Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [102]
Something of the same division of function between Sanskrit for high and Prakrit for everyday use is also shown by the language conventions of Sanskrit drama. Every play was multilingual, or multi-dialectal. From the sixth century AD, noble males speak in Sanskrit; ladies speak in Śaurasenī (the Mathura Prakrit), but sing in Mahārārī; meanwhile, low characters are scripted in Magadhi (ironically, the descendant of the dialect that had had royal overtones, nine hundred years before). We can only suppose that intervening political reversals (e.g. the rise of the Sātavāhana kings in the Maharashtra area over the first centuries BC and AD) had a more or less permanent effect on the perceived status of the dialects.*
Rājaśekhara, making recommendations C.AD 900 for the ideal poet, says that he should have servants fluent in Apabhraśa (’falling off, the quite generally used, but unflattering, term for later forms of Śauraseni Prakrit, on its way to becoming modern Hindi), maids in Magadhi and the like; but his wives should speak Sanskrit, or else ‘Prakrit’, which for him means Maharashtri, and his friends all languages.14 The social imperative for Sanskrit had become inescapable, despite the poet’s own personal enthusiasm for his local Prakrit. But to a large extent, the status of the dialects seemed to have become fully detached from awareness of their local origins, or their history.
RELIGIOUS
Interestingly, Magadhi had probably also been the dialect of Gautama, the founder of Buddhism, though about one millennium earlier. (His contemporary, Mahāvīra, the founder of Jainism, lived in the area too.) Magadha was also the area of the earliest Buddhist councils, which established the outlines of this faith for later generations. And Buddhism’s most famous, and influential, early convert was King Aśoka himself, another resident of Magadha, in its chief city, Pāaliputra (modern Patna in the state of Bihar on the Ganges).
This geographical coincidence might have been expected to lead Buddhism to favour Magadhi. The Buddha had advised his monks to teach in their own language (sakayā niruttiyā). His view here seems to have involved not only a respect for the vernacular, but also a positive belief that his caste, the warrior Katriya, was actually superior to the priestly Brāhmaa with its Sanskrit associations. This was part of his persuasive redefinition of the whole caste system and of what it was to be truly ariya (Aryan)—though this word is usually translated in Buddhist English as ‘noble’—based on personal merit rather than birth.
But the monks did not in turn privilege the common speech of the Buddha himself and his region. Rather, they declared themselves in favour of any form of vernacular language. There are stories that this caused some unease among Brahman monks, who feared that the resulting slack grammar and pronunciation would corrupt the sayings of the Buddha. However, in time a particular Prakrit did come to predominate: it was called Pāli (’canonical’) and was a mixed Prakrit. Despite the claims of the Buddhist tradition (which also claimed that this language had been spoken by the Buddha and was, for good measure, the original language of all beings, sabbasattāna mūlabhāsa),* Pali was not predominantly Magadhi, but included many distinctively Western elements, reminiscent of Śauraseni: it must have arisen as a kind of Buddhist Aryan creole, by a process of compromise among monks speaking various Prakrits.
Later on, as the faith developed, and became more heavily institutionalised, it increasingly adopted a grander style of language, in form closer to classical Sanskrit, which is known as Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit. This typically involves taking the grammatical structures of Prakrit, which are much simpler and more analytic than