Chandolankara

Between two covers of card stock sits a complete study printed on sheets that run to 248 pages. The paperback binding keeps the whole thing light enough to hold open in one hand or slip into a bag, and the spine wears well on a shelf taken down and returned often. The front cover carries a mandala-style motif worked in orange, red and black, the kind of design that suits a title concerned with the patterns of language.

Inside, the text is entirely in Sinhala script. The cover announces the subject in terms that any student of the language will place at once: a study of the sources of chandas and alankara, the two classical disciplines of metre and literary ornament. These are the areas of Sri Lankan poetics in which verse structure and figures of speech were once taught side by side, and the book approaches them as fields to be examined rather than merely admired.

The author is Dr. Bihesh Indika Sampath, and the publisher is Godage International Publishers of Colombo, a house known for its scholarly, literary and academic lists in both Sinhala and English. The ISBN is 978-955-305117-2. Everything in the book, from the front matter to the final page, is written for a reader who is comfortable in Sinhala; there is no parallel English commentary running alongside.

The title itself is assembled from the two terms that define its contents, chandas and alankara, and the cover spells this out plainly, marking the work as an adhyayana, a study or investigation, of the source material behind those traditions. A reader who has worked through Sinhala literary vocabulary will grasp the register the moment they see the word laid out across the front.

This is a title for Sinhala readers who live abroad and wish to keep a current of the literature published at home, and for libraries that maintain Sinhala-language holdings in poetry and letters, where books printed in Sri Lanka are otherwise difficult to source. It arrives as a single paperback, and no further volume or companion edition is needed to make use of it.