Each of the first five tales are interrupted in the middle, with the sixth tale being told in full, before the preceding five tales are finished in reverse order. Each layer of the story either challenges
5136-542: A narrative counterpoint and add a touch of surrealism to the main narrative. They additionally raise the question of whether works of artistic genius justify or atone for the sins and crimes of their creators. Auster's The Book of Illusions (2002) and Flicker by Theodore Roszak (1991) also rely heavily on fictional films within their respective narratives. This dramatic device was probably first used by Thomas Kyd in The Spanish Tragedy around 1587, where
5350-454: A natural part of the earliest Vedic language, and that these developed in the centuries after the composition had been completed, and as a gradual unconscious process during the oral transmission by generations of reciters. The primary source for this argument is internal evidence of the text which betrays an instability of the phenomenon of retroflexion, with the same phrases having sandhi-induced retroflexion in some parts but not other. This
5564-479: A negative evidence to Pollock's hypothesis, but it is not positive evidence. A closer look at Sanskrit in the Indian history after the 12th century suggests that Sanskrit survived despite the odds. According to Hanneder, On a more public level the statement that Sanskrit is a dead language is misleading, for Sanskrit is quite obviously not as dead as other dead languages and the fact that it is spoken, written and read will probably convince most people that it cannot be
5778-731: A noble story, the boring character tells a very dull tale, and the rude miller tells a smutty tale. Homer 's Odyssey too makes use of this device; Odysseus ' adventures at sea are all narrated by Odysseus to the court of king Alcinous in Scheria . Other shorter tales, many of them false, account for much of the Odyssey . Many modern children's story collections are essentially anthology works connected by this device, such as Arnold Lobel 's Mouse Tales , Paula Fox 's The Little Swineherd , and Phillip and Hillary Sherlock's Ears and Tails and Common Sense . A well-known modern example of framing
5992-546: A pan-Indo-Aryan accessibility to information and knowledge in the ancient and medieval times, in contrast to the Prakrit languages which were understood just regionally. It created a cultural bond across the subcontinent. As local languages and dialects evolved and diversified, Sanskrit served as the common language. It connected scholars from distant parts of South Asia such as Tamil Nadu and Kashmir, states Deshpande, as well as those from different fields of studies, though there must have been differences in its pronunciation given
6206-400: A quieter moment with Krishna such as in section 5.139.45, and to his lifelong friend Duryodhana in section 8.1.7, Karna confides he was wrong in insulting Draupadi and the Pandavas, it is his past karma that haunts him and is a source of his private suffering. Book 5 of the Mahabharata describes two meetings where Karna discovers information about his birth. The first meeting is with Krishna,
6420-578: A refined and standardized grammatical form that emerged in the mid-1st millennium BCE and was codified in the most comprehensive of ancient grammars, the Aṣṭādhyāyī ('Eight chapters') of Pāṇini . The greatest dramatist in Sanskrit, Kālidāsa , wrote in classical Sanskrit, and the foundations of modern arithmetic were first described in classical Sanskrit. The two major Sanskrit epics, the Mahābhārata and
6634-486: A restrained language from which archaisms and unnecessary formal alternatives were excluded". The Classical form of the language simplified the sandhi rules but retained various aspects of the Vedic language, while adding rigor and flexibilities, so that it had sufficient means to express thoughts as well as being "capable of responding to the future increasing demands of an infinitely diversified literature", according to Renou. Pāṇini included numerous "optional rules" beyond
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6848-439: A similar phonetic structure to Tamil. Hock et al. quoting George Hart state that there was influence of Old Tamil on Sanskrit. Hart compared Old Tamil and Classical Sanskrit to arrive at a conclusion that there was a common language from which these features both derived – "that both Tamil and Sanskrit derived their shared conventions, metres, and techniques from a common source, for it is clear that neither borrowed directly from
7062-489: A small shield on a larger shield). The literary device of stories within a story dates back to a device known as a " frame story ", where a supplemental story is used to help tell the main story. Typically, the outer story or "frame" does not have much matter, and most of the work consists of one or more complete stories told by one or more storytellers. The earliest examples of "frame stories" and "stories within stories" were in ancient Egyptian and Indian literature , such as
7276-461: A sprawling, loosely interconnected science fiction narrative, as do the albums of Janelle Monae . On Tom Waits 's concept album Alice (consisting of music he wrote for the musical of the same name), most of the songs are (very) loosely inspired by both Alice in Wonderland , and the book's real-life author, Lewis Carroll , and inspiration Alice Liddell . The song "Poor Edward", however,
7490-799: A study of the Bombay edition, the Poona edition, the Calcutta edition and the south Indian editions of the Mahabharata manuscripts. The most accepted version is one prepared by scholars led by Vishnu Sukthankar at the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute , preserved at the Kyoto University , the Cambridge University and various Indian universities. According to the legend, there was a king of
7704-508: A surreal version of Madam Mao 's Red Detachment of Women , illuminating the ascendance of human values over the disillusionment of high politics in the meeting. In Bertolt Brecht 's The Caucasian Chalk Circle , a play is staged as a parable to villagers in the Soviet Union to justify the re-allocation of their farmland: the tale describes how a child is awarded to a servant-girl rather than its natural mother, an aristocrat, as
7918-405: A symbolic and psychological significance for the characters in the outer story. There is often some parallel between the two stories, and the fiction of the inner story is used to reveal the truth in the outer story. Often the stories within a story are used to satirize views, not only in the outer story, but also in the real world. When a story is told within another instead of being told as part of
8132-459: A tale told through the music of Coheed and Cambria , tells a story for the first two albums but reveals that the story is being actively written by a character called the Writer in the third. During the album, the Writer delves into his own story and kills one of the characters, much to the dismay of the main character. The critically acclaimed Beatles album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
8346-459: A young boy. Both the book and the movie assert that the central story is from a book called "The Princess Bride" by a nonexistent author named S. Morgenstern . In the Welsh novel Aelwyd F'Ewythr Robert (1852), by Gwilym Hiraethog , a visitor to a farm in north Wales tells the story of Uncle Tom's Cabin to those gathered around the hearth. Sometimes a frame story exists in the same setting as
8560-549: Is James Merrill 's 1974 modernist poem " Lost in Translation ". In Rabih Alameddine 's novel The Hakawati , or The Storyteller , the protagonist describes coming home to the funeral of his father, one of a long line of traditional Arabic storytellers. Throughout the narrative, the author becomes hakawati (an Arabic word for a teller of traditional tales) himself, weaving the tale of the story of his own life and that of his family with folkloric versions of tales from Qur'an,
8774-437: Is a complex concept in the Indian religions. It is not an atomistic or compartmentalized concept, rather incorporates "ways of living, ways of seeing and ways of relating to life's ultimate issues", according to Matilal. Of those issues, ones relating to right or wrong behaviour, duties, rights, and expectations from others are the domain of dharma-ethics . Karna's story raises the dharma-ethics questions both while Karna acts in
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8988-504: Is a graphic novel about a middle-school musical production, and the tentative romantic fumblings of its cast members. In Manuel Puig 's Kiss of the Spider Woman , ekphrases on various old movies, some real, and some fictional, make up a substantial portion of the narrative. In Paul Russell 's Boys of Life , descriptions of movies by director/antihero Carlos (loosely inspired by controversial director Pier Paolo Pasolini ) provide
9202-592: Is a key participant in insulting the Pandavas and Draupadi . He humiliates the Pandavas with his gift of speech and mocks Draupadi, then calls her a "whore" and asks Duhshasana to strip her off her clothes. It is Karna's language and insults that hurt the Pandavas and Draupadi the most, a sentiment that is noted in numerous verses of the Mahabharata such as 3.13.113 and 5.93.11. Yet, states the Mahabharata scholar Alf Hiltebeitel , "remarkably, Karna regrets his harsh words to Draupadi and Pandavas", in verse 5.139.45, where he confesses he spoke so to please Duryodhana. Karna
9416-552: Is about a rich bachelor who finds an essay written by someone who learned to "see" playing cards from the reverse side. The full text of this essay is included in the story, and itself includes a lengthy sub-story told as a true experience by one of the essay's protagonists, Imhrat Khan. Lewis Carroll 's Alice books, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1871), have several multiple poems that are mostly recited by several characters to
9630-499: Is about a troupe of actors who perform a play about marital infidelity that mirrors their own lives, and composer Richard Rodney Bennett and playwright - librettist Beverley Cross 's The Mines of Sulphur features a ghostly troupe of actors who perform a play about murder that similarly mirrors the lives of their hosts, from whom they depart, leaving them with the plague as nemesis. John Adams ' Nixon in China (1985-7) features
9844-515: Is about the production of a fictitious musical, The Taming of the Shrew , based on the Shakespeare play of the same name , and features several scenes from it. Pericles draws in part on the 14th-century Confessio Amantis (itself a frame story), by John Gower , and Shakespeare has the ghost of Gower "assume man's infirmities" to introduce his work to the contemporary audience and comment on
