Social Life in Ancient India: Studies in Vatsyayana's Kamasutra c8.s5.t2.1

c8.s5.t2.1

We now come to the *goṣṭhī* or social gathering where the *nāgaraka* diverts himself in pleasant talk with persons of the same status and position as himself by their education, intelligence, character, wealth and age; there he engages in competitions in making verses or in various other sports of skill and art.¹ Affording, as these *goṣṭhīs* did, opportunities for the *nāgaraka* to exhibit his intellectual accomplishments and mastery of the arts, they were most popular with him, being attended by him every afternoon and they were also held on a comparatively large scale on special occasions. Of the branches of literary art in which competitions were held, we may glean the following from Vātsyāyana’s list of the sixty-four arts: there were competitions in the extempore composition of verses, completion of a stanza of which a part only was given, the proper reading of books, with proper intonation and accent, either singly or in groups, the reading of passages in prose or verse that on account of many harsh sounds were hard to pronounce, and the art of composing and expounding passages written in a secret code or cypher. These competitions required knowledge of foreign tongues and provincial dialects, knowledge of lexicons and specical vocabularies, of metres and the figures of rhetoric, the knowledge of dramas and their stories, in short, a very comprehensive litererary and artistic training. One game is described called *pratimālā* in which a number of persons had to recite verses one after another, the condition being that every reciter must repeat a verse commencing with the letter with which the previous speaker's verse ended and any one unable to supply his verse sufficiently quickly had to pay a forfeit. Besides these literary competitions, there were tests of proficiency in the fine arts such as painting, singing, instrumental music and the like and also of manual skill and dexterity in many of the practical arts such as the stringing together of flowers in a garland and so on.¹