"Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination." - Ludwig Wittgenstein
Marinating in the aftertaste of Māgha’s Śiśupāla-vadha — a piece of eight-century epic-poetry that reads like a love letter to words, to language— a thought struck me: that we don’t celebrate language anymore. Sure, we discuss in plenty the “correct use” of language, we complain in loud voices its “dumbing down”, we still take pleasure in crosswords and Scrabble … but we don’t play with words. No, not like the Sanskrit poets did. Sanskrit poets, it seems, delighted in linguistic acrobatics. In the name of chitrakavya, or Figurative Poetry, the poets performed Olympian feats of gymnastics before the reader, and their words, like boomerangs, soared across the mind to swoop in for a clean strike each time.
“Chitra”, literally, means peculiar/wonder (as in vichitra), and variegated. Chitrakavya, therefore, is poetry that creates wonder through a physical arrangement of words into visual patterns or pictures. It held a great charm for the poets, and in a spirit of lighthearted indulgence, they worked words into patterns like lotuses, wheels, conches, wrote verses with just one alphabet in a feet or a hemistich, shunned certain alphabets throughout a verse, created rhymes and chain-rhymes, identical hemistiches with un-identical meanings, etc.
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