A History of Sanskrit Literature c12.s1.28

c12.s1.28

Bhāravi sets a bad example in his fondness for showing his skill in grammar, and he is in many ways the beginner of mannerisms in the later poets. The ridiculously frequent use of the root *tan* begins with him;² he is fond of passive perfect forms, including the impersonal use; the adverbial use of prepositional compounds is a favourite form of his; many of Pāṇini’s rules of rare type³ are illustrated by him, as *çās* with double accusative, *darçayate* in the same use, *anujīvisātkṛta*, *stanopapīḍam*, the double negative as a positive, and *na* compounded as in *nanivṛtam*; it occurs also with the imperative. Most interesting in his elaborate care in the use of the narrative tenses, which Kālidāsa and the other poets treat indifferently. In Bhāravi the imperfect and the aorist are not tenses of narrative use; they occur only in dealing with what the speaker has himself experienced (*aparokṣe*), and the imperfect denotes what happened in the more remote past (*anadyatane*), the aorist the immediate past (*adyatane*), exceptions being minimal; the aorist hence is extremely rare, occurring only ten times to 272 times in Māgha. The perfect is the tense of narrative, save in the case of the present perfects *āha* and *veda*. The present occurs with *sma* not rarely in narrative as a past; the participle in *tavant* is used in speeches only, that in *ta* in both. Both the imperative and the aorist with *mā* are found in interrogations beside their normal uses, and *labdhā* is used in the passive, the periphrastic future having always its precise sense of a distant event. Errors in grammar are few, but *ājaghne* seems indefensible.