A History of Sanskrit Literature c21.s5.9

c21.s5.9

What we have in Subandhu is an exercise in style applied in descriptions of mountain, river, stream, the valour of the prince, the beauty of the heroine, and the strife of the contending armies, whose struggle led to the loss of the princess, who unwittingly trespassed into the garden of an ascetic and was cursed by him with the customary injustice of his kind to become a stone. Of serious characterization there is nothing whatever; Subandhu’s own claim is that he is a storehouse of cleverness in the composition of works in which there is a pun in every syllable (*pratyakṣarāçleṣamayavinyāsavaidagdhyanidhi*), and this is carried out in prose with occasional verses interspersed and with an introduction in verse. Subandhu’s translator has generously—and not without justice—claimed for him a true melody in the long rolling compounds, a sesquipedalian majesty which can never be equalled except in Sanskrit, a lulling music in the alliterations, and a compact brevity in the paronomasias which are in most cases veritable gems of terseness and twofold appropriateness. In fact Subandhu’s ideal was clearly the Gauḍa style with its enormous compounds, its love of etymologizing, its deliberate exaggeration, its love of harsh sounds, its fondness for alliteration, its attempt to match sense closely with sound, its research for recondite results in the use of figures and above all in paronomasias and cases of apparent incongruity. How far Subandhu’s accomplishment was original we cannot say in the absence of so much literature now lost, but Daṇḍin certainly is very different in style, and it is of interest that in the period after Subandhu we begin to find in inscriptions¹ a rather free use of paronomasias and the figure incongruity (*virodha*). Thus, as a parallel to Subandhu's *dhanadenāpi pracetasā*, 'who is Kubera, yet also Varuṇa, for he is generous, yet wise,' we have *dhanado 'pi na pramattaḥ*, 'he was Kubera, not Varuṇa, for he was generous, not inattentive.' It must, however, be said that alliteration, pretty when used with a point, becomes tedious when practised too often, and it is impossible not to be wearied by a string of puns even if they cannot be styled obscene and are at the worst only dull. Granted that the poet's fancy² is able, with the resources of the Sanskrit language, to find a vast variety of clever *double entendres*, moderation and judgement are conspicuously lacking throughout in Subandhu. Moreover, he has to perfection the capacity of constructing a vast sentence which rests on a single verb, while in its enormous compass by means of a series of epithets, each composed of a long compound, it contains infinitely more matter than the mind can conveniently assimilate at one time. The disadvantage of the prose form is here abundantly apparent; the stanza compels compression and a certain moderation, and Subandhu has verses³ which show that, when placed under restraint, he was capable of really effective writing. The picture of the lion's attack lacks puns and is admirable.