Who Is Commanded? A Prose Passage from a Jain Narrative
A prose passage from a Jain narrative anthology reads: rāyā mantriṃ āṇāvei. mantī rāyāe āṇatto bhaṇia gacchai. The forms are familiar but the syntax is not obvious: āṇāvei can be causative present ('causes to be ordered' or 'orders'); āṇatto is a past passive participle that could agree with mantī ('the minister, commanded') or with rāyā ('the king, having commanded'); bhaṇia is an absolutive ('having said') or a past participle. The passage continues with a third sentence in which the minister speaks to the queen. You must decide who is the agent of 'commanding' and who is the person commanded, then translate the passage without importing Sanskrit syntax. The exam expects you to justify voice, case and clause boundaries.
1. Segment each verb form and identify tense, voice and agreement.
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āṇāvei = āṇā- causative present, 3rd singular active, 'orders / causes to be ordered'; it governs mantriṃ in the accusative. āṇatto = past passive participle of āṇā, nominative singular masculine, 'ordered / commanded'; it agrees with mantī, not with rāyā. bhaṇia = absolutive (gerund), 'having said/spoken'; it is indeclinable and its subject is normally the same as the main verb's subject. gacchai = present, 3rd singular, 'goes'. The clause boundary falls after āṇāvei; the second sentence has mantī as subject and two predicates, bhaṇia and gacchai.
2. Who is commanded? Translate the passage and justify the agent.
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The minister is commanded. rāyā is nominative subject of āṇāvei; mantriṃ is accusative object; rāyāe is the instrumental agent of the passive participle āṇatto; mantī is nominative subject of gacchai. Translation: 'The king orders the minister. The minister, having been ordered by the king, speaks and goes.' The case ending -e in rāyāe is the signal: it cannot be the subject of āṇatto, because āṇatto already agrees with mantī. If rāyāe were genitive, the phrase would be 'the king's ordered minister', which is syntactically possible but less natural than an instrumental agent with a passive participle.
3. What goes wrong if āṇatto is taken as an active past, and how does the passage's syntax prevent that?
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If āṇatto were active ('he ordered'), the sentence would have two competing subjects, rāyā and mantī, and the instrumental rāyāe would be left without a function. A past passive participle agrees with the person affected, here mantī, and the agent is put in the instrumental. The active past in Prakrit would normally be a finite verb, not a participle in -tta-/-ia- agreeing with the subject. Taking āṇatto as passive also makes bhaṇia's subject coherent: the minister is the one who has been ordered and then speaks. The exam answer should show that voice is diagnosed from agreement plus case, not from the English translation alone.