10058-516: Is akin to that of Latin and Ancient Greek in Europe. Sanskrit has significantly influenced most modern languages of the Indian subcontinent , particularly the languages of the northern, western, central and eastern Indian subcontinent. Sanskrit declined starting about and after the 13th century. This coincides with the beginning of Islamic invasions of South Asia to create, and thereafter expand
10272-592: Is also found in classic religious and philosophical texts. The structure of The Symposium and Phaedo , attributed to Plato , is of a story within a story within a story. In the Christian Bible , the gospels are accounts of the life and ministry of Jesus . However, they also include within them the parables that Jesus told. In more modern philosophical works, Jostein Gaarder 's books often feature this device. Examples are The Solitaire Mystery , where
10486-501: Is also the world's longest epic, has a nested structure. The experimental modernist works that incorporate multiple narratives into one story are quite often science-fiction or science fiction influenced. These include most of the various novels written by the American author Kurt Vonnegut . Vonnegut includes the recurring character Kilgore Trout in many of his novels. Trout acts as the mysterious science fiction writer who enhances
10700-512: Is expected to choose her husband, both Arjuna and Karna are present. Arjuna and his brothers, however, are disguised as mendicant Brahmins. They use this false identity in exile because Duryodhana had attempted to kill them using various schemes, including burning the lacquer house – custom built for the Pandavas by Duryodhana – along with the forest while they were sleeping. There are some variations regarding Karna's participation. Some renditions show Draupadi refusing to marry Karna on account of being
10914-419: Is found by a charioteer's wife Radha, who takes the baby Karna to her husband Adhiratha Nandana. They adopt him right away and name him Vasushena. They love him and raise him just like their own son. While he was growing up, his adopting parents let Karna know that they had found and adopted him. This knowledge affects Karna, he feels ashamed that he was abandoned, and this frames his sense of self-identity through
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#173277968331911128-452: Is found in the writing of Bharata Muni , the author of the ancient Natya Shastra text. The early Jain scholar Namisādhu acknowledged the difference, but disagreed that the Prakrit language was a corruption of Sanskrit. Namisādhu stated that the Prakrit language was the pūrvam ('came before, origin') and that it came naturally to children, while Sanskrit was a refinement of Prakrit through "purification by grammar". Sanskrit belongs to
11342-494: Is from the love and affection and "not scripture" that he knows Adhiratha to be his real father. He is already married, says Karna, he has two sons and now grandsons, all because his father Adhiratha helped him settle into his married life. What matters most in life are the "bonds of love", according to Karna, and not power over the world. He shall betray no one, remain loyal to those who love him, including his friend Duryodhana, with whom he has been in allegiance for thirteen years. It
11556-580: Is mentioned that he married a Suta woman chosen by Adhiratha. She is later referenced in the Stri Parva as the mother of Vrishasena and Sushena, the two most prominent sons of Karna. Marital details of Karna's life are expanded and reimagined in later adaptations of the Mahabharata . In the modern day version of the Mahabharata , nine sons of Karna are mentioned— Vrishasena , Chitrasena, Satyasena, Sushena, Shatrunjaya, Dvipata, Banasena, Prasena and Vrishaketu . The Karna-Arjuna story has parallels in
11770-508: Is not "blood ties" that matter, but how someone treats you over a period of time that does. He made a promise to Duryodhana and he will keep it. It is his duty to fight Arjuna. Krishna then went to Kunti and asked her to meet Karna and tell him that he is her first born son and the Pandavas were his brothers. Krishna left it to her to choose between Karna and her five other sons. Kunti then went to meet Karna, finds him praying. She waits. After he finished his prayers to Surya, Karna meets Kunti for
11984-429: Is not content simply to point out the weaknesses of human beings. It criticizes society's flaws. It raises the question whether a person's social position should be defined by birth or by some other criterion, such as accomplishment of some sort. [...] Karna challenges their traditional understanding of dharma – as inherited status – and offers a new notion of dharma as deserved status. Karna has to be 'the wrong person in
12198-423: Is portrayed in the Mahabharata as a skilled and valiant warrior, achieving several notable victories. One of his key successes was his defeat of Jarasandha , the powerful king of Magadha , during the s wayamvara of the princess of Kalinga . Despite Jarasandha’s strength and reputation, Karna prevailed and, as a mark of respect, was gifted the territory of Malini by the defeated ruler. Additionally, Karna played
12412-511: Is presented as a stage show by the fictional eponymous band, and one of its songs, "A Day in the Life" is in the form of a story within a dream. Similarly, the Fugees album The Score is presented as the soundtrack to a fictional movie, as are several other notable concept albums , while Wyclef Jean 's The Carnival is presented as testimony at a trial. The majority of Ayreon 's albums outline
12626-450: Is presented as a story told by a narrator about Edward Mordrake , and the song "Fish and Bird" is presented as a retold story that the narrator heard from a sailor. In his 1895 historical novel Pharaoh , Bolesław Prus introduces a number of stories within the story, ranging in length from vignettes to full-blown stories, many of them drawn from ancient Egyptian texts, that further the plot, illuminate characters , and even inspire
12840-441: Is presented as a translation of a found manuscript by (fictional) Cide Hamete Benengeli . A commonly independently anthologised story is " The Grand Inquisitor " by Dostoevsky from his long psychological novel The Brothers Karamazov , which is told by one brother to another to explain, in part, his view on religion and morality. It also, in a succinct way, dramatizes many of Dostoevsky's interior conflicts. An example of
13054-532: Is rare in the later version of the language. The Homerian Greek, like Ṛg-vedic Sanskrit, deploys simile extensively, but they are structurally very different. The early Vedic form of the Sanskrit language was far less homogenous compared to the Classical Sanskrit as defined by grammarians by about the mid-1st millennium BCE. According to Richard Gombrich—an Indologist and a scholar of Sanskrit, Pāli and Buddhist Studies—the archaic Vedic Sanskrit found in
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#173277968331913268-479: Is taken along with evidence of controversy, for example, in passages of the Aitareya-Āraṇyaka (700 BCE), which features a discussion on whether retroflexion is valid in particular cases. The Ṛg-veda is a collection of books, created by multiple authors. These authors represented different generations, and the mandalas 2 to 7 are the oldest while the mandalas 1 and 10 are relatively the youngest. Yet,
13482-399: Is the fantasy genre work The Princess Bride (both the book and the movie ). In the movie, a grandfather is reading the story of "The Princess Bride" to his grandson. In the book, a more detailed frame story has a father editing a much longer (but fictive) work for his son, creating his own "Good Parts Version" (as the book called it) by leaving out all the parts that would bore or displease
13696-485: Is the name of a warrior character. Called Vasusena as a child by his foster parents, he became known by the name Karna because of the golden earrings of Surya he used to wear, according to the Sanskrit epics scholar David Slavitt. The word Karna, states the Indologist Kevin McGrath, signifies "eared, or the ear-ringed one". In section 3.290.5 of the Mahabharata , Karna is described as a baby born with
13910-589: Is the predominant language of one of the largest collection of historic manuscripts. The earliest known inscriptions in Sanskrit are from the 1st century BCE, such as the Ayodhya Inscription of Dhana and Ghosundi-Hathibada (Chittorgarh) . Though developed and nurtured by scholars of orthodox schools of Hinduism, Sanskrit has been the language for some of the key literary works and theology of heterodox schools of Indian philosophies such as Buddhism and Jainism. The structure and capabilities of
14124-432: Is time for Karna to present his lineage. If Karna were to announce his charioteer lineage, it would disqualify him from competing against Arjuna. Duryodhana steps in and says Karna is an Arajna (a non-king, but also a word play on Arjuna) but announces that he is offering to anoint Karna as the king of Angas (Bengal). Once Karna is a king, states Duryodhana, Arjuna would not have the excuse to avoid Karna and not compete with
14338-540: The Bhagavata Purana , the Panchatantra and many other texts are all in the Sanskrit language. The Classical Sanskrit with its exacting grammar was thus the language of the Indian scholars and the educated classes, while others communicated with approximate or ungrammatical variants of it as well as other natural Indian languages. Sanskrit, as the learned language of Ancient India, thus existed alongside
14552-516: The Adi Parvan . It is here that his earrings "that make his face shine", as well as the divine breastplate (body armor) he was born with, are mentioned for the first time. This sets him apart as someone special, with gifts no ordinary mortal has. However, later in the epic, the generous Karna gives the "earrings and breastplate" away in charity, thereby becomes a mortal and later dies in a battle with Arjuna. The story of his unmarried mother getting
14766-580: The Dalai Lama , the Sanskrit language is a parent language that is at the foundation of many modern languages of India and the one that promoted Indian thought to other distant countries. In Tibetan Buddhism, states the Dalai Lama, Sanskrit language has been a revered one and called legjar lhai-ka or "elegant language of the gods". It has been the means of transmitting the "profound wisdom of Buddhist philosophy" to Tibet. The Sanskrit language created
