Features of Nepali Poetry

The last eighty years have seen a gradual drift away from traditional forms in Nepali verse, although a few poets do still employ classical meters. Until the late nineteenth century, however, almost all Nepali poetry fulfilled the requirements of Sanskrit prosody and was usually composed to capture and convey one of the nine rasa. Rasa literally means "juice," but in the context of the arts it has the sense of "aesthetic quality" or "mood." The concept of rasa tended to dictate and limit the number of themes and topics deemed appropriate for poetry.

Classical Sanskrit meters, many of which are derived from ancient Vedic forms, are based on quantity and are extremely strict. A syllable with a long vowel is considered long, or "heavy," whereas a syllable is short, or "light," when it contains only a short vowel. Whether a syllable is followed by a single consonant or a conjunct consonant also affects its metrical length. The simplest classical meter, and consequently one of the most commonly used, is the anushtubh (or anushtup ), often referred to simply as shloka , "stanza." This allows nine of the sixteen syllables of each line to be either long or short and therefore provides an unusual degree of flexibility. In most other meters, however, the quantity of each syllable is rigidly determined. The shardula-vikridita that Bhanubhakta adopted in his Ramayana epic is a typical example. Each line of verse in this meter must contain nineteen syllables with a caesura after the twelfth, and the value of each and every syllable is dictated with no scope for adaptation or compromise.

Evidently, the ability to compose metrical verse that retains a sense of freshness and spontaneity is a skill that can be acquired only through diligent study and has therefore remained the preserve of the more erudite, high-caste sections of society. Most Nepali poets now regard these rules and conventions as restrictive, outdated, and elitist, especially

because they also extend to considerations of theme and structure. Yet it is significant that the skill to compose poetry in a classical mode was considered an important part of a poet's repertoire until quite recently. Balkrishna Sama used Vedic meters even in some of his later poems, and Devkota gave a dazzling display of his virtuosity in the Shakuntala Mahakavya (The Epic of Shakuntala) by employing no less than twenty different meters.

The first attempts to break the stranglehold of classical conventions were made during the 1920s and 1930s when poets such as Devkota began to use meters and rhythms taken from Nepali folk songs. The musical jhyaure became especially popular and retains some currency today. Such developments were part of a more general trend toward the definition of a specifically Nepali identity distinct from pan-Indian cultural and literary traditions. These changes could also be regarded as a literary manifestation of the Nepali nationalism that eventually toppled the Rana autocracy.

In the years that followed, many poets abandoned meter altogether. Nonmetrical Nepali verse is termed gadya-kavita , literally "prose poetry." Most nonmetrical poems can be described as free verse, but a few works do exist, such as Sama's "Sight of the Incarnation" (Avatar-Darshan ), that seem to be conscious efforts to compose genuine prose poems. As Nepali poetry departed from the conventions of its Sanskrit antecedents, its language also changed. The arcane Sanskrit vocabulary required by classical formulas was no longer relevant. When poets began to address contemporary issues and to dispense with traditional forms, they also strove to make their works more readily comprehensible. The vocabulary of the "old" poetry was therefore rapidly discarded.

Nepali poetry is composed in several distinct generic forms. The most common is, of course, the simple "poem" (kavita ) written in metrical or free-verse form. A khanda-kavya , "episodic poem," is longer and is usually published as a book in its own right. It consists of either a description or a narrative divided into chapters of equal length. Devkota's narrative poem Muna-Nadan (Muna and Madan) and Lekhnath's description of the seasons, Ritu-Vichara (Reflections on the Seasons), are two famous examples. Because the khanda-kavya is a form with classical antecedents, it is invariably composed in metrical verse. The lamo kavita , or "long poem," however, is a modern free-verse form that is not divided into chapters and that can address any topic or theme. The longest poetic genre is the mahakavya , the "epic poem," another classical form that must be composed in metrical verse. The importance and popularity of the khanda-kavya and the mahakavya have diminished significantly in the years since 1950.