128-477: Valmiki ( / v ɑː l ˈ m iː k i / ; Sanskrit : वाल्मीकि , romanized : Vālmīki , [ʋɑːlmiːki] ) was a legendary poet who is celebrated as the traditional author of the epic Ramayana , based on the attribution in the text itself. He is revered as Ādi Kavi , the first poet, author of Ramayana , the first epic poem. The Ramayana , originally written by Valmiki, consists of 24,000 shlokas and seven cantos (kaṇḍas). The Ramayana
256-513: A patron saint, with a plethora of mandirs (temples) dedicated to him. In the Siddhar tradition of Tamil Nadu , Valmiki is known as Vanmeegar and is revered as one of the 18 esteemed Siddhars of yore. The Ettukudi Murugan Temple, Nagapattinam is home to his Jeeva Samadhi . An area in Chennai , Tiruvanmiyur is believed to derive its name from Sage Valmiki, Thiru-Valmiki-Oor. There
384-428: A change in metres was an embedded code to inform the reciter and audience that it marks the end of a section or chapter. Each section or chapter of these texts uses identical metres, rhythmically presenting their ideas and making it easier to remember, recall and check for accuracy. Similarly, the authors of Sanskrit hymns used metres as tools of literary architecture, wherein they coded a hymn's end by frequently using
512-741: A complete expression of the Chandas . Panini's treatise on Sanskrit grammar distinguishes Chandas as the verses that compose the Vedas, from Bhāṣā (Sanskrit: भाषा), the language spoken by people for everyday communication. Vedic Sanskrit texts employ fifteen metres. Seven are common, and the most frequent three are 8-, 11- and 12-syllable lines. Post-Vedic texts, such as the epics as well as other classical literature of Hinduism, deploy both linear and non-linear metres, many of which are based on syllables and others based on repeating numbers of morae (matra per foot). About 150 treatises on Sanskrit prosody from
640-464: 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." Sloka meter Divisions Sama vedic Yajur vedic Atharva vedic Vaishnava puranas Shaiva puranas Shakta puranas Sanskrit prosody or Chandas refers to one of
768-561: A fixed number of syllables per verse, and those based on fixed number of morae per verse. Extant ancient manuals on Chandas include Pingala 's Chandah Sutra , while an example of a medieval Sanskrit prosody manual is Kedara Bhatta's Vrittaratnakara . The most exhaustive compilations of Sanskrit prosody describe over 600 metres. This is a substantially larger repertoire than in any other metrical tradition. The term Chandas ( Sanskrit : छन्दः/छन्दस् chandaḥ/chandas (singular)) means "pleasing, alluring, lovely, delightful or charming", and
896-433: 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
1024-591: 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
1152-658: 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
1280-454: 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
1408-479: 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
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#17327722770381536-546: 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
1664-578: 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
1792-538: 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
1920-427: A sequence of gaṇas, or triplets of syllables (trisyllabic feet), plus the excess, if any, as single units. There being eight possible patterns of light and heavy syllables in a sequence of three, Pingala associated a letter, allowing the metre to be described compactly as an acronym . Each of these has its Greek prosody equivalent as listed below. Pingala's order of the gaṇas, viz. m-y-r-s-t-j-bh-n , corresponds to
2048-439: 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
2176-705: A song; with the song – a chant; with the Tristubh – a recited stanza; With the stanza of two feet and four feet – a hymn; with the syllable they measure the seven voices. ॥24॥ Beyond these seven metres, ancient and medieval era Sanskrit scholars developed numerous other syllable-based metres ( Akshara-chandas ). Examples include Atijagati (13x4, in 16 varieties), Shakvari (14x4, in 20 varieties), Atishakvari (15x4, in 18 varieties), Ashti (16x4, in 12 varieties), Atyashti (17x4, in 17 varieties), Dhriti (18x4, in 17 varieties), Atidhriti (19x4, in 13 varieties), Kriti (20x4, in 4 varieties) and so on. In addition to
2304-422: A standard enumeration in binary , when the three syllables in each gaṇa are read right-to-left with H=0 and L=1. The word yamātārājabhānasalagāḥ (or yamātārājabhānasalagaṃ ) is a mnemonic for Pingala's gaṇas, developed by ancient commentators, using the vowels "a" and "ā" for light and heavy syllables respectively with the letters of his scheme. In the form without a grammatical ending, yamātārājabhānasalagā
2432-463: A thief before turning into a rishi. The Nagara Khanda of the Skanda Purana in its section on the creation of Mukhara Tirtha mentions that Valmiki was born a Brahmin , with the name of Lohajangha and was a devoted son to his parents. He had a beautiful wife and both of them were faithful to each other. Once, when there was no rain in the region of Anarta , for twelve long years, Lohajangha, for
2560-489: A verse of a metre different from that used in the hymn's body. However, they never used Gayatri metre to end a hymn or composition, possibly because it enjoyed a special level of reverence in Hindu texts. In general, all metres were sacred and the Vedic chants and hymns attribute the perfection and beauty of the metres to divine origins, referring to them as mythological characters or equivalent to gods. The verse perfection in
