A History of Sanskrit Literature c7.s3.4

c7.s3.4

It is, however, true that beside this feature we have the deliberate employment by poets of usages, prescribed in the grammar, but so rare as to reveal themselves as purely learned reminiscences. From Açvaghoṣa on, the great authors are fond of displaying their erudition; Kālidāsa has *anugiram*, 'on the mountain', though this is given by Pāṇini¹ merely as an optional form, and *sausnātaka*, 'asking if one has bathed well', from a Vārttika.² Māgha is adept in these niceties; he has *khalu* with the gerund to denote prohibition; *mā jīvan*, 'let him not live'; he distinguishes *vi-ṣvan*, eat noisily, and *vi-svan*, howl; he affects the passive use of the perfect, revives aorist forms and gerunds in *am*, including *vastraknopam*, and uses *klam* as a finite verb. Çrīharṣa, author of the *Naiṣadhīya*, is responsible for the solitary example of the first person periphrastic future middle, *darçayitāhe*, yet cited.³ The case is still more extreme with Bhaṭṭi, whose epic is at once a poem and an illustration of the rules of grammar and rhetoric, and who has imitators in Bhaumaka's *Rāvaṇārjunīya* and Halāyudha's *Kavirahasya* (10th cent.). Even in writers of the folk-tale knowledge of grammar sometimes is exhibited quite unexpectedly in the shape of recondite forms culled from Pāṇini or his successors. So serious a philosopher as Çaṅkara resorts to the use of the negative with finite verbs—which originally must have been merely a comic use—and he is guilty also of the employment of the comparative of a verb, *upapadye-tarām*, a linguistic monstrosity of the worst kind.