Studies in the History of Sanskrit Poetics v2.c80.42

v2.c80.42

The etymological meaning of the term *vakrokti* is "crooked speech"; and this meaning appears in the verbal poetic figure defined by Rudraṭa (ii 13-17) and, after him, by all later theorists, who connote by this figure a kind of pretended speech based on paronomasia (*śleṣa*) or peculiarities of intonation (*kāku*). In Vāmana, on the other hand, vakrokti appears not as verbal figure (*śabdālaṃkāra*) but as a figure based on the sense (*arthālaṃkāra*); and it is defined as a metaphorical mode of speech based on the "transference of sense" (*lakṣaṇā*). Bhāmaha, while admitting it, apparently in common with Daṇḍin (ii 363), as a collective designation of all *alaṃkāras*²⁰, uses the term to imply a selection of words and turning of ideas peculiar to poetry and abhorrent of matter-of-fact speech. Kuntala, who develops this idea and builds a unique theory of *alaṃkāra* on its basis, makes this meaning clear when he indicates by such *vakratā* the peculiar charm (*vicchitti*) or strikingness (*vaicitrya*) which can be imparted to ordinary expression by the conception of the poet (*kavi-pratibhā*). When words are used in the ordinary manner of common parlance, as people without a poetic turn of mind use them, there is no special charm, no strikingness; and consequently it is not poetical in the sense in which Bhāmaha and his follower understand it. Such *svabhāvokti* or 'natural' mode of speech, to which Daṇḍin is so partial but which he also distinguishes from vakrokti, is not acceptable to Bhāmaha and Kuntala, who refuse to acknowledge *svabhāvokti* as a poetic figure at all; for these theorists apparently imply a distinction between the “artistic”, or ornamental, or extraordinary, on the one hand, and the “naturalistic”, or unadorned, or ordinary expression, on the other²¹.