2688-573: Is a temple for Valmiki located in this place, which is believed to be 1300 years old. Shree Valmiki Mata Maha Samsthana is a temple dedicated to Valmiki in Rajanahalli, Karnataka . Valmiki Ashram , a site considered to be the original ashram of Valmiki, is located in Chitwan district of Nepal . The site is near the Triveni Dham pilgrimage site. Several Indian films have been made on
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#17327722770382816-516: 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
2944-435: Is also known as Chandah sastra , or Pingala Sutras after its author Pingala . It is the oldest Hindu treatise on prosody to have survived into the modern era. This text is structured in 8 books, with a cumulative total of 310 sutras. It is a collection of aphorisms predominantly focused on the art of poetic metres, and presents some mathematics in the service of music. There have been numerous Bhashyas (commentaries) of
3072-432: Is also quoted as being the contemporary of Rama. Menen claims Valmiki is "the first author in all history to bring himself into his own composition." Valmiki was born as Agni Sharma to a Brahmin named Pracheta (also known as Sumali) of Bhrigu gotra. According to legend he once met the great sage Narada and had a discourse with him on his duties. Moved by Narada's words, Agni Sharma began to perform penance and chanted
3200-531: Is based on the root chad which means "esteemed to please, to seem good, feel pleasant and/or something that nourishes, gratifies or is celebrated". The term also refers to "any metrical part of the Vedas or other composition". The hymns of Rigveda include the names of metres, which implies that the discipline of Chandas (Sanskrit prosody) emerged in the 2nd-millennium BCE. The Brahmanas layer of Vedic literature, composed between 900 BCE and 700 BCE, contains
3328-575: Is composed of about 480,002 words, being a quarter of the length of the full text of the Mahabharata or about four times the length of the Iliad . The Ramayana tells the story of a prince, Rama of the city of Ayodhya in the Kingdom of Kosala , whose wife Sita is abducted by Ravana , the demon-king ( Rakshasa ) of Lanka . The scholars' estimates for the earliest stage of the text ranging from
3456-632: Is considered the first shloka in Sanskrit literature . Valmiki later composed the entire Ramayana in the same meter. Valmiki is revered as Adi Kavi (the first poet); the Ramayana is revered as the first kavya (poem). Valmiki played an important role in Uttarakāṇḍa, the last chapter of the epic Ramayana . The Uttarakāṇḍa may not have been originally worked by Valmiki. The scholars Robert and Sally Goldman, for example, have pointed out: "Much of
3584-469: Is counted as one mora, and a long syllable is counted as two morae. Gaṇa ( Sanskrit , "group") is the technical term for the pattern of light and heavy syllables in a sequence of three. It is used in treatises on Sanskrit prosody to describe metres, according to a method first propounded in Pingala 's chandahsutra . Pingala organizes the metres using two units: Pingala's method described any metre as
3712-584: Is determined from the amount of time needed to pronounce a syllable, and not on stress (quantitative metre). Each eight-syllable line, for instance in the Rigveda, is approximately equivalent to the Greek iambic dimeter. The sacred Gayatri metre of the Hindus consists of three of such iambic dimeter lines, and this embedded metre alone is at the heart of about 25% of the entire Rigveda. The gaṇas are, however, not
3840-452: 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
3968-545: Is less common than syllable-based metric texts, but found in important texts of Hindu philosophy , drama, lyrical works and Prakrit poetry. The entire Samkhyakarika text of the Samkhya school of Hindu philosophy is composed in Arya metre, as are many chapters in the mathematical treatises of Aryabhata , and some texts of Kalidasa . Indian scholars also developed a hybrid class of Sanskrit metres, which combined features of
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4096-532: 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
4224-509: Is self-descriptive, where the structure of each gaṇa is shown by its own syllable and the two following it: The mnemonic also encodes the light "la" and heavy "gā" unit syllables of the full scheme. The truncated version obtained by dropping the last two syllables, viz. yamātārājabhānasa , can be read cyclically (i.e., wrapping around to the front). It is an example of a De Bruijn sequence . Sanskrit prosody shares similarities with Greek and Latin prosody. For example, in all three, rhythm
4352-479: 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,
4480-589: 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
4608-540: 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
4736-656: The Natya Shastra , chapter 104 of the Brihat Samhita , the Pramodajanaka section of the Manasollasa contain embedded treatises on Chandas . The metres found in classical Sanskrit poetry are classified into three kinds. Most of Sanskrit poetry is composed in verses of four lines each. Each quarter-verse is called a pāda (literally, "foot"). Meters of the same length are distinguished by
4864-574: The Ramayana . Bala Kanda of the epic also tells the story of Valmiki narrating the Ramayana to Lava and Kusha, who become his disciples. Valmiki was alive during the Mahabharata , and he was one of the many sages that visited Yudhisthira after the war. He told Yudhisthira the benefits of worshipping Shiva . Once upon a time, some ascetic possessors of the homa fire cursed Valmiki as guilty of brahminicide . The sin possessed him as soon as he
