We all know the bargain – Ganesha agreed to write Mahabharata as Vyasa dictated it, but on one condition. He said that his pen would never stop, in other words Vyasa should keep dictating without a pause till the end! Vyasa agreed, on one condition of his own! Ganesha must understand every verse before writing it, and Vyasa would continue dictating as soon as Ganesha finishes writing the current dictated verse.
Vyasa used that condition to buy himself time – but How? With verses similar to this.
Read it once, plainly, the way any Sanskrit student would read.
Keśavaṃ patitaṃ dṛṣṭvā droṇo harṣam-upāgataḥ,
rudanti kauravāḥ sarve hā hā keśava keśava.
केशवं पतितं दृष्ट्वा द्रोणो हर्षमुपागतः ।
रुदन्ति कौरवाः सर्वे हा हा केशव केशव ॥ಕೇಶವಂ ಪತಿತಂ ದೃಷ್ಟ್ವಾ ದ್ರೋಣೋ ಹರ್ಷಮುಪಾಗತಃ ।
ರುದಂತಿ ಕೌರವಾಃ ಸರ್ವೆ ಹಾ ಹಾ ಕೇಶವ ಕೇಶವ ॥
The meaning is – “Seeing Keshava fallen, Drona was filled with joy. All the Kauravas are weeping – alas, Keshava! Keshava!”
Now think about what you just read. Every single thing in this has to be wrong.
Keshava is Krishna. Krishna never fell in the Mahabharata war. He didnt even fight in the war – he was ParthaSarathy – Arjuna’s charioteer! And Kauravas who were on the enemy side of Krishna, why would they weep for him? Impossible!
So either the poet has lost his mind, or the verse has been cut in the wrong places. cut in the wrong places? yes, let us see how.
Cut it again
Sanskrit verse is not written with spaces. It is a continuous chain of syllables, and the reader decides where one word ends and the next begins with his pauses. Now lets cut the same chain differently and re-interpret it.
| As read the first time | Cut differently | New meaning |
|---|---|---|
| केशवं (Keśavam) – Krishna | के शवं (ke śavam) | ke = in the water, śavam = a corpse |
| द्रोणः (Droṇaḥ) – Drona | द्रोणः (droṇaḥ) | a crow |
| कौरवाः (Kauravāḥ) – the Kauravas | कौ रवाः (kau ravāḥ) | kau = on the earth, ravāḥ = the cries, the noisy creatures |
| हा हा केशव केशव | हा हा के शव के शव | “Alas! a corpse in the water, a corpse in the water!” |
Now read the whole verse again with the new cuts:
“Seeing a corpse fallen into the water, the crow was filled with joy. All the creatures crying on the ground wail – alas, a corpse in the water! a corpse in the water!”
A crow spots a dead body floating in river and is delighted as it found a meal. The jackals and dogs on the bank, who cannot reach it, howl in frustration. The corpse is in the water!
Same syllables. Same order. Not one sound changed. Krishna, Drona and the Kauravas have vanished, and in their place is a river bank!
How does this work?
Three ordinary features of Sanskrit make this possible. And none of them is a trick.
1. Words fuse at the joints. Sanskrit has sandhi. They are the rules by which the end of one word and the start of the next merge into a single sound. Ke + śavam naturally becomes keśavam, which is exactly the spelling of Krishna’s name. Once fused, the join is invisible. Only the reader’s judgement can put it back.
2. Many words have many meanings. Droṇa is Drona the teacher, but it is also a crow, a wooden trough, and a measure of grain. Ka means water (which is why kamala, the lotus, is “born in water”). Ku means the earth. A poet who knows all the meanings of a word has ten doors where an ordinary reader sees one.
3. A small syllable can be a whole word. Ke is the locative of ka – which means “in the water”. Kau is the locative of ku meaning “on the earth”. Two-letter words that hide comfortably inside longer ones.
Put these together and the chain ke-śa-vaṃ-pa-ti-taṃ is genuinely two sentences at once. The poet has not hidden a second meaning behind the first. He has written both, in the same ink! This is what we mean when we say the vedic mantras have hidden meanings in them. Compact verses – multiple knowledge forms and information encrypted within them in parallel!
Where does this verse come from?
Back to Vyasa and Ganesha. Whenever Vyasa needed a moment to compose what came next, tradition says he threw in a knotty verse similar to the one we save – it is called a kūṭa śloka – and that made Ganesha pause and work it out before his pen could move. There are said to be thousands of such verses in the epic, and this one is the example usually quoted – even Ganesha, the story goes, stopped at “Keshava fallen” and wondered what was going on!
It is a lovely story, and the Vyasa–Ganesha episode itself is found in the opening of the Mahabharata in most printed editions. But this particular verse is not in the epic’s text. It is a subhāṣita – a “well-said” verse – thousands of them exist in Sanskrit literature – that has been passed around by teachers for generations precisely because it teaches the lesson so well. It circulates in more than one form; another version has the Pāṇḍavāḥ rejoicing instead of Drona, and that actually means fish there.
So please do not quote it as Vyasa’s. Quote it as what it is: one of the finest classroom examples of śleṣa (the Sanskrit art of multiple meanings) ever composed.
Why Sanskrit poets loved this
There is an entire branch of Sanskrit literature built on this property. Kavirāja’s Rāghavapāṇḍavīya (12th century) tells the Ramayana and the Mahabharata at the same time in the same verses – every śloka is cut one way for Rama and another way for the Pandavas. Sūryadāsa’s Rāma Kṛṣṇa Viloma Kāvyam goes further: reverse the syllables of each verse and re-cut, and the Rama story becomes the Krishna story (see Sanskrit poem on Ramayana – read in reverse becomes Mahabharata!).
None of that would be possible in a language where words are separated by spaces and fixed in meaning. Sanskrit poets did not fight this property of their language. They turned it into a sport. In Sanskrit, what you speak becomes an art, a poetry, and you can play with the words and syllables themselves!
The lesson for the reader
This is also why Sanskrit was never meant to be read alone from a book. It was chanted, heard, and explained by a teacher. The sound is only half the text. The other half is knowing where to cut – and that knowledge lived in people’s minds, not on the page.
The next time somebody tells you a Sanskrit verse “obviously” means something absurd, remember the crow. The verse is fine. Check where you are cutting it. That is exactly the reason we have so many absurd English translations of Sanskrit texts moving around – the problem is with the translator and his limited understanding of the language and its features.
References
- Mahābhārata, Ādi Parva, Anukramaṇikā – the Vyāsa–Gaṇeśa episode, found in the vulgate (Nīlakaṇṭha) editions and in most popular editions; omitted from the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute critical edition.
- Yigal Bronner, Extreme Poetry: The South Asian Movement of Simultaneous Narration, Columbia University Press, 2010 – on śleṣa and bitextual poetry, including the Rāghavapāṇḍavīya.
- Christopher Minkowski, “On Sūryadāsa and the Invention of Bidirectional Poetry (vilomakāvya)”, Journal of the American Oriental Society 124(2), 2004.