14980-675: The Indo-European family of languages . It is one of the three earliest ancient documented languages that arose from a common root language now referred to as Proto-Indo-European : Other Indo-European languages distantly related to Sanskrit include archaic and Classical Latin ( c. 600 BCE–100 CE, Italic languages ), Gothic (archaic Germanic language , c. 350 CE ), Old Norse ( c. 200 CE and after), Old Avestan ( c. late 2nd millennium BCE ) and Younger Avestan ( c. 900 BCE). The closest ancient relatives of Vedic Sanskrit in
15194-503: The Mahabharata . They become close friends not long after, when Karna and Arjuna are at a weapons trial competition. Duryodhana sees in Karna a man who is an equal of Arjuna in martial abilities, and someone to befriend to balance out Arjuna and thereby "diminish the Pandavas". Before the competition starts, the contestants must announce theirs lineage so that men of equal ranks are placed together. After Arjuna announces his royal lineage, it
15408-568: The Neil Gaiman series The Sandman feature an endless series of waking from one dream into another dream. In Charles Maturin 's novel Melmoth the Wanderer , the use of vast stories-within-stories creates a sense of dream-like quality in the reader. The 2023 Christian fictional novel Just Once by Karen Kingsbury features a series of three nested stories, all centering around the main characters of Hank and Irvel Myers: This structure
15622-753: The Rigveda had already evolved in the Vedic period, as evidenced in the later Vedic literature. Gombrich posits that the language in the early Upanishads of Hinduism and the late Vedic literature approaches Classical Sanskrit, while the archaic Vedic Sanskrit had by the Buddha 's time become unintelligible to all except ancient Indian sages. The formalization of the Saṃskṛta language is credited to Pāṇini , along with Patañjali's Mahābhāṣya and Katyayana's commentary that preceded Patañjali's work. Panini composed Aṣṭādhyāyī ('Eight-Chapter Grammar'), which became
15836-531: The Rāmāyaṇa , however, were composed in a range of oral storytelling registers called Epic Sanskrit which was used in northern India between 400 BCE and 300 CE, and roughly contemporary with classical Sanskrit. In the following centuries, Sanskrit became tradition-bound, stopped being learned as a first language, and ultimately stopped developing as a living language. The hymns of the Rigveda are notably similar to
16050-655: The Siddha mantra , telling her that if she ever wants, she can invoke any deity to give her a child. Teenage Pritha became curious, wondered if the mantra would really work and, as the sun rose one morning, she initiated the mantra through which she could invoke any divine God being to provide her a son. She called the sun god Surya. He came with a golden glow, dressed up in jewellery and breastplate, and provided her with her first son. Pritha felt confused and ashamed, worried what everyone will think and how she will embarrass her family. At that time, according to Vedic civilization, if
16264-458: The Yadava dynasty named Shurasena who had a beautiful young daughter named Pritha (later Kunti ). A rishi (Vedic scholar and seer) named Durvasa visited the king for a lengthy stay and was housed as his palace guest. Shurasena asked Pritha to ensure that Durvasa's stay was comfortable. On leaving, having been delighted with his stay and her diligent services, Durvasa thanked her and gave her
16478-446: The dramatic tension and also makes more poignant the inevitable failure of the relationship between the mortal Hans and water sprite Ondine. The Two-Character Play by Tennessee Williams has a concurrent double plot with the convention of a play within a play. Felice and Clare are siblings and are both actor/producers touring "The Two-Character Play". They have supposedly been abandoned by their crew and have been left to put on
16692-406: The sandhi rules, both internal and external. Quite many words found in the early Vedic Sanskrit language are never found in late Vedic Sanskrit or Classical Sanskrit literature, while some words have different and new meanings in Classical Sanskrit when contextually compared to the early Vedic Sanskrit literature. Arthur Macdonell was among the early colonial era scholars who summarized some of
16906-410: The story within a story style of narration, the account of Karna's birth has been narrated four times. Karna appears for the first time in the Mahabharata in the verse 1.1.65 of Adi Parvan (first book) where he is briefly mentioned through the metaphor of a tree, as someone who is refusing to fight or help in the capture of Krishna. He is presented again in sections 1.2.127–148, and chapter 1.57 of
17120-500: The verbal adjective sáṃskṛta- is a compound word consisting of sáṃ ('together, good, well, perfected') and kṛta - ('made, formed, work'). It connotes a work that has been "well prepared, pure and perfect, polished, sacred". According to Biderman, the perfection contextually being referred to in the etymological origins of the word is its tonal—rather than semantic—qualities. Sound and oral transmission were highly valued qualities in ancient India, and its sages refined
17334-414: The 13th century, a premier center of Sanskrit literary creativity, Sanskrit literature there disappeared, perhaps in the "fires that periodically engulfed the capital of Kashmir" or the "Mongol invasion of 1320" states Pollock. The Sanskrit literature which was once widely disseminated out of the northwest regions of the subcontinent, stopped after the 12th century. As Hindu kingdoms fell in the eastern and
17548-532: The 7th century where he established a major center of learning and language translation under the patronage of Emperor Taizong. By the early 1st millennium CE, Sanskrit had spread Buddhist and Hindu ideas to Southeast Asia, parts of the East Asia and the Central Asia. It was accepted as a language of high culture and the preferred language by some of the local ruling elites in these regions. According to
17762-598: The Brahmastra at the critical moment when he wishes to use it against his enemy. The third Pandava prince Arjuna was Karna's peer and equal. At school and in episodes where his character appears, he is repeatedly rejected, subjected to ridicule and bullied for being the son of a poor family, and particularly for his low birth. The boy Karna came to be known for his solitary habits, hard work, pious yoga before Surya every day, compassion and eager generosity to help anyone in need particularly Brahmins, his gift of speech, and for
17976-425: The Classical Sanskrit language launched ancient Indian speculations about "the nature and function of language", what is the relationship between words and their meanings in the context of a community of speakers, whether this relationship is objective or subjective, discovered or is created, how individuals learn and relate to the world around them through language, and about the limits of language? They speculated on
18190-532: The Dravidian languages borrowed from Sanskrit vocabulary, but they have also affected Sanskrit on deeper levels of structure, "for instance in the domain of phonology where Indo-Aryan retroflexes have been attributed to Dravidian influence". Similarly, Ferenc Ruzca states that all the major shifts in Indo-Aryan phonetics over two millennia can be attributed to the constant influence of a Dravidian language with
18404-521: The Dravidian words and forms, without modifying the word order; but the same thing is not possible in rendering a Persian or English sentence into a non-Indo-Aryan language. Shulman mentions that "Dravidian nonfinite verbal forms (called vinaiyeccam in Tamil) shaped the usage of the Sanskrit nonfinite verbs (originally derived from inflected forms of action nouns in Vedic). This particularly salient case of
18618-594: The Egyptian " Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor " and Indian epics like the Ramayana , Seven Wise Masters , Hitopadesha and Vikrama and Vethala . In Vishnu Sarma 's Panchatantra , an inter-woven series of colorful animal tales are told with one narrative opening within another, sometimes three or four layers deep, and then unexpectedly snapping shut in irregular rhythms to sustain attention. In
18832-675: The High Castle , each character comes into interaction with a book called The Grasshopper Lies Heavy , which was written by the Man in the High Castle. As Dick's novel details a world in which the Axis Powers of World War II had succeeded in dominating the known world , the novel within the novel details an alternative to this history in which the Allies overcome the Axis and bring stability to
19046-569: The Hindu arts tradition, both in India and in southeast Asia. A regional tradition believes that Karna founded the city of Karnal , in contemporary Haryana . Karṇa (कर्ण) is a word found in the Vedic literature, where it means "the ear", "chaff or husk of a grain" or the "helm or rudder". In another context, it refers to a spondee in Sanskrit prosody. In the Mahabharata and the Puranas, it
19260-476: The Indo-Aryan language underwent rapid linguistic change and morphed into the Vedic Sanskrit language. The pre-Classical form of Sanskrit is known as Vedic Sanskrit . The earliest attested Sanskrit text is the Rigveda , a Hindu scripture from the mid- to late-second millennium BCE. No written records from such an early period survive, if any ever existed, but scholars are generally confident that
19474-519: The Indo-European languages are the Nuristani languages found in the remote Hindu Kush region of northeastern Afghanistan and northwestern Himalayas, as well as the extinct Avestan and Old Persian – both are Iranian languages . Sanskrit belongs to the satem group of the Indo-European languages. Colonial era scholars familiar with Latin and Greek were struck by the resemblance of
19688-521: The Kurukshetra battlefield is presented as the Makara movement (an arrangement of soldiers in the sea-monster pattern). As Duryodhana's army crumbles each day, the sea and vessel metaphor repeatedly appears in the epic, particularly when Karna is mentioned. As a newborn, Karna's life begins in a basket without a rudder on a river, in circumstances that he neither chose nor had a say. In Book 1, again in
19902-532: The Muslim rule in the form of Sultanates, and later the Mughal Empire . Sheldon Pollock characterises the decline of Sanskrit as a long-term "cultural, social, and political change". He dismisses the idea that Sanskrit declined due to "struggle with barbarous invaders", and emphasises factors such as the increasing attractiveness of vernacular language for literary expression. With the fall of Kashmir around
20116-555: The Muslim rulers. Hindu rulers such as Shivaji of the Maratha Empire , reversed the process, by re-adopting Sanskrit and re-asserting their socio-linguistic identity. After Islamic rule disintegrated in South Asia and the colonial rule era began, Sanskrit re-emerged but in the form of a "ghostly existence" in regions such as Bengal. This decline was the result of "political institutions and civic ethos" that did not support
