Some considerations on the epic usage of traditional Kāvya’s in-compound rūpakas padmamukha- and padmalocana-

In 1964 Sharma’s “Elements of Poetry in the Mahābhārata” constituted the first attempt to systematically analyse Mahābhārata’s figures of speech and to list several upamānas of similes and metaphors along with their related symbolism. Then, Brockington (1977) studied how Rāmāyaṇa’s textual stratification encompasses some kinds of alaṃkāras at a different level of sophistication. By taking into account such background, I shall present a Rāmāyaṇa and Mahābhārata-based occurrences’ survey of two renown compounds involving the lotus as upamāna sometimes listed as similes, and I shall propose to interpret them all as samastarūpakas according to classifications of early alaṃkāraśastra theorists (Gerow 1971; Bronner 2007, 2010; Candotti-Pontillo 2017). The compounds and their variants (i.e. mukhāmbuja-; kamalalocana- etc.) recur at varying density: in fact, both Epics register a low frequency of the samastarūpaka ‘lotus/face’ and, for what concerns the Mahābhārata, several occurrences take place in passages excised from the main text of the critical edition. Instead, the samastarūpaka ‘lotus/eye’ is highly recurrent and frequently referred to prominent male characters in different contexts, whereas it is used far less for portraying major and minor female characters. By showing the collected data, I propose to examine the epic usage of these compounds in order to draw an overview of the texts’ perception and reception of such metaphorical identifications which will later became signature features Kāvya’s symbolism (Smith 2002), especially for what concerns the mahākāvya genre and its origins seemingly linked to itihāsa (Lienhard 1984; Boccali 2008; Sudyka 2011).