4992-580: 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
5120-672: The Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages . It arose in South Asia after its predecessor languages had diffused there from 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
5248-613: 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
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5376-753: 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
5504-532: The Rigveda , a collection of 1,028 hymns composed between 1500 BCE and 1200 BCE by Indo-Aryan tribes migrating east from 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 ,
5632-476: 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
5760-421: The bhashya tradition of Hinduism. Of the various commentaries, those widely studied are the three 6th century texts - Jayadevacchandas , Janashrayi-Chhandovichiti and Ratnamanjusha , the 10th century commentary by Karnataka prosody scholar Halayudha, who also authored the grammatical Shastrakavya and Kavirahasya (literally, The Poet's Secret ). Other important historical commentaries include those by
5888-406: 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
6016-500: 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
6144-491: The 11th-century Yadavaprakasha and 12th-century Bhaskaracharya, as well as Jayakriti's Chandonushasana , and Chandomanjari by Gangadasa. There is no word without meter, nor is there any meter without words. — Natya Shastra Major encyclopedic and arts-related Hindu texts from the 1st and 2nd millennium CE contain sections on Chandas . For example, the chapters 328 to 335 of the Agni Purana , chapter 15 of
6272-414: 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
6400-532: 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
6528-505: The 8th to 4th centuries BCE, and later stages extending up to the 3rd century CE, although original date of composition is unknown. As with many traditional epics, it has gone through a process of interpolations and redactions, making it impossible to date accurately. British satirist Aubrey Menen says that Valmiki was "recognized as a literary genius," and thus was considered, "an outlaw," presumably because of his " philosophic scepticism ," as part of an "Indian Enlightenment" period. Valmiki
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#17327722770386656-425: 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
6784-532: 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
6912-521: 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
7040-476: 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
7168-519: 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
7296-532: 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
7424-496: 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
7552-499: 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
7680-638: 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
7808-447: 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
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#17327722770387936-451: 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
8064-511: The Vedic texts, verse Upanishads and Smriti texts has led some Indologists from the 19th century onwards to identify suspected portions of texts where a line or sections are off the expected metre. Some editors have controversially used this metri causa principle to emend Sanskrit verses, assuming that their creative conjectural rewriting with similar-sounding words will restore the metre. This practice has been criticized, states Patrick Olivelle , because such modern corrections may be changing
8192-459: 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
8320-477: The bird. He saw a hunter with a bow and arrows, nearby. Valmiki became very angry. His lips opened and he cried out, मा निषाद प्रतिष्ठां त्वमगमः शाश्वतीः समाः। यत्क्रौञ्चमिथुनादेकमवधीः काममोहितम्॥' mā niṣāda pratiṣṭhā tvamagamaḥ śāśvatīḥ samāḥ yat krauñcamithunādekam avadhīḥ kāmamohitam You will find no rest for the long years of Eternity For you killed a bird in love and unsuspecting Emerging spontaneously from Valmiki's rage and grief, this couplet
8448-440: 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
8576-502: The classical era are known, in which some 850 metres were defined and studied by the ancient and medieval Hindu scholars. The ancient Chandahsutra of Pingala , also called Pingala Sutras , is the oldest Sanskrit prosody text that has survived into the modern age, and it is dated to between 600 and 200 BCE. Like all Sutras , the Pingala text is distilled information in the form of aphorisms, and these were widely commented on through
8704-527: 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
8832-559: 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
8960-601: 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
9088-467: 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
9216-471: 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
9344-460: 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
9472-490: The early medieval era, it became a language of religion and high culture , and of 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
9600-548: 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
9728-412: 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