20330-486: The Old Testament, Ovid, and One Thousand and One Nights. Both the tales he tells of his family (going back to his grandfather) and the embedded folk tales, themselves embed other tales, often 2 or more layers deep. In Sue Townsend 's Adrian Mole: The Wilderness Years , Adrian writes the book Lo! The Flat Hills of My Homeland , in which the character Jake Westmorland writes a book called Sparg of Kronk , where
20544-432: The Pandavas" as the final solution. Karna persistently recommends violence and an all-out war, to settle things once and for all, by good brave warriors. Karna also accuses Bhisma and Drona as covetous materialists and dishonest in counselling Duryodhana with non-violent strategies. Duryodhana has evil intentions and is a bad king, but it is Karna who fuels Duryodhana's ambitions and fights his battles. With Duryodhana, Karna
20758-424: The Pandavas, particularly Arjuna, were hostile. The Mahabharata mentions Karna as the main challenger of Arjuna at sporting and skills competitions. At martial sporting events, Arjuna and Karna were often equal, though in his self-bragging style Karna once announced, states McGrath, that "he will perform any feat that Arjuna has accomplished and do it better". At the svayamvara competition of Draupadi, where she
20972-538: The Pandavas, ridicules him for his low status and calls him dog-like. The public insult of his father makes Karna hate the Pandavas. At the end of the competition, while everyone rejects Karna, Duryodhana expresses amity to Karna by "taking Karna by his hand". Karna feels Duryodhana is that friend who stood by him when everyone rejected him. Duryodhana becomes Karna's lifelong close friend. In Karna, Duryodhana finds an able man and talented commander who can help him gain and retain power over an empire. In Duryodhana, Karna finds
21186-655: The Pandavas’ Rajasuya Yajna, when Karna refused an alliance with Bhima , leading to a direct confrontation. Although Karna resisted fiercely, Bhima ultimately defeated him, with Karna’s divine armor ( Kavacha ) and earrings ( Kundala ) preventing his death. In the Gandharva episode during the Pandavas' exile, Karna fled from battle after Kauravas were captured by Chitrasena , the Gandharva king, after being defeated in battle. The relationship between Karna and
21400-499: The Saṃskṛta language, both in its vocabulary and grammar, to the classical languages of Europe. In The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World , Mallory and Adams illustrate the resemblance with the following examples of cognate forms (with the addition of Old English for further comparison): The correspondences suggest some common root, and historical links between some of
21614-558: The Sky (which adopts the conceit that it is a book from the future by an author called Gen Jaramet-Sauner), and J. R. Rasmussen's "Research" in the anthology Star Trek: Strange New Worlds II . Steven Barnes 's novelization of " Far Beyond the Stars " partners with Greg Cox 's The Eugenics Wars: The Rise and Fall of Khan Noonien Singh (Volume Two) to tell us that the story "Far Beyond the Stars"—and, by extension, all of Star Trek itself—is
21828-638: The South India, such as the great Vijayanagara Empire , so did Sanskrit. There were exceptions and short periods of imperial support for Sanskrit, mostly concentrated during the reign of the tolerant Mughal emperor Akbar . Muslim rulers patronized the Middle Eastern language and scripts found in Persia and Arabia, and the Indians linguistically adapted to this Persianization to gain employment with
22042-565: The Southern manuscripts more profuse and longer. The legends of Karna too appear in many versions, including some versions that have no support in surviving manuscripts. The manuscripts found in the North and South India for the Karna parvan book have "great divergence" in details, though the thematic essence is similar. Scholars have attempted to construct a critical edition , relying mostly on
22256-537: The Sunset ) propose the idea that every real universe is a fiction in another universe. This hypothesis enables many writers who are characters in the books to interact with their own creations. Margaret Atwood 's novel The Blind Assassin is interspersed with excerpts from a novel written by one of the main characters; the novel-within-a-novel itself contains a science fiction story written by one of that novel's characters. In Philip K. Dick 's novel The Man in
22470-447: The Vedic Sanskrit in these books of the Ṛg-veda "hardly presents any dialectical diversity", states Louis Renou – an Indologist known for his scholarship of the Sanskrit literature and the Ṛg-veda in particular. According to Renou, this implies that the Vedic Sanskrit language had a "set linguistic pattern" by the second half of the 2nd millennium BCE. Beyond the Ṛg-veda, the ancient literature in Vedic Sanskrit that has survived into
22684-451: The Vedic Sanskrit's bahulam framework, to respect liberty and creativity so that individual writers separated by geography or time would have the choice to express facts and their views in their own way, where tradition followed competitive forms of the Sanskrit language. The phonetic differences between Vedic Sanskrit and Classical Sanskrit, as discerned from the current state of the surviving literature, are negligible when compared to
22898-430: The Vedic literature and may have emerged from these more ancient themes. According to McGrath, the Vedic mythology is loaded with the legendary and symbolism-filled conflict between Surya (sun) and Indra (clouds, thunder, rain). Indra cripples Surya in the Vedic mythology by detaching his wheel, while Arjuna kills Karna while he tries to fix the wheel that is stuck in the ground. As another example of parallels, Surya too has
23112-405: The able warrior. Karna accepts the anointment, becomes a king that day. It also transforms him into a loyal friend to Duryodhana, with an eagerness to reciprocate the favour. Karna asks Duryodhana what he would want in return for the kingdom he just gave out of his empire, Duryodhana replies, "I want your endless friendship Karna". For the consecration ceremony, Karna's father arrives. Bhima, one of
23326-584: The action of the play. In Francis Beaumont 's Knight of the Burning Pestle (ca. 1608) a supposed common citizen from the audience, actually a "planted" actor, condemns the play that has just started and "persuades" the players to present something about a shopkeeper. The citizen's "apprentice" then acts, pretending to extemporise, in the rest of the play. This is a satirical tilt at Beaumont's playwright contemporaries and their current fashion for offering plays about London life. The opera Pagliacci
23540-461: The action of the plot of the outer story. In others, the inner story is independent, and could either be skipped or stand separately, although many subtle connections may be lost. Often there is more than one level of internal stories, leading to deeply-nested fiction. Mise en abyme is the French term for a similar literary device (also referring to the practice in heraldry of placing the image of
23754-712: The affection or care from her as the firstborn. "You discarded me", says Karna to Kunti, "you destroyed me in a way that no enemy could ever do to him". It is too late. He reiterates that he loves the parents who raised him, they love him, and he will remain loyal to his lifelong relationships. No one should abandon those who give respect and affection, says Karna in these Mahabharata verses. The war momentum shall continue and he aims to kill Arjuna. Karna promised to Kunti that he will not kill any of his other four half-brothers, but either "Arjuna or I" shall die and she can still say she has five sons just as she did all her life. After these developments and pondering on Karna's life choices,
23968-407: The alphabet, the structure of words, and its exacting grammar into a "collection of sounds, a kind of sublime musical mold" as an integral language they called Saṃskṛta . From the late Vedic period onwards, state Annette Wilke and Oliver Moebus, resonating sound and its musical foundations attracted an "exceptionally large amount of linguistic, philosophical and religious literature" in India. Sound
24182-647: The ancient Hindu epic suggests a social debate between "inherited status" and "deserved status", a debate that remains relevant to the contemporary times. Das writes, Karna, like the other heroes in the Mahabharata, forces us to look at ourselves and at our frailties. When Karna is not allowed to train in weaponry because he is a suta, it makes one ask, ’What if my child had been denied entry into college because of her birth?’ [...] We want them [our children] to feel secure and confident about their position. We want them to be treated with respect as equals. The Mahabharata
24396-425: The bitterness of Pandava for Karna to much more emotional level from what previously was a dispute about respective martial prowess. These are the sections of the epic when the Pandavas, Arjuna in particular, openly pledge to kill Karna. Karna retaliates with words too, stating that Arjuna's death is so near that he will "not wash his feet until Arjuna is slain". Karna is not proud of his anger and outbursts. Later, in
24610-440: The capacity to understand the old Prakrit languages such as Ardhamagadhi . A section of European scholars state that Sanskrit was never a spoken language. However, evidences shows that Sanskrit was a spoken language, essential for oral tradition that preserved the vast number of Sanskrit manuscripts from ancient India. The textual evidence in the works of Yaksa, Panini, and Patanajali affirms that Classical Sanskrit in their era
24824-409: The character Sparg writes a book with no language. In Anthony Horowitz 's Magpie Murders , a significant proportion of the book features a fictional but authentically formatted mystery novel by Alan Conway, titled 'Magpie Murders'. The secondary novel ends before its conclusion returning the narrative to the original, and primary, story where the protagonist and reviewer of the book attempts to find
25038-465: The characters that Melville went on to create and develop . Instead of discarding the ideas altogether, Melville wove them into a coherent short story and had the character Ishmael demonstrate his eloquence and intelligence by telling the story to his impressed friends. One of the most complicated structures of a story within a story was used by Vladimir Nabokov in his novel The Gift . There, as inner stories, function both poems and short stories by
