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Quick post about “rāmābhiṣeke…”

There is a well-known verse in Sanskrit that goes (many minor variants exist):

रामाभिषेके मदविह्वलाया
हस्ताच्च्युतो हेमघटस्तरुण्याः ।
सोपानमार्गेण करोति शब्दं
ठठं ठठं ठं ठठठं ठठं ठः ॥

It is usually presented as a “samasyā-pūraṇa”: someone proposed the meaningless (but metrical) set of syllables “ठठं ठठं ठं ठठठं ठठं ठः” as the last line (samasyā), and the poet completed it (pūraṇa) into a complete verse in the same metre. This is a genre in itself, and the poet of this one is sometimes said to be Kālidāsa, which is IMO unlikely but indicative of something.

This small verse is just a curiosity and not great poetry in any sense (and presented as such, i.e. in anthologies usually among other such playful verses and not alongside great poetry), but even here there are things to be seen.

(Quick translation / meaning: it is the time of Rāma’s abhiṣeka, a festive occasion. A young woman is मदविह्वला, as if drunk: shaky/unstable. A pot she’s carrying slips, falls onto the stairs, and “ठठं ठठं ठं ठठठं ठठं ठः” is the sound it makes. With the first three lines, suddenly the last line no longer seems like a nonsensical repetitive string of unusual syllables, but highly appropriate aurally.)

I don’t know much about how poets compose such samasyā-pūraṇa verses, but it is interesting to imagine this being composed from the last line backwards:

This I think is something core to (the best of) Indian poetry/culture/saṃskṛti, always being aware of dharma-artha-kāma-mokṣa, always maintaining some sort of connection to the Ultimate as much as possible. Flip through Lilāśuka’s Kṛṣṇa-karṇāmṛta’s verses about a young Kṛṣṇa for example, and if you look closely you’ll find that several of the verses could have been about any baby / toddler / child. The ideas in a particular poem may apply to children in general, but by making the poem about Kṛṣṇa in particular, something deeper is achieved. It is not simply, as a cynical person may think, a question of appealing to “religious” readers, of smuggling in creative expression under a devotional pretext. Rather, for the sensitive reader in tune with the stories and personality of Kṛṣṇa (say), this heightens the aesthetic experience, such that truly rasānubhava can be sahodara of brahmānubhava, i.e. a shade of the ultimate bliss that does not conflict with it in any way. Similar with Jayadeva’s Gīta-govinda I guess.

Here, by putting रामाभिषेक in conjunction with the मदविह्वला युवती (whether she’s मदविह्वला for some other reason or because it’s रामाभिषेक and everyone is dizzy with joy, as one commentary says), a harmony is achieved between all the usual dualities: between divi and bhuvi, between puruṣa and prakṛti, etc.

And as a reader the experience goes in the other direction, in rapid/compressed form:

In a way the verse is taking us from something deep inside us and universal or timeless (and unwordly), gradually outwards to a specific situation and we can appreciate that too (worldly).

I remember Shatavadhani Dr. Ganesh mentioning a couple of times about poetry and science, how one of them involves going from the specific to the general, and the other one from the general to the specific. I don’t remember exactly what he said, because at the time it didn’t sound right to me: it seems/seemed to me that both poetry and science have plenty of going in each of the two directions. (For example, in arthāntaranyāsa a poem states something specific to imply the general.) But after some more thought, I think I agree with what I guess he meant and I didn’t see immediately at the time: with poetry, one’s mind is brought to something very particular: you think of something specific, but feel something universal (sādhāraṇīkaraṇa, rasa). Cognitively particular, emotionally universal. With science you either start by observing the specific and think towards the general (forming theories, the development of science) or start by thinking of the general and then map it to a particular case (the application of science): either way, higher-level abstract cognition is on the general while intuitive/pragmatic experience is on the specific case.

Anyway, this is perhaps a lot of analysis for such a short verse, but learning to appreciate things more deeply takes lifelong practice, so it’s fine I guess.

Some variants:

Some sources (forgive the formatting):