According to the story, Rāma uttered this first
ever śloka spontaneously, upon seeing a male krauñca crane killed by a hunter when in the midst of courtship or
mating. So these aorist verbs presumably would have been what he and others
then used in speech. They would not have been deliberately employed to display
erudition.
The specific past sense that the aorist tense signifies was a matter
of question in classical Sanskrit. Ramkrishna Gopal Bhandarkar in his 1868
Preface to his Second Book of Sanskrit
acknowledges this, and says that he read the Aitareya Brāhmaṇa to determine its specific usage when the language
was still living. He found that the aorist was there used “when the persons in
the story are represented as speaking with one another,” as we have here in Vālmīki’s
first śloka. By contrast, writes Bhandarkar, “In this work, wherever stories
are told, the so called Imperfect or the Perfect is always used, and the Aorist
never occurs.”
So Vālmīki’s first śloka, in its usage of the aorist, agrees
with the normal usage found in the Aitareya
Brāhmaṇa, taken as representative of when the aorist was a still living form.
Best regards,
David Reigle
Colorado, U.S.A.
Dear David,
Bob is of course best able to respond in the case of Rāmāyaṇa, but my impression is that the post-Vedic
use of the aorist is not so rare as you suggest. A good example to consider is Aśvaghoṣa, particularly in
Saundarananda, in which he displays his virtuosity in the conjugation systems by making plentiful use of unusual
aorist forms. In kãvya I rather doubt that this alone can be taken as evidence of antiquity. Rather, the aorist
seems to be deliberately employed to display erudition.
best,
Matthew
Matthew Kapstein
Directeur d'études,
Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes
Numata Visiting Professor of Buddhist Studies,
The University of Chicago