25252-546: The chariot for the critical battle. Ultimately Shalya agrees. Since all previous commanders of Duryodhana had been killed, he anoints Karna as the senapati (commander of all his forces) for the first time. Karna and Shalya head into the battlefield together, though they keep insulting each other's abilities and intent, lack mutual devotion and teamwork. Together they reach Arjuna with Krishna. They battle that day, each showing his martial skills of attack as well as his ability to neutralize all weapons that reach their chariot. Then,
25466-429: The child due to her curiosity, his divine connection to the Hindu god Surya , then his birth appears for the first time in the epic in section 1.104.7. The epic uses glowing words to describe Karna, but the presentation here is compressed in 21 shlokas unlike the later books which expand the details. These later sections with more details on Karna's birth and childhood include 3.287, 5.142 and 15.38. According to McGrath,
25680-527: The close relationship between the Indo-Iranian tongues and the Baltic and Slavic languages , vocabulary exchange with the non-Indo-European Uralic languages , and the nature of the attested Indo-European words for flora and fauna. The pre-history of Indo-Aryan languages which preceded Vedic Sanskrit is unclear and various hypotheses place it over a fairly wide limit. According to Thomas Burrow, based on
25894-404: The common wife of the Pandavas – Draupadi too – says Krishna, may marry to him. after some time, were Karna to press his status as the eldest biological Pandava brother, end the war and rule the world. Karna declines the offer. Karna replies that though he was born from Kunti, it was the wife of a charioteer "Radha who gave him love and sustenance", and that makes her his real mother. Similarly, it
26108-486: The content and process of the text and novelist was discussed rather than the lives of the patients. In this way subconscious defenses could be circumvented. Farmer took the real life case-studies and melded these with adventures of his characters in the series. The Quantum Leap novel Knights of the Morningstar also features a character who writes a book by that name. In Matthew Stover 's novel Shatterpoint ,
26322-494: The context of Karna, Duryodhana remarks, "the origins of heroes and rivers are indeed difficult to understand". The name Karna is also symbolically connected to the central aspect of Karna's character as the one who is intensely preoccupied with what others hear and think about him, about his fame, a weakness that others exploit to manipulate him. This "hearing" and "that which is heard", states McGrath makes "Karna" an apt name and subtle reminder of Karna's driving motivation. Karna
26536-614: The context of a speech or language, is found in verses 5.28.17–19 of the Ramayana . Outside the learned sphere of written Classical Sanskrit, vernacular colloquial dialects ( Prakrits ) continued to evolve. Sanskrit co-existed with numerous other Prakrit languages of ancient India. The Prakrit languages of India also have ancient roots and some Sanskrit scholars have called these Apabhramsa , literally 'spoiled'. The Vedic literature includes words whose phonetic equivalent are not found in other Indo-European languages but which are found in
26750-458: The creation of 1950s writer Benny Russell. The book Cloud Atlas (later adapted into a film by The Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer ) consisted of six interlinked stories nested inside each other in a Russian doll fashion. The first story (that of Adam Ewing in the 1850s befriending an escaped slave) is interrupted halfway through and revealed to be part of a journal being read by composer Robert Frobisher in 1930s Belgium. His own story of working for
26964-711: The crystallization of Classical Sanskrit. As in this period the Indo-Aryan tribes had not yet made contact with the inhabitants of the South of the subcontinent, this suggests a significant presence of Dravidian speakers in North India (the central Gangetic plain and the classical Madhyadeśa) who were instrumental in this substratal influence on Sanskrit. Extant manuscripts in Sanskrit number over 30 million, one hundred times those in Greek and Latin combined, constituting
27178-484: The death of Bhima's son Ghatotkacha, but now Karna had exhausted the weapon that gave him an advantage over Arjuna. As the second last day of the war and Karna's day of death dawns, Karna asks Duryodhana to convince king Shalya to be his charioteer since he plans to kill Arjuna that day. The South Indian king considers it below his dignity to be a mere charioteer and starts insulting Karna, who retaliates with words. Duryodhana intervenes, praises both, presses Shalya to guide
27392-467: The detailed and sophisticated treatise then transmitted it through his students. Modern scholarship generally accepts that he knew of a form of writing, based on references to words such as Lipi ('script') and lipikara ('scribe') in section 3.2 of the Aṣṭādhyāyī . The Classical Sanskrit language formalized by Pāṇini, states Renou, is "not an impoverished language", rather it is "a controlled and
27606-471: The differences between the Vedic and Classical Sanskrit. Louis Renou published in 1956, in French, a more extensive discussion of the similarities, the differences and the evolution of the Vedic Sanskrit within the Vedic period and then to the Classical Sanskrit along with his views on the history. This work has been translated by Jagbans Balbir. The earliest known use of the word Saṃskṛta (Sanskrit), in
27820-460: The distant major ancient languages of the world. The Indo-Aryan migrations theory explains the common features shared by Sanskrit and other Indo-European languages by proposing that the original speakers of what became Sanskrit arrived in South Asia from a region of common origin, somewhere north-west of the Indus region , during the early 2nd millennium BCE. Evidence for such a theory includes
28034-469: The divine Krishna, as well as a host of Mahabharata heroes, in private and after his death, honour Karna as a satpurusha (lit. "a true, honest, good man") and "the best among those who understand and uphold the dharma ". Karna was born with aspects of his divine father Surya – the earrings and armour breastplate – that made him an immortal at birth. However, despite being warned, Karna prefers to lose these natural gifts in order to uphold his reputation as
28248-481: The ear-rings and armoured breastplate, like his father Surya. The second meaning of Karna as "rudder and helm" is also an apt metaphor given Karna's role in steering the war in Book 8 of the epic, where the good Karna confronts the good Arjuna, one of the climax scenes wherein the Mahabharata authors repeatedly deploy the allegories of ocean and boat to embed layers of meanings in the poem. For example, his first entry into
28462-420: The early presentation of Karna in the Mahabharata is such as if the poets expect the audience to already know the story and love the character of Karna. The text does not belabour the details about Karna in the early sections, rather uses metaphors and metonyms to colourfully remind the audience of the fabric of a character they already are assumed to be aware of. The complete narrative of his life appears for
28676-735: The epic Mahabharata , the Kurukshetra War is narrated by a character in Vyasa 's Jaya , which itself is narrated by a character in Vaisampayana 's Bharata , which itself is narrated by a character in Ugrasrava's Mahabharata . Both The Golden Ass by Apuleius and Metamorphoses by Ovid extend the depths of framing to several degrees. Another early example is the One Thousand and One Nights ( Arabian Nights ), where
28890-421: The epic as well as after his death. These questions arise with the circumstances related to his birth and through his death. Karna chooses loyalty to his lifelong friend and "good policy based on his heart" to be of higher value than accepting Krishna's recommendation that he switch sides and become the king as the eldest son of Kunti based on dharmasastras . According to Gurcharan Das , the character of Karna in
29104-493: The epic then discovers that he is the older half-brother of those he is fighting against. Karna is a symbol of someone who is rejected by those who should love him but do not given the circumstances, yet becomes a man of exceptional abilities willing to give his love and life as a loyal friend. His character is developed in the epic to raise and discuss major emotional and dharma (duty, ethics, moral) dilemmas. His story has inspired many secondary works, poetry and dramatic plays in
29318-428: The epic, according to McGrath, Krishna states, "by law, Karna should be considered as the eldest born of Pandavas", that he can use this information to become the king. Through his relationship to his mother Kunti, all Vrishnis on Krishna's side will also recognize him and be his tributary, he can be the emperor with power over everyone. Yudhisthira will hold the fan for him as he sits in the throne, Bhima his umbrella, and
29532-466: The epic. Karna attends school in Hastinapura , where he studies martial arts under the sages Drona and Kripa . When Drona declines to teach him the knowledge of the Brahmastra weapon, Karna disguises himself as a Brahmin to become a student of Parashurama , an incarnation of the god Vishnu . Upon discovering Karna's deception, Parashurama curses him, declaring that he will forget the secret of
29746-410: The exile of the Pandavas, Duryodhana plans to sow dissension and keep the entire empire to himself. In contrast, Bhisma and Drona suggest a conciliation and dividing the kingdom into two, half for Kauravas and other for Pandavas. Karna, in contrast, adopts the hawkish approach and becomes the first to suggest a direct confrontation in the form of the Kurukshetra war. He calls for "together we should slay
29960-573: The exposure of a murderer (although not a king). The play I Hate Hamlet and the movie A Midwinter's Tale are about a production of Hamlet , which in turn includes a production of The Murder of Gonzago , as does the Hamlet -based film Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead , which even features a third-level puppet theatre version within their play. Similarly, in Anton Chekhov 's The Seagull there are specific allusions to Hamlet : in
30174-577: The fashioning of individual characters. Jan Potocki 's The Manuscript Found in Saragossa (1797–1805) has an interlocking structure with stories-within-stories reaching several levels of depth. The provenance of the story is sometimes explained internally, as in The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien , which depicts the Red Book of Westmarch (a story-internal version of the book itself) as
