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Rāmcaritābdhiratnam A Literary Jugglery
Satyavrat Varma
Proudly flaunted as a Mahācitrakāvya by none else than the author himself, the Rāmacaritābdhiratnam (RCR), a comprehensive poem in fourteen cantos by Nitya Nand Shastri (1889-1961 A.D.), has indeed degenerated into a mind-boggling exercise in literary jugglery, euphemistically called a kāvya by the ancient theoriticians. More than any thing else, it means to perform the stupendous feat of absorbing in its ambit Canto One of the Bālakāņda of the Vālmīki-Rāmāyaṇa in a way that when read sequentially the first syllables of the different feet of its verses yield the full text of the said canto. It was doubtless a daunting task and demanded phenomenal equipment in grammar, semantics, poetics, prosody and lexicon to grapple with it with success. While with his enviable command over a slew of śāstras the author has come out with credit from the gruesome exercise, his deep-seated penchant for airing his formidable equipment in grammar in the garb of verse has turned the RCR into a quaint treatise, which, notwithstanding the elevating overtones of its narrative, poses a serious challenge even to an erudite Pandita to resolve it convincingly. But for the penetrating commentary Śāna by the author's elder brother Pt. Bhagavatīlal, the RCR is hardly amenable to a coherent interpretation, so gravely stuffed it is with grotesque grammatical formations and wild imageries emanating form the abstruse Pāninian rules. However, despite the author's unabated predilection for an array of gimmicks inherent in a citrakāvya, the theme of the poem has not sunk into oblivion.
lon.
It is generous to call the RCR a mahākāvya. In scripting it the author had set his sight very high. As noted earlier, his primary aim in writing the RCR was to incorporate in its body the first canto of Book One of Vālmīki's epic in a breathtakingly queer way. While it is always hazardous to cast another text in
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