Handbook of Classical Sanskrit Rhetoric /17

Introduction
 
theory, is its whole purport (tātparya). The two schools of Miīmāṁsā

explain this semantic concept thus:
 

 
a) abhihitäānvaya: ie words of a sentence first denote their indi-

vidual meanings and then the meaning of the complete sen-

tence is revealed.
 

 
b) anvitābhidhāna: ie a sentence as a whole reveals its meaning

through the words which are always inter-related and have no
separate enteaty
separate <error>enteaty</error> <fix>entity</fix>, and only after the revelation of the meaning

words may be separately analysed grammatically.
 

 
History of literary criticism in Sanskrit covers a period of more

than two thousand years and throughout this period a good many

works on literary criticism and rhetoric have been written by expert

critics and scholars. In ancient Indian tradition, rhetoric along

with grammar was one of the prominent and dominant academic

disciplines and like some other branches of ancient and traditional

human knowledge (such as ānvīkṣikiī or Science and Logic, trayi or
ī or
Religion and Philosophy, vārtā or Social science and Economics)

poetics and dramaturgy was cultivated and taught by eminent mas-

ters and erudite pundits. Etymology, versification, syntax, seman-

tics, rhetoric and prosody are the anatomy and physiology of

poetry. The ancient śāstras or branches of knowledge exhibit the

history of their development by establishing their theories and for-

mulating different codes for their practitioners. Ancient grammari-

ans have rightly observed that their approach to language is purely

analytical and has nothing to do with the aesthetic value of litera-

ture. But the <flag>rhetoricians'</flag> <note>apostrophe symbol should be before s</note> approach to art of poetry is both objec-

tive and subjective and, therefore, encompasses intimate analysis of

its syntactical and grammatical features as well as its artistic evalua-

tion through different angles which go by the name of alamṃkāra,
gun
guṇa, riīti, rasa etc.
 

 
Sanskrit literature has been made conspicuous for the excel-

lences of its most sophisticated grammar and philosophy of lan-

guage as well as most analytical and artistic concept of criticism. All

the fundamental theories of literary criticism, whether it is
alam
alaṃkāra, guṇa, riīti, vakrokti or dhvani, deal with grammatical fea-
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN