❁ · ✦
Ornaments · अलङ्काराः
✦ · ❁
How a line is decorated
Sanskrit poets did not leave figures of speech to instinct. They named them, classified them, and argued about them for a thousand years. These seven will carry you through almost any verse you meet.
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the tell
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Which ornament is at work here?
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साधु! · {{ qScore }} of {{ qTotal }}
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✦ Wonder · the verse that reads backwards
Śleṣa lets one word carry two meanings. Push that to its limit and you get citrakāvya — “picture poetry” — where a whole verse carries two poems at once.
The Rāghavayādavīya
In the seventeenth century Veṅkaṭādhvarin wrote thirty verses that tell the story of Rāma. Read each one backwards — syllable by syllable, from the last to the first — and the same thirty verses tell the story of Kṛṣṇa instead. Not a summary of it, and not a trick of translation: the identical string of sounds, taken in reverse order, is a second complete poem. The work has two names in one, and so does its title: राघव for Rāma’s line and यादव for Kṛṣṇa’s.
Turn a line around yourself
Reversal happens by syllable, never by letter. Pick a line — or type your own Devanāgarī — and watch it come back.
Forward · अनुलोम
Reversed · विलोम
It comes back identical.
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Try a line of your own and you will see how hard this is. Reversal almost always produces noise. Thirty verses of it, each one grammatical, metrical, and telling a coherent second story, is the reason citrakāvya was regarded as the summit of poetic skill — and, by some critics, as showing off.
Ornaments met: {{ metCount }} of seven. ॐ