पीडीएफ सुरेशभट इन च्या सौजन्याने
INTRODUCTION
This work being intended mainly for students of Marathi
versification is written in Marāthi; but as it will be no less useful to students of Sanskrit prosody, I propose to give here in English a brief statement of what I have attempted.
From very ancient times writers on Metre have been content merely to give a list of metres with mnemonic descriptions and illustrations often composed by themselves for the occasion. For the first time an attempt is here made to go over the whole field of versification, Sanskrit and Marathi, ancient and modern, in order to study historically metres already known and to discover others which have not been mentioned by prosodists but illustrations of which are met with in literature.In this book I have given all of these newly discovered metres along with others given in the works of Bharata, Pingala, Virahanka, Svayambhu, Hemacandra, Kedarabhatta and the ancient Kannada writer Nagavarma. Everywhere I have given references to authorities which are so necessary but which are so rarely given in these works. I have moreover, attempted to reduce the great confusion of names of metres caused by the vicious habit of calling one and the same metre by many names and many different metres by one and the same name. In classifying these metres the old system of classification according to the number of syllables in a line is rejected in favour of that of basing it on the nature of rhythm and the internal rhythmic structure of the line.
I have thus reached the fundamentals of prosody—the rhythms om which metres are founded and which, though casually, darkly hinted at by one obscure Marathi author, no one has ever elaborated upon. I have discussed various questions connected with metre,for instance, that of the relation of verse-rhythm with music and that of free verse. Metre is not a mere play of permutation and combination of short and long syllables. A 1ine to be truly metrical has got to be rhythmic. These rhythms, I have found, are of
