Intransitive Passive: When the Agent Cannot Become the Subject
A 6-mark translation item asks: ‘Children are playing in the garden.’ The instructions add: ‘Use karmaṇi-prayoga where the agent is not prominent.’ A student, Sunita, writes bālāḥ udyāne krīḍanti. The teacher says the sentence is grammatical but ignores the instruction; the expected answer may be bālaiḥ udyāne krīḍyate. Sunita objects that krīḍyate is singular and cannot agree with plural bālāḥ. She has 12 minutes. The grammar chart in her memory shows passive 3sg -yate and 3pl -yante, but she cannot recall whether the agent goes into instrumental plural and whether the verb agrees with the agent or with the subject. The passage is a description of a garden, with no contrastive agent. The marking scheme gives 2 marks for voice, 2 for case endings, and 2 for agreement.
1. Is Sunita’s active sentence grammatically acceptable? If the instruction is enforced, write the expected passive and explain the verb form.
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bālāḥ udyāne krīḍanti is grammatical active Sanskrit: bālāḥ nominative plural, krīḍanti third-person plural. But the instruction asks for karmaṇi-prayoga where the agent is not prominent. Because krīḍ ‘play’ is intransitive, there is no accusative patient to become the passive subject. Sanskrit therefore uses the impersonal passive: bālaiḥ udyāne krīḍyate. bālaiḥ is instrumental plural, the agent; udyāne is locative; krīḍyate is passive third-person singular, conventionally neuter impersonal. The verb does not agree with bālaiḥ, because the agent in a passive is instrumental, not nominative.
2. Why would **bālāḥ krīḍyante** be wrong?
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bālāḥ is nominative plural. In a passive sentence the nominative slot is reserved for the patient that is being acted upon, and the agent must be instrumental. krīḍyante is passive third-person plural, so it would require a nominative plural patient, e.g. ‘they are played’. But krīḍ is intransitive and has no patient here. If Sunita wrote bālāḥ krīḍyante, she would be mixing an active-looking nominative subject with a passive verb and changing the meaning to something like ‘the children are being played’. The correct agent form is bālaiḥ, and the correct impersonal verb is krīḍyate.
3. If the sentence were ‘The children are playing a game in the garden’, how would the passive be formed?
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bālaiḥ udyāne krīḍā krīḍyate. Now there is a patient, krīḍā ‘game’, feminine nominative singular; it becomes the passive subject, and the verb agrees with it as krīḍyate (third-person singular). The agent remains instrumental plural bālaiḥ, and the location remains locative udyāne. If the patient were plural, e.g. krīḍāḥ, the verb would be krīḍyante. This shows the rule: the passive verb agrees with the nominative patient, not with the instrumental agent; with no patient, the verb stays impersonal third-person singular.