30388-409: The final chapter. As this progresses characters and messages within the fictional 'Magpie Murders' manifest themselves within the primary narrative and the final chapter's content reveals the reason for its original absence. Dreams are a common way of including stories inside stories, and can sometimes go several levels deep. Both the book The Arabian Nightmare and the curse of "eternal waking" from
30602-513: The first act a son stages a play to impress his mother, a professional actress, and her new lover; the mother responds by comparing her son to Hamlet. Later he tries to come between them, as Hamlet had done with his mother and her new husband. The tragic developments in the plot follow in part from the scorn the mother shows for her son's play. Shakespeare adopted the play-within-a-play device for many of his other plays as well, including A Midsummer Night's Dream and Love's Labours Lost . Almost
30816-548: The first language of the respective speakers. The Sanskrit language brought Indo-Aryan speaking people together, particularly its elite scholars. Some of these scholars of Indian history regionally produced vernacularized Sanskrit to reach wider audiences, as evidenced by texts discovered in Rajasthan, Gujarat, and Maharashtra. Once the audience became familiar with the easier to understand vernacularized version of Sanskrit, those interested could graduate from colloquial Sanskrit to
31030-567: The first time in chapter 1.125. The Mahabharata manuscripts exist in numerous versions, wherein the specifics and details of major characters and episodes vary, often significantly. Except for the sections containing the Bhagavad Gita which is remarkably consistent between the numerous manuscripts, the rest of the epic exists in many versions. The differences between the Northern and Southern recensions are particularly significant, with
31244-426: The first time in his adult life. He greets her (he now already knows her to be his biological mother). With folded hands , he introduces himself as the son of Radha and Adhiratha, and inquires about the purpose of her visit. Kunti then confesses that he is her firstborn. Surya also appears and confirms Kunti's story, and suggests that he follow her. Karna says that though he may have been the firstborn, he never received
31458-412: The foundation of Vyākaraṇa, a Vedānga . The Aṣṭādhyāyī was not the first description of Sanskrit grammar, but it is the earliest that has survived in full, and the culmination of a long grammatical tradition that Fortson says, is "one of the intellectual wonders of the ancient world". Pāṇini cites ten scholars on the phonological and grammatical aspects of the Sanskrit language before him, as well as
31672-401: The general story is narrated by an unknown narrator, and in this narration the stories are told by Scheherazade . In many of Scheherazade's narrations, there are also stories narrated , and even in some of these, there are some other stories. An example of this is " The Three Apples ", a murder mystery narrated by Scheherazade. Within the story, after the murderer reveals himself, he narrates
31886-537: The gods Varuna, Mitra, Indra, and Nasatya found in the earliest layers of the Vedic literature. O Bṛhaspati, when in giving names they first set forth the beginning of Language, Their most excellent and spotless secret was laid bare through love, When the wise ones formed Language with their mind, purifying it like grain with a winnowing fan, Then friends knew friendships – an auspicious mark placed on their language. — Rigveda 10.71.1–4 Translated by Roger Woodard The Vedic Sanskrit found in
32100-431: The historic Sanskrit literary culture and the failure of new Sanskrit literature to assimilate into the changing cultural and political environment. Sheldon Pollock states that in some crucial way, "Sanskrit is dead ". After the 12th century, the Sanskrit literary works were reduced to "reinscription and restatements" of ideas already explored, and any creativity was restricted to hymns and verses. This contrasted with
32314-486: The intense change that must have occurred in the pre-Vedic period between the Proto-Indo-Aryan language and Vedic Sanskrit. The noticeable differences between the Vedic and the Classical Sanskrit include the much-expanded grammar and grammatical categories as well as the differences in the accent, the semantics and the syntax. There are also some differences between how some of the nouns and verbs end, as well as
32528-432: The largest cultural heritage that any civilization has produced prior to the invention of the printing press. — Foreword of Sanskrit Computational Linguistics (2009), Gérard Huet, Amba Kulkarni and Peter Scharf Sanskrit has been the predominant language of Hindu texts encompassing a rich tradition of philosophical and religious texts, as well as poetry, music, drama , scientific , technical and others. It
32742-412: The linguistic expression and sets the standard for the Sanskrit language. Pāṇini made use of a technical metalanguage consisting of a syntax, morphology and lexicon. This metalanguage is organised according to a series of meta-rules, some of which are explicitly stated while others can be deduced. Despite differences in the analysis from that of modern linguistics, Pāṇini's work has been found valuable and
32956-460: The literary works. The Indian tradition, states Winternitz , has favored the learning and the usage of multiple languages from the ancient times. Sanskrit was a spoken language in the educated and the elite classes, but it was also a language that must have been understood in a wider circle of society because the widely popular folk epics and stories such as the Ramayana , the Mahabharata ,
33170-409: The main character Fyodor Cherdyntsev as well as the whole Chapter IV, a critical biography of Nikolay Chernyshevsky (also written by Fyodor). This novel is considered one of the first metanovels in literature. With the rise of literary modernism , writers experimented with ways in which multiple narratives might nest imperfectly within each other. A particularly ingenious example of nested narratives
33384-480: The main story. On the television series The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles , each episode was framed as though it were being told by Indy when he was older (usually acted by George Hall , but once by Harrison Ford ). The same device of an adult narrator representing the older version of a young protagonist is used in the films Stand by Me and A Christmas Story , and the television show The Wonder Years and How I Met Your Mother . In The Amory Wars ,
33598-566: The mixing of varna (here, Brahmin-Kshatriya marriage). Arjuna maintains his calm, continues to hide his true identity, insists that he is a "Brahmin who fight". Arjuna's accomplishments and calmness win Draupadi's heart. Draupadi picks Arjuna and awards the garland to him, signify that she chooses to marry the disguised-Brahmin Arjuna. The varna-based discrimination and verbal insults on Arjuna, for lovely Draupadi's hand, one that Karna initiates at
33812-511: The modern age include the Samaveda , Yajurveda , Atharvaveda , along with the embedded and layered Vedic texts such as the Brahmanas , Aranyakas , and the early Upanishads . These Vedic documents reflect the dialects of Sanskrit found in the various parts of the northwestern, northern, and eastern Indian subcontinent. According to Michael Witzel, Vedic Sanskrit was a spoken language of
34026-490: The morals of the novels through plot descriptions of his stories. Books such as Breakfast of Champions and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater are sprinkled with these plot descriptions. Stanisław Lem 's Tale of the Three Storytelling Machines of King Genius from The Cyberiad has several levels of storytelling. All levels tell stories of the same person, Trurl. House of Leaves is the tale of
34240-429: The more advanced Classical Sanskrit. Rituals and the rites-of-passage ceremonies have been and continue to be the other occasions where a wide spectrum of people hear Sanskrit, and occasionally join in to speak some Sanskrit words such as namah . Classical Sanskrit is the standard register as laid out in the grammar of Pāṇini , around the fourth century BCE. Its position in the cultures of Greater India
34454-401: The most advanced analysis of linguistics until the twentieth century. Pāṇini's comprehensive and scientific theory of grammar is conventionally taken to mark the start of Classical Sanskrit. His systematic treatise inspired and made Sanskrit the preeminent Indian language of learning and literature for two millennia. It is unclear whether Pāṇini himself wrote his treatise or he orally created
34668-602: The most archaic poems of the Iranian and Greek language families, the Gathas of old Avestan and Iliad of Homer . As the Rigveda was orally transmitted by methods of memorisation of exceptional complexity, rigour and fidelity, as a single text without variant readings, its preserved archaic syntax and morphology are of vital importance in the reconstruction of the common ancestor language Proto-Indo-European . Sanskrit does not have an attested native script: from around
34882-409: The mountains of what is today northern Afghanistan across northern Pakistan and into northwestern India. Vedic Sanskrit interacted with the preexisting ancient languages of the subcontinent, absorbing names of newly encountered plants and animals; in addition, the ancient Dravidian languages influenced Sanskrit's phonology and syntax. Sanskrit can also more narrowly refer to Classical Sanskrit ,
35096-409: The murder of Hamlet's father in the main action, and Prince Hamlet writes additional material to emphasize this. Hamlet wishes to provoke the murderer, his uncle, and sums this up by saying "the play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king." Hamlet calls this new play The Mouse-trap (a title that Agatha Christie later took for the long-running play The Mousetrap ). Christie's work
35310-435: The northwest in the late Bronze Age . Sanskrit is the sacred language of Hinduism , the language of classical Hindu philosophy , and of historical texts of Buddhism and Jainism . It was a link language in ancient and medieval South Asia, and upon transmission of Hindu and Buddhist culture to Southeast Asia, East Asia and Central Asia in the early medieval era, it became a language of religion and high culture , and of
35524-545: The numbers are thought to signify a wish to be aligned with the prestige of the language. Sanskrit has been taught in traditional gurukulas since ancient times; it is widely taught today at the secondary school level. The oldest Sanskrit college is the Benares Sanskrit College founded in 1791 during East India Company rule . Sanskrit continues to be widely used as a ceremonial and ritual language in Hindu and Buddhist hymns and chants . In Sanskrit,
