Page:The history of the Bengali language (1920).pdf/144

122 cannot be seriously doubted. The hemistiches of one line of this verse are divided below by partition lines:

Each hemistich is really a complete foot, and the characteristics of it are repeated in subsequent hemistiches. A portion of our nursery rhyme will be seen to be exactly in accord with it. It is as follows:

The apparent inaccuracy in the second hemistich of the first foot disappears if the সুর or tune underlying the Sanskrit as well as the Bengali verse is rightly caught. Uniformity in Sanskrit metre is maintained by the fixity of long and short sounds, while without following the Sanskrit rule, mere tune may maintain the purity of the metre with natural accent in the Bengali verse. Compare the same ছন্দ in another nursery rhyme:

It will be seen that how the four akṣaras required in each hemistich in Sanskrit, correspond exactly to the four syllable-unit of Bengali. No one will venture to say, that our village girls or matrons imitated the মানবকাক্রীড়; that the Paṇḍits utilised the indigenous chhanda for a Sanskrit metre verging upon মাত্রাবৃত্ত, cannot be doubted. When songs were composed with mātrās, numerous chhandas cropped up in Sanskrit, and the verses were set in indigenous tunes. To illustrate this properly, I take a verse of a very familiar song from the গীতগোবিন্দ. I divide the lines for the purpose of my analysis, and put the fag portions in brackets.