A History of Sanskrit Literature c7.s3.14

c7.s3.14

Neither the epic nor the grammarians, however, are responsible for the fundamental change which gradually besets the Kāvya style, in the worst form in prose, but in varying degree even in verse. This is the change from the verbal to the nominal style, as Bhandarkar¹ not inaptly termed it. In the main, Vedic and epic Sanskrit show a form of speech closely akin to Greek and Latin; verbal forms are freely used, and relative clauses and clauses introduced by conjunctions are in regular employment. The essential feature of the new style is the substitution of the use of compounds for the older forms.² In its simplest form, of course, the practice is unobjectionable and tends to conciseness; *hataputra* is less cumbrous than 'whose sons have been slain'. But when new members are added there are soon lost the advantages of an inflective language with its due syntactical union of formed words into sentences; brevity is attained at a fatal cost in clearness. A compound like *jalāntaçcandracapala*, 'fickle as the moon reflected in the water', is comparatively innocuous, but even a stylist like Kālidāsa permits himself such a phrase as *vīcikṣobha-stanitavihagaçreṇikāñcīguṇā*, 'whose girdle-string is a row of birds loquacious through the agitation of the waves'. True, in such a case there is no real doubt as to the sense, but often this is not the case, and in point of fact it is one of the delights of the later poets to compose compounds which contain a double entendre, since they can be read in two ways; of such monstrosities Subandhu is a master. Moreover, the nominal forms of the verb are given a marked preference; the expression of past time is regularly carried out by a past participle passive in form of an intransitive verb, such as *gatas*, he went, or if the verb is active the subject is put into the instrumental and the past participle passive is employed, as in *mṛgeṇoktam*, the deer said. Or an active past participle is created by adding *vant* to the passive participle, *kṛtavān*, he did; a distant parallel in the grammarians has been seen in the sanction by Pāṇini of the use of such forms as *dāçvāṅs* in lieu of a finite verb. Or the use of any save a verb of colourless kind may be avoided by substituting such an expression as *pakvaṁ karoti* for *pacati*, he cooks, or *pakvo bhavati*, it is cooked, for *pacyate*. Similarly the periphrastic future is preferred to the finite verb. Or the verb may wholly disappear as when for *ayaṁ māṅsaṁ bhakṣayati* we have *māṅsabhojako 'yam*, he is a meat eater. In harmony with this is the tendency to lay great stress on case relations as expressing meaning, a practice which in the later style in philosophy, exegesis, and dialectics results in the occurrence of sentences passim with no verb and practically only the nominative and ablative cases of abstract nouns. Frequent, and indeed in some forms of composition, such as the folk tale, tedious in its reiteration, is the use of gerunds in lieu of subordinate clauses.