9856-474: The four 11-syllable Tristubh, the four 12-syllable Jagati, and the mixed pāda metres named Ushnih, Brihati and Pankti. गायत्रेण प्रति मिमीते अर्कमर्केण साम त्रैष्टुभेन वाकम् । वाकेन वाकं द्विपदा चतुष्पदाक्षरेण मिमते सप्त वाणीः ॥२४॥ gāyatréṇa práti mimīte arkám arkéṇa sā́ma traíṣṭubhena vākám vākéna vākáṃ dvipádā cátuṣpadā akṣáreṇa mimate saptá vā́ṇīḥ With the Gayatri, he measures
9984-399: The four quarters are similar in pattern, Ardhasamavritta , where alternate verses have a similar syllabic structure, and Vishamavritta where all four quarters are different. A regular Vritta is defined as that where the total number of syllables in each line is less than or equal to 26 syllables, while irregulars contain more. When the metre is based on morae ( matra ), a short syllable
10112-537: 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
10240-431: 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
10368-486: 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
10496-432: 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
10624-441: The life of the poet, beginning with G. V. Sane's Valmiki (1921); it was followed by Surendra Narayan Roy's Ratnakar (1921), Ellis Dungan 's Valmiki (1946), Bhalji Pendharkar 's Valmiki (1946), Sundarrao Nadkarni 's Valmiki (1946), C.S.R. Rao 's Valmiki (starring Rajkumar 1963) and Valmiki (starring N. T. Rama Rao ; 1963), and Arvind Bhatt's Sant Valmiki (1991). Bhatt's film which starred Suresh Oberoi in
10752-412: 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
10880-402: 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 ,
11008-405: The meaning, adding to corruption, and imposing the modern pronunciation of words on ancient times when the same syllable or morae may have been pronounced differently. Large and significant changes in metre, wherein the metre of succeeding sections return to earlier sections, are sometimes thought to be an indication of later interpolations and insertion of text into a Sanskrit manuscript, or that
11136-511: 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
11264-429: 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
11392-401: 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
11520-602: 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
11648-495: The narrative focuses on figures other than Rāma and is narrated only indirectly by Vālmīki, being placed in the mouths of other figures such as Agastya." It is believed to have been taken up from Sesha Ramayana. According to the legend, Rama sent Sita to the forest. Sita finds refuge in Sage Valmiki's ashram, where she gives birth to twin boys Lava and Kusha . Lava and Kusha were Valmiki's first disciples, to whom he taught
11776-545: 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,
11904-403: 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
12032-431: 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
12160-532: The pattern of laghu ("light") and guru ("heavy") syllables in the pāda . The rules distinguishing laghu and guru syllables are the same as those for non-metric prose, and these are specified in Vedic Shiksha texts that study the principles and structure of sound, such as the Pratishakhyas . Some of the significant rules are: Metre is a veritable ship, for those who want to go, across
12288-414: 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
12416-439: 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
12544-480: 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
12672-609: 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
12800-497: 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,
12928-519: The requirement of the metre. Exceptions also apply to special sounds, of the type प्र, ह्र, ब्र and क्र. A stanza ( śloka ) is defined in Sanskrit prosody as a group of four quarters ( pāda s). Indian prosody studies recognise two types of stanzas. Vritta stanzas are those that have a precise number of syllables, while jati stanzas are those that are based on syllabic time-lengths (morae, matra ) and can contain varying numbers of syllables. The vritta stanzas have three forms: Samavritta , where
13056-562: 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
13184-479: The sages returned and heard the sound of the mantra coming from the ant-hill, they blessed him and said, "Since you achieved great Siddhi seated within a Valmīka (an anthill), you will become well-known in the world as Vālmīki." Valmiki was going to the river Ganges for his daily ablutions. A disciple by the name Bharadwaja was carrying his clothes. On the way, they came across the Tamasa Stream. Looking at
13312-539: The sake of his hungry family, started robbing people that he found in the forest. In the course of this life he met the seven sages or the Saptarishi and tried to rob them as well. But the learned sages felt pity on him and showed him the folly of his ways. One of them, Pulaha gave him a Mantra to meditate upon and the Brahmin turned thief got so engrossed in its recitation that ant-hills came up around his body. When
13440-613: The same as the foot in Greek prosody. The metrical unit in Sanskrit prosody is the verse (line, pada ), while in Greek prosody it is the foot. Sanskrit prosody allows elasticity similar to Latin Saturnian verse , uncustomary in Greek prosody. The principles of both Sanskrit and Greek prosody probably go back to Proto-Indo-European times, because similar principles are found in ancient Persian, Italian, Celtic, and Slavonic branches of Indo-European. The Vedic Sanskrit prosody included both linear and non-linear systems. The field of Chandas
