________________
Genesis of the Prakrit Languages
NAMISĀDHU seems to have struck the right note when he explains the word prakṛta as derived from prakṛti in the sense of natural speech free from the rules of grammarians.1 He wrote it in AD 1068 when the literary forms of Prakrit had already been fossilised. The other explanation offered by him, deriving it from prāk kṛta, to mean 'created of old',2 is in consonance with his faith that the language of the Arṣa canon, Ardha-Māgadhi, is the language of the gods, and is not very relevant to a philological discussion.
In the sixties of the nineteenth century E.B. Cowell brought out Vararuci's Prākṛta-Prakasa with the Manoramā commentary of Bhamaha, and thenceforth Prakrit has engaged the attention of many linguists and Indologists. The pioneers in the field are Hermann Jacobi, Richard Pischel, A.F.R. Hoernle, George Bühler, Sten Konow, A.C. Woolner, Muni Jina Vijaya, Banarasi Das Jain and A.N. Upadhye. The linguistic survey of George Grierson, the philological deliberations of Suniti Kumar Chatterji, the volumes of Maurice Winternitz on the history of Indian literature, the discovery of Prakrit and Sanskrit texts, and an in-depth study of the Pāli, Prakrit, Apabhramśa and Sanskrit works, as also of the epigraphic and numismatic material, during the last one-hundred-thirty years or so, have
1
1. Vide Namisādhu's commentary on Rudraṭa's Kāvyālaṁkāra, 2, 12.
2.
Ibid.
3.
Arisa-vayane siddham devāṇam Addhamāgahā vāṇī.
Jain Education International
For Private & Personal Use Only
www.jainelibrary.org
