Lost meters

Abstract

Although the vast majority of Prakrit literature that survives is composed in one meter, the gāhā, we know that a much larger varieties of meters were used, thanks to (a) metrical handbooks (especially Jānāśrayī Chandōviciti, Vr̥ttajātisamuccaya, Svayambhūcchandas, and Hēmacandra’s Chandōnuśāsana), (b) occasional examples in surviving texts (e.g., Sētubandha, Ratnāvalī), and (c) the adaptation of Prakrit meters into Sanskrit and vernacular literatures. This paper examines the main categories of “lost Prakrit meters” and offers an overview of what we know about their use as well as their formal features, which are quite different from those of the gāhā.
The most important group is the galita(ka), a family of meters constructed from four lines, each of which is made from groups of moras. These meters appear to have regularly exhibited end-rhyme, which make them an important but universally-neglected piece of evidence for the history of rhyme in South Asian literature. Galitakas are (or were) found in the texts of all the major epic poems that constitute “the second phase of Prakrit literature” (basically the Vākāṭaka period: Harivijaya, Rāvaṇavijaya, and Sētubandha, the first two of which are lost). Already in the 11th century, however, some critics thought that the galitaka verses in the aforementioned texts were interpolations. The galitaka seems to have once been popular, since it is described as such in the Jānāśrayī Chandōviciti (6th/7th c.), but its popularity appears to have declined after the 8th c., as there are no further examples from literature, and Svayambhū’s (9th c.) discussion was apparently shorter than Virahāṅka’s (8th c.).
The second main category is the śīrṣakas, “strophic” meters that consist of at least one “body” verse and one “head” verse (what we might call a coda, inverting the metaphor implied by śīrṣaka, which means “head”). Special meters were used for both components; my current view is that khañjaka, another poorly-understood family of Prakrit meters, refers primarily to the “body” element in such strophic compositions. In the case of the śīrṣakas, the number of actual examples in Prakrit is vanishingly small (although it includes the well-known song from the second act of the Ratnāvalī), and we unfortunately are missing most of Svayambhū’s discussion on this topic. Nevertheless it appears that both the principles of strophic composition as well as some of the metrical forms of the śīrṣakas were borrowed into other literary traditions: the narkuṭa(ka), a khañjaka, appears to be particularly important in Sanskrit and other languages because it can easily be set to music, while the Telugu sīsa and gīti appear to implement the strophic form of the Prakrit śīrṣaka and gītikā, although all of the relevant forms employ the so-called aṁśa meters of Telugu and Kannada.