Hindu Narrative

[Guest]

HH,

Thanks for posting!

I also tried to weave my way through those rules and became frustrated. You had mentioned IIRC, that you had a copy of "puShpa-sUtra". The same wonder/amazement AND frustration I feel when browsing through that text.

IMHO (and in opinion of some others), these are systematizations attempted after the fact.

Vedic metres probably were purely syllabic. Thats why we see so much variation in the distribution of laghu-guru aksharas within the same nominal metre. Indics were very diligent in systematization and most probably created rules post-hoc to make them fall in line.

Coming back to the example of puShpa-sUtra, it would appear that rks came first, and by elaborate rules given in puShpa-sUtra, the aksharas in the "rks" get modified in such a way as to create the song or the sAman from it. This "flowering" of the "rk" into a "sAman" explains the name "puShpa-sUtra".

But there is strong evidence that the "sAmans" are not uniquely connected with the "rks". A sAman is actually just a melody, rks form the lyrics. Each sAman is named separately, has its own rishi etc, and there are mentions of various rks being sung on same sAman. This supports the view that sAman stood for the melodies and not for the text of the rks. Also the heavy usage of nonsensical syllables termed "stobha-s", suggets that melodies or sAmans were independent of rks, and any gaps were filled in with the nonsensical syllables or stobha-s.

But following puShpa-sUtra (and sAma-tantra) one may be led into believing that rks came first and followed systematic rules in undergoing deformations to be transformed (or blossomed) into full form songs. This whole scheme appears too contrived, although immensely brilliant.

I have the same feeling of post-hoc systematization being attempted with vedic-metres. Vedic metres appear most consistent when seen as purely syllabic. Even then there are variations, as the example of the gAyatrI-mantra itself shows. Introducing laghu-guru rules on top of them introduces even more complexity since one is now forced to introduce new rules to explain all the diversity.

And one central fact still remains. A syllable/akshara doesn't have a unique time-measurement that can be assigned to it. Even regarding laghu and guru, at most one can say is that laghu sylables can be pronounced in shorter duration than the guru ones. The "guru" syllable taking exactly twice as the laghu one is a superimposed assumption for metrical purposes, and not a phonetic fact. Although this does bring a lot of beauty into the metres, which explains its popularity.