Sanskrit prosody

Chandas is the study of Sanskrit metre, and it is one of the six Vedangas, the disciplines a student of the Veda had to hold before the text itself. That placing says what it is for. A Vedic verse has to be recited exactly, and the metre is the check: a syllable dropped shows up as a limp in the line before it shows up as a change in meaning. From that practical beginning it grew into a formal system describing some hundreds of named metres, which every later Sanskrit poet wrote in and every reader was expected to hear.

Every syllable is either light or heavy, laghu or guru, decided by the length of its vowel and by what follows it, and a metre is a pattern of those over a line. The patterns are grouped in threes as the eight ganas, each with a name, and a metre is specified by naming its ganas and where it breaks. Anushtubh, the thirty two syllable four line verse, is the commonest and is what the Ramayana and the Mahabharata are in; Shloka is its name in practice. Longer metres, Mandakranta, Shardulavikridita, Vasantatilaka, are chosen for effect, and a Sanskrit reader notices a change of metre in a poem the way an English reader notices a change of tense.

Learnt young and by ear, alongside the recitation itself rather than after it, which is why traditional students can scan a line they have never seen without analysing it. The formal study comes later with Pingala’s sutras and a commentary, and a student is set to identify metres and then to compose in them. A year of daily work gives the common metres; the rare ones are a lifetime’s reading. Anyone taught this way will say that the system is a description of something already heard and not a set of rules obeyed.

Pingala’s Chandahshastra, perhaps of the third or second century BCE, is the foundational text and is studied through Halayudha’s tenth century commentary. Pingala’s method of enumerating metres is a binary one, and his treatment of the combinations contains the triangle of binomial coefficients and a positional notation using a symbol for zero, which is why the text turns up in histories of mathematics as often as in histories of poetry. Kedara Bhatta’s Vrittaratnakara is the handbook most students actually use. The discipline passed into Tamil, Kannada, Telugu and Prakrit prosody, each of which adapted it rather than adopting it.

North India

Studied in the Sanskrit pathashalas of Varanasi and the north with Pingala and Kedara Bhatta as the set texts.

Tamil Nadu

Tamil yappu is a prosody of its own with its own units, and Tolkappiyam predates the contact; the two systems are compared constantly and conflated often.

Karnataka

Kannada chandas adapted the Sanskrit metres and added its own, and Nagavarma’s Chandombudhi is the eleventh century treatise that did it.

Kerala

Kept in the Sanskrit tradition of the Namboothiri households and in the Manipravalam poetry that mixes Sanskrit metre with Malayalam.

Deities

• Saraswati
• Brahma
• Ganesha

Festivals

• Saraswati Puja · Ayudha Puja · Sri Panchami
• Navaratri begins
• Guru Purnima · Vyasa Purnima

Related arts

• Tamil prosody
• Carnatic music