The garden verse and the boundary between upamā and rūpaka
At a Plus Two Sanskrit poetry competition in Kottayam, a student submits four lines for the alamkāra section: 'mukhaṃ te kamalaṃ śobhate / netre nīlotpale iva / hāsaś candra iva rājate / kīrtir gaṅgeva vahati.' In the required forty-word note the student labels line 1 rūpaka and lines 2–4 upamā, arguing that the only difference is the missing 'iva'. The rubric awards five marks for the label and five for the justification, and a mislabel loses five marks; the student is currently two marks below the first-place entry. The teacher comments that classical commentators sometimes allow 'iva-lopa' (suppressed iva) and asks the student to defend the note before results are announced. The student has ten minutes and may revise only the note, not the verse. The competition rules also say that if a verse contains more than one figure, the entrant must name the dominant one.
1. Which label for line 1 is more defensible under the rubric-rūpaka or upamā with iva-lopa? Show the test you apply.
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The explicit grammar favours rūpaka. In 'mukhaṃ te kamalaṃ śobhate' the two nouns stand in apposition; the sentence asserts that the face is a lotus, not that it is like one. The test is whether the sentence can be paraphrased with 'iva' without changing its syntax. If 'iva' must be supplied to make the comparison work, the figure is upamā with iva-lopa; if the identity reading is complete, it is rūpaka. Here 'śobhate' works perfectly with identity, so rūpaka is the safer label. The iva-lopa allowance is a commentator's option, not a default; in a competition the student should signal it explicitly if relying on it.
2. Evaluate the student's claim that lines 2–4 differ from line 1 'only by iva'. Does that claim help or hurt the justification?
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The claim is formally true but justificatory weak. Lines 2–4 contain explicit 'iva', which marks comparison and therefore upamā. Line 1 lacks 'iva'; the absence of the marker is exactly what makes identity the default reading. Saying 'only iva is missing' concedes that the grammatical signal of comparison is absent. A stronger note would say that the verse uses 'iva' in three lines and withholds it in the first for variation, but that this variation produces rūpaka, not suppressed upamā. If the student wants upamā, the note must say 'upamā with iva-lopa' and cite a commentator who allows it, not claim the lines are otherwise identical.
3. If the rubric requires a single dominant alamkāra for the whole four-line verse, what should the student write, and why?
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The dominant figure is upamā: three of the four lines use explicit 'iva', and the first line's rūpaka is a single deviation. A dominant-alamkāra rule asks which figure organizes the whole; here the repeated comparison does. The student should write 'upamā, with a subordinate rūpaka in line 1' and explain that the rūpaka is local. If the rubric forbids mixed labels, upamā is still the better single choice because it covers 75% of the lines and the verse's design is comparative. This also preserves the justification marks: the student shows awareness of the first line's identity claim without letting it control the whole.