35738-482: The one who always gives dāna (charity), particularly to Brahmins, as being more important than his own life. As the battle-to-death between Karna and Arjuna becomes certain, Kunti – the mother of both, faints and later weeps in sorrow that her boys are bent on killing each other. In parallel, Arjuna's brothers and Indra – the father of Arjuna and a major Vedic deity – plan ways to make Karna mortal. Surya meets Karna and warns him of Indra's plan to appear disguised as
35952-403: The oral transmission of the texts is reliable: they are ceremonial literature, where the exact phonetic expression and its preservation were a part of the historic tradition. However some scholars have suggested that the original Ṛg-veda differed in some fundamental ways in phonology compared to the sole surviving version available to us. In particular that retroflex consonants did not exist as
36166-512: The other". Under these circumstances, there is an inherent subjective weighing of one moral duty against another. Sanskrit Sanskrit ( / ˈ s æ n s k r ɪ t / ; attributively 𑀲𑀁𑀲𑁆𑀓𑀾𑀢𑀁 , संस्कृत- , saṃskṛta- ; nominally संस्कृतम् , saṃskṛtam , IPA: [ˈsɐ̃skr̩tɐm] ) is a classical language belonging to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages . It arose in South Asia after its predecessor languages had diffused there from
36380-431: The other." Reinöhl further states that there is a symmetric relationship between Dravidian languages like Kannada or Tamil, with Indo-Aryan languages like Bengali or Hindi, whereas the same relationship is not found for non-Indo-Aryan languages, for example, Persian or English: A sentence in a Dravidian language like Tamil or Kannada becomes ordinarily good Bengali or Hindi by substituting Bengali or Hindi equivalents for
36594-452: The play broadly mirror those of the novel and give the character Oedipa Maas a greater context to consider her predicament; the play concerns a feud between two rival mail distribution companies, which appears to be ongoing to the present day, and in which, if this is the case, Oedipa has found herself involved. As in Hamlet , the director makes changes to the original script; in this instance,
36808-416: The play by themselves. The characters in the play are also brother and sister and are also named Clare and Felice. The Mysteries , a modern reworking of the medieval mystery plays , remains faithful to its roots by having the modern actors play the sincere, naïve tradesmen and women as they take part in the original performances. Alternatively, a play might be about the production of a play, and include
37022-535: The play is presented before an audience of two of the characters, who comment upon the action. From references in other contemporary works, Kyd is also assumed to have been the writer of an early, lost version of Hamlet (the so-called Ur-Hamlet ), with a play-within-a-play interlude. William Shakespeare 's Hamlet retains this device by having Hamlet ask some strolling players to perform The Murder of Gonzago . The action and characters in The Murder mirror
37236-409: The plot, it allows the author to play on the reader's perceptions of the characters—the motives and the reliability of the storyteller are automatically in question. Stories within a story may disclose the background of characters or events, tell of myths and legends that influence the plot, or even seem to be extraneous diversions from the plot. In some cases, the story within a story is involved in
37450-529: The political elites in some of these regions. As a result, Sanskrit had a lasting impact on the languages of South Asia, Southeast Asia and East Asia, especially in their formal and learned vocabularies. Sanskrit generally connotes several Old Indo-Aryan language varieties. The most archaic of these is the Vedic Sanskrit found in the Rigveda , a collection of 1,028 hymns composed between 1500 BCE and 1200 BCE by Indo-Aryan tribes migrating east from
37664-414: The possible influence of Dravidian on Sanskrit is only one of many items of syntactic assimilation, not least among them the large repertoire of morphological modality and aspect that, once one knows to look for it, can be found everywhere in classical and postclassical Sanskrit". The main influence of Dravidian on Sanskrit is found to have been concentrated in the timespan between the late Vedic period and
37878-439: The previous 1,500 years when "great experiments in moral and aesthetic imagination" marked the Indian scholarship using Classical Sanskrit, states Pollock. Scholars maintain that the Sanskrit language did not die, but rather only declined. Jurgen Hanneder disagrees with Pollock, finding his arguments elegant but "often arbitrary". According to Hanneder, a decline or regional absence of creative and innovative literature constitutes
38092-480: The problems of interpretation and misunderstanding. The purifying structure of the Sanskrit language removes these imperfections. The early Sanskrit grammarian Daṇḍin states, for example, that much in the Prakrit languages is etymologically rooted in Sanskrit, but involves "loss of sounds" and corruptions that result from a "disregard of the grammar". Daṇḍin acknowledged that there are words and confusing structures in Prakrit that thrive independent of Sanskrit. This view
38306-423: The protagonist Mace Windu narrates the story within his journal, while the main story is being told from the third-person limited point of view. Several Star Trek tales are stories or events within stories, such as Gene Roddenberry 's novelization of Star Trek: The Motion Picture , J. A. Lawrence 's Mudd's Angels , John M. Ford 's The Final Reflection , Margaret Wander Bonanno 's Strangers from
38520-456: The protagonist receives a small book from a baker, in which the baker tells the story of a sailor who tells the story of another sailor, and Sophie's World about a girl who is actually a character in a book that is being read by Hilde, a girl in another dimension. Later on in the book Sophie questions this idea, and realizes that Hilde too could be a character in a story that in turn is being read by another. Mahabharata , an Indian epic that
38734-487: The pursuit of excellence in whatever he did. Karna is also known as someone who craves for respect, love and attention, who is overly sensitive to criticism, who habitually brags about his skills and martial capabilities, yet is deeply thoughtful and dharmic in critical moments of the epic. Karna meets Duryodhana for the first time in Hastinapura during archery lessons from Drona, an event described in section 3.293 of
38948-609: The regional Prakrit languages, which makes it likely that the interaction, the sharing of words and ideas began early in the Indian history. As the Indian thought diversified and challenged earlier beliefs of Hinduism, particularly in the form of Buddhism and Jainism , the Prakrit languages such as Pali in Theravada Buddhism and Ardhamagadhi in Jainism competed with Sanskrit in the ancient times. However, states Paul Dundas , these ancient Prakrit languages had "roughly
39162-497: The relationship between various Indo-European languages, the origin of all these languages may possibly be in what is now Central or Eastern Europe, while the Indo-Iranian group possibly arose in Central Russia. The Iranian and Indo-Aryan branches separated quite early. It is the Indo-Aryan branch that moved into eastern Iran and then south into South Asia in the first half of the 2nd millennium BCE. Once in ancient India,
39376-562: The role of language, the ontological status of painting word-images through sound, and the need for rules so that it can serve as a means for a community of speakers, separated by geography or time, to share and understand profound ideas from each other. These speculations became particularly important to the Mīmāṃsā and the Nyaya schools of Hindu philosophy, and later to Vedanta and Mahayana Buddhism, states Frits Staal —a scholar of Linguistics with
39590-405: The sage Vyasa , was also born from an unwed union of Satyavati and sage Parashara . German Indologist Georg von Simson states that Karna of the Mahabharata resembles Kumbhakarna of the Ramayana , the demon brother of the main antagonist Ravana of the epic Ramayana in their powers to sway the war. Both Karna and Kumbhakarna did not take part in the great wars of their respective epics at
39804-496: The same relationship to Sanskrit as medieval Italian does to Latin". The Indian tradition states that the Buddha and the Mahavira preferred the Prakrit language so that everyone could understand it. However, scholars such as Dundas have questioned this hypothesis. They state that there is no evidence for this and whatever evidence is available suggests that by the start of the common era, hardly anybody other than learned monks had
40018-461: The second where his biological mother Kunti comes to meet him for the first time. Krishna approaches Karna as an ambassador seeking to prevent violence and the war. Krishna starts by complimenting Karna for knowing "the Vedas and the subtlety of the dharmasastras ". He then requests his support to end the cascading cycle of violence and war. Krishna tells Karna that Kunti is his biological mother and Pandavas are his half-brothers. In section 5.138 of
40232-501: The semi-nomadic Aryans . The Vedic Sanskrit language or a closely related Indo-European variant was recognized beyond ancient India as evidenced by the " Mitanni Treaty" between the ancient Hittite and Mitanni people, carved into a rock, in a region that now includes parts of Syria and Turkey. Parts of this treaty, such as the names of the Mitanni princes and technical terms related to horse training, for reasons not understood, are in early forms of Vedic Sanskrit. The treaty also invokes
40446-421: The social structures such as the role of the poet and the priests, the patronage economy, the phrasal equations, and some of the poetic metres. While there are similarities, state Jamison and Brereton, there are also differences between Vedic Sanskrit, the Old Avestan, and the Mycenaean Greek literature. For example, unlike the Sanskrit similes in the Ṛg-veda, the Old Avestan Gathas lack simile entirely, and it
40660-451: The start. Scholars internationally have also drawn parallels with various European mythologies. Karna's kavacha (breastplate armour) has been compared with that of Achilles 's Styx -coated body and with Irish warrior Ferdiad 's skin that could not be pierced. He has been compared to the Greek mythological part divine, part human character Achilles on various occasions as they both have divine powers but lack corresponding status. Dharma
