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Beginning with Rūpa Gosvāmin (late fifteenth century-1564), at least four poets composed poems in the Sanskrit virudāvalī genre that included akṣamayī kalikā s, rhythmic compositions wherein each successive segment begins with the letters of the Sanskrit varṇakrama, from a to kṣa, in sequence. The fact that a number of the letters of the varṇakrama rarely or never occur in word-initial position, including the nasals ṅa,ña, and ṇa, the retroflex consonants, the aspirated consonants jha and tha, the anusvāra and visarga, and the vowels ...,..., and especially ..., creates potential obstacles in the composition of such poems. This paper examines the four known works with these "alphabet poems," and identifies six strategies that the poets employed in coining epithets beginning with such challenging letters: 1) the use of ekākṣarakoṣa s, dictionaries of single-letter words, 2) reference to the shapes of the written letter, 3) onomatopoeia, 4) grammatical derivations, 5) fictitious sandhi-based back-derivations, and 6) metalinguistic puns. The paper thus argues that the difficulty these letters present was, for these poets, a desirable feature of this structure, allowing them to display their learning, whether in service of a royal patron or in a context of Vaiṣṇava devotion.
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-USASCII text omitted.)
As in many languages around the world, there exist in Sanskrit many "alphabet poems"- that is, acrostic poems wherein the words or lines begin with each letter of the language, in the standard order in which they are arranged.1 In Sanskrit, of course, this is not really an "alphabet" (derived from alpha,beta . . .), but rather the basic Sanskrit varṇakrama or sequence of letters (a,ā,i,ī. . .).2 A full history of such Sanskrit acrostic poems deserves to be written but is well beyond the scope of the present paper. Rather, this paper focuses on the particular manifestation of such varṇakrama acrostic poems as one of the possible components of Sanskrit virudāvalī praise poetry, a broader genre of composition, discussed briefly below, which is largely associated with the Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava theologian and poet Rūpa Gosvāmin (late fifteenth century-1564). In Rūpa's terminology, these poetic segments stringing together alphabetically arranged epithets are called akṣamayī kalikā s ("rhythmic passages consisting of [the letters]a to kṣa").3 This paper will consider four such poems. Three are by Gauḍīya...