13568-496: 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
13696-556: 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
13824-491: The six Vedangas , or limbs of Vedic studies. It is the study of poetic metres and verse in Sanskrit . This field of study was central to the composition of the Vedas , the scriptural canons of Hinduism ; in fact, so central that some later Hindu and Buddhist texts refer to the Vedas as Chandas . The Chandas, as developed by the Vedic schools, were organized around seven major metres, each with its own rhythm, movements and aesthetics. Sanskrit metres include those based on
13952-615: 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
14080-490: The stream, Valmiki said to his disciple, "Look, how clear is this water, like the mind of a good man! I will bathe here today." When he was looking for a suitable place to step into the stream, he saw a crane couple mating. Valmiki felt very pleased on seeing the happy birds. Suddenly, hit by an arrow, the male bird died on the spot. Filled by sorrow, its mate screamed in agony and died of shock. Valmiki's heart melted at this pitiful sight. He looked around to find out who had shot
14208-458: The syllable-based metres and morae-based metres. These were called Matra-chandas . Examples of this group of metres include Vaitaliya , Matrasamaka and Gityarya . The Hindu texts Kirātārjunīya and Naishadha Charita , for instance, feature complete cantos that are entirely crafted in the Vaitaliya metre. The Vedic texts, and later Sanskrit literature, were composed in a manner where
14336-469: The syllable-based metres, Hindu scholars in their prosody studies, developed Gana-chandas or Gana-vritta , that is metres based on mātrās (morae, instants). The metric foot in these are designed from laghu (short) morae or their equivalents. Sixteen classes of these instants-based metres are enumerated in Sanskrit prosody, each class has sixteen sub-species. Examples include Arya , Udgiti , Upagiti , Giti and Aryagiti . This style of composition
14464-627: The text is a compilation of works of different authors and time periods. However, some metres are easy to preserve and a consistent metre does not mean an authentic manuscript. This practice has also been questioned when applied to certain texts such as ancient and medieval era Buddhist manuscripts, as this may reflect versatility of the author or changing styles over author's lifetime. When halved, (record) two. When unity (is subtracted, record) sunya . When sunya, (multiply by) two. When halved, multiply (by) itself (squared). — Chandah Sutra 8.28-31 6th-2nd century BCE The Chandah Sutra
14592-463: The title role remains unreleased after a case was filed against Oberoi for remarks deemed offensive by members of the Valmiki caste in India. Sanskrit language 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
14720-653: 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
14848-408: 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
14976-420: The vast ocean of poetry. — Dandin , 7th century For measurement by mātrā (morae), laghu syllables count as one unit, and guru syllables as two units. The Indian prosody treatises crafted exceptions to these rules based on their study of sound, which apply in Sanskrit and Prakrit prosody. For example, the last vowel of a verse, regardless of its natural length, may be considered short or long according to
15104-564: 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
15232-400: The word "Mara" which meant "die". As he performed his penance for several years, the word became "Rama", a name of the god Vishnu. Huge anthills formed around Agni Sharma and this earned him the name of Valmiki. Agni Sharma, rechristened as Valmiki, learnt the scriptures from Narada and became the foremost of ascetics, revered by everyone. There also exist some legends about Valmiki having been
15360-502: 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
15488-408: 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
15616-427: 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
15744-472: 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
15872-738: 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
16000-540: Was cursed. So he prayed to Shiva and he became cleansed of all his sins. Valmiki told Yudhisthira that he should also pray to Shiva like him. Vishnudharmottara Purana says that Valmiki was born in the Treta Yuga as a form of Brahma who composed Ramayana and that people desirous of earning knowledge should worship Valmiki. He was later reincarnated as Tulsidas , who composed the Ramcharitamanas , which
16128-403: Was organized around seven major metres, state Annette Wilke and Oliver Moebus, called the "seven birds" or "seven mouths of Brihaspati", and each had its own rhythm, movements and aesthetics. The system mapped a non-linear structure (aperiodicity) into a four verse polymorphic linear sequence. The seven major ancient Sanskrit metres are the three 8-syllable Gāyatrī, the four 8-syllable Anustubh,
16256-509: Was the Awadhi - Hindi version of the Ramayana . The full moon day of Hindu month of Ashvin is celebrated as the birth anniversary of the poet. The day is also known as Pargat Diwas or Valmiki Jayanti, and is a major festival of the followers of the Balmiki religious sect of Hinduism. The Balmiki sect of Hinduism reveres Valmiki, where he is also known as Lal Beg or Bala Shah , as
16384-442: 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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