40874-420: The stories of their predecessors in a manner that validates a belief stated in the sixth tale that "Our lives are not our own. We are bound to others, past and present and by each crime, and every kindness, we birth our future." The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon has several characters seeing a play called The Courier's Tragedy by the fictitious Jacobean playwright Richard Wharfinger. The events of
41088-401: The story within a story influences the reality of the story he has been telling, so that what happens in "The Mad Trist" begins happening in "The Fall of the House of Usher". Also, in Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes , there are many stories within the story that influence the hero's actions (there are others that even the author himself admits are purely digressive). Most of the first part
41302-411: The subject of an epic puppet theater presentation. Another example is found in Samuel Delany 's Trouble on Triton , which features a theater company that produces elaborate staged spectacles for randomly selected single-person audiences. Plays produced by the "Caws of Art" theater company also feature in Russell Hoban's modern fable, The Mouse and His Child . Raina Telgemeier 's best-selling Drama
41516-406: The time of Draupadi's svayamvara competition comes back to haunt him many times through angry Bhima and others who remind Karna that he is merely a suta-putra (son of a charioteer). Draupadi too never likes Karna thereafter. Karna fights and berates the Pandavas at the legendary gambling match during the royal consecration ritual. There, Karna uses the choicest words to insult Draupadi that takes
41730-448: The titular character. The most notable examples are " You Are Old, Father William ", " 'Tis the Voice of the Lobster ", " Jabberwocky ", and " The Walrus and the Carpenter ". Chaucer 's The Canterbury Tales and Boccaccio 's Decameron are also classic frame stories. In Chaucer's Canterbury Tales , the characters tell tales suited to their personalities and tell them in ways that highlight their personalities. The noble knight tells
41944-535: The turn of the 1st-millennium CE, it has been written in various Brahmic scripts , and in the modern era most commonly in Devanagari . Sanskrit's status, function, and place in India's cultural heritage are recognized by its inclusion in the Constitution of India 's Eighth Schedule languages . However, despite attempts at revival, there are no first-language speakers of Sanskrit in India. In each of India's recent decennial censuses, several thousand citizens have reported Sanskrit to be their mother tongue, but
42158-430: The twin Ashwini Kumaras . As the adolescent mother abandons her unwanted child on the river, she laments and the epic verses describe her emotions with heartbreaking poetry, according to the Indologist Patricia Greer. The basket floats, reaches the river Charmanwati , which carries it to the Yamuna River . The basket floats on and reaches the Ganges River and on it into the kingdom of Anga (ancient Bengal). There, it
42372-408: The variants in the usage of Sanskrit in different regions of India. The ten Vedic scholars he quotes are Āpiśali, Kaśyapa , Gārgya, Gālava, Cakravarmaṇa, Bhāradvāja , Śākaṭāyana, Śākalya, Senaka and Sphoṭāyana. In the Aṣṭādhyāyī , language is observed in a manner that has no parallel among Greek or Latin grammarians. Pāṇini's grammar, according to Renou and Filliozat, is a classic that defines
42586-429: The veracity of the previous layer, or is challenged by the succeeding layer. Presuming each layer to be a true telling within the overall story, a chain of events is created linking Adam Ewing's embrace of the abolitionist movement in the 1850s to the religious redemption of a post-apocalyptic tribal man over a century after the fall of modern civilization. The characters in each nested layer take inspiration or lessons from
42800-564: The vernacular Prakrits. Many Sanskrit dramas indicate that the language coexisted with the vernacular Prakrits. The cities of Varanasi , Paithan , Pune and Kanchipuram were centers of classical Sanskrit learning and public debates until the arrival of the colonial era. According to Lamotte , Sanskrit became the dominant literary and inscriptional language because of its precision in communication. It was, states Lamotte, an ideal instrument for presenting ideas, and as knowledge in Sanskrit multiplied, so did its spread and influence. Sanskrit
43014-403: The wheel of Karna's chariot gets stuck in the ground. Karna steps out of his chariot and is distracted while trying to unstick it. Arjuna – whose own son was killed by the Kauravas a day ago while he was trying to unstick his chariot's wheel – takes this moment to launch the fatal attack. Karna dies. The Mahabharata provides scarce information on Karna's marital life. In the Udyoga Parva , it
43228-420: The whole of The Taming of the Shrew is a play-within-a-play, presented to convince Christopher Sly , a drunken tinker, that he is a nobleman watching a private performance, but the device has no relevance to the plot (unless Katharina's subservience to her "lord" in the last scene is intended to strengthen the deception against the tinker ) and is often dropped in modern productions. The musical Kiss Me, Kate
43442-462: The woman most likely to care for it well. This kind of play-within-a-play, which appears at the beginning of the main play and acts as a "frame" for it, is called an " induction ". Brecht's one-act play The Elephant Calf (1926) is a play-within-a-play performed in the foyer of the theatre during his Man Equals Man . In Jean Giraudoux 's play Ondine , all of act two is a series of scenes within scenes, sometimes two levels deep. This increases
43656-498: The world – a victory which itself is quite different from real history. In Red Orc's Rage by Philip J. Farmer a doubly recursive method is used to intertwine its fictional layers. This novel is part of a science-fiction series, the World of Tiers . Farmer collaborated in the writing of this novel with an American psychiatrist, Dr. A. James Giannini. Dr. Giannini had previously used the World of Tiers series in treating patients in group therapy. During these therapeutic sessions,
43870-408: The wrong place' – this is what Karna symbolizes to many minds today. Life may have been unfair to Karna but he rises above pity. Despite his flaws we admire him. As the Karna story unfolds, similar to other stories in epic, it raises moral dilemmas. With each dilemma, the Mahabharata presents various sides and shades of answers through the characters. According to Bimal Matilal , the characters face
44084-446: The Ṛg-veda is distinctly more archaic than other Vedic texts, and in many respects, the Rigvedic language is notably more similar to those found in the archaic texts of Old Avestan Zoroastrian Gathas and Homer's Iliad and Odyssey . According to Stephanie W. Jamison and Joel P. Brereton – Indologists known for their translation of the Ṛg-veda – the Vedic Sanskrit literature "clearly inherited" from Indo-Iranian and Indo-European times
44298-408: Was a spoken language ( bhasha ) used by the cultured and educated. Some sutras expound upon the variant forms of spoken Sanskrit versus written Sanskrit. Chinese Buddhist pilgrim Xuanzang mentioned in his memoir that official philosophical debates in India were held in Sanskrit, not in the vernacular language of that region. According to Sanskrit linguist professor Madhav Deshpande, Sanskrit
44512-427: Was a spoken language in a colloquial form by the mid-1st millennium BCE which coexisted with a more formal, grammatically correct form of literary Sanskrit. This, states Deshpande, is true for modern languages where colloquial incorrect approximations and dialects of a language are spoken and understood, along with more "refined, sophisticated and grammatically accurate" forms of the same language being found in
44726-472: Was adopted voluntarily as a vehicle of high culture, arts, and profound ideas. Pollock disagrees with Lamotte, but concurs that Sanskrit's influence grew into what he terms a "Sanskrit Cosmopolis" over a region that included all of South Asia and much of southeast Asia. The Sanskrit language cosmopolis thrived beyond India between 300 and 1300 CE. Today, it is believed that Kashmiri is the closest language to Sanskrit. Reinöhl mentions that not only have
44940-409: Was also called with many names. Some of them are: The story of Karna is told in the Mahābhārata , one of the Sanskrit epics from the Indian subcontinent. The work is written in Classical Sanskrit and is a composite work of revisions, editing and interpolations over many centuries. The oldest parts in the surviving version of the text probably date to about 400 BCE. Within Mahabharata, which follows
45154-568: Was also the language of some of the oldest surviving, authoritative and much followed philosophical works of Jainism such as the Tattvartha Sutra by Umaswati . The Sanskrit language has been one of the major means for the transmission of knowledge and ideas in Asian history. Indian texts in Sanskrit were already in China by 402 CE, carried by the influential Buddhist pilgrim Faxian who translated them into Chinese by 418 CE. Xuanzang , another Chinese Buddhist pilgrim, learnt Sanskrit in India and carried 657 Sanskrit texts to China in
45368-415: Was parodied in Tom Stoppard's The Real Inspector Hound , in which two theater critics are drawn into the murder mystery they are watching. The audience is similarly absorbed into the action in Woody Allen's play God , which is about two failed playwrights in Ancient Greece. The phrase The Conscience of the King also became the title of a Star Trek episode featuring a production of Hamlet which leads to
45582-523: Was true indeed. Karna was secretly born to an unmarried Kunti in her teenage years, and fearing outrage and backlash from society over her premarital pregnancy, Kunti had to abandon the newly born Karna adrift in a basket on the Ganges. The basket is discovered floating on the Ganges River . He is adopted and raised by foster Suta parents named Radha and Adhiratha Nandana of the charioteer and poet profession working for king Dhritarashtra . Karna grows up to be an accomplished warrior of extraordinary abilities,
45796-442: Was visualized as "pervading all creation", another representation of the world itself; the "mysterious magnum" of Hindu thought. The search for perfection in thought and the goal of liberation were among the dimensions of sacred sound, and the common thread that wove all ideas and inspirations together became the quest for what the ancient Indians believed to be a perfect language, the "phonocentric episteme" of Sanskrit. Sanskrit as
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