It’s easy to solve samasyas, if you have your wits about you

Sans the Sacred

Sanskrit poets, as you can imagine, had to be quick on their feet. In so many stories about poets, the king just waltzes in with an eccentric idea, and the poor poet is obligated to write a poem on it. Or even worse, some rival king sends along a nonsensical line, and the court poet must manage to build a nice verse around it. There is an entire genre of Samasya in Sanskrit and in many Indian languages, where one seemingly inappropriate, contradictory, or nonsensical line of a poem is given, and poets write three creative lines which provide a new context such that the line given at the start makes complete sense.

You might have come across some of these already—There are some in the Kannada movie Kaviratna Kalidasa, starring Rajkumar. The samasya is “A lotus within a lotus has neither been heard of, nor seen before.” And poor Kalidasa, forced into a cliché, completes the poem by adding, “But darling, in your lotus face, I see two lotus eyes.”

A Kannada one for you—”I saw some Jains eating a mouse” (ili, in Kannada). A creative poetess, Kanti, solved this by adding a syllable before the mouse at the start of the line, effectively changing it into the fried snack, chakkili. The poem now becomes— “I saw some Jains eating chakkili”, which is no longer incongruous.

Another popular Sanskrit samasya has a single line with six synonyms for the ocean. But who in the world would just repeat the word ‘ocean’ six times? One talented poet thinks it could happen in the heavens, where Skanda tells his father Shiva, “My mom will be angry at you for carrying another woman on your head; please send Ganga away.” Ganga then asks Skanda, “Where am I to go if Shiva casts me away?” In his anger, Skanda answers with all his six faces: “The ocean, the ocean, the ocean, the ocean, the ocean, the ocean.”

Mythology provides innumerable opportunities for samasyas. Consider this one -- “The sky filled with a hundred moons.” The poet Banabhatta solves it -- “Krishna gave Chanura one hard punch, and Chanura saw the sky filled with a hundred moons.” If we see stars after a punch, why not see moons? Even potentially scandalous samasyas like this one -- “The young woman took off her veil and wanted her father-in-law” have an easy solution: “Hidimba, Bhima’s wife, was strolling with her husband in the summer. It was really hot. She took off her veil and wanted the breeze.” The breeze, or wind god, Vayu, is Bhima’s father, after all.

Though there are no kings around anymore to amuse us with samasyas, we can now count on press statements issued by splitting celebrity couples like Bill and Melinda Gates, and Aamir Khan and Kiran Rao. Here is a new samasya for you to solve -- “Our love and mutual trust has only grown with time, and we are breaking up.”

(Anusha S Rao: the University of Toronto doctoral student in Religion oscillates between scholarly pursuits and abject laziness @AnushaSRao2)