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96
Amrita
The Sanskrit rhetoricians, on the other hand, were in need of illustrations to their rules of poetics and found in this language an extensive literature to hand, both epic and lyrical in character which would serve their purpose of illustrating the minute rules of poetic composition to their satisfaction. The major portion of the examples in these works is taken over from the literature in this language which shows that it was rich enough to serve their purpose well. The existence of anthologies of stray verses which would require no context for their understanding also helped them in citing these verses, a fact of no small importance to them. MĀHĀRĀȘTRI AND ŚAURASENÍ
This view of regarding Māhārāstrī to be the normal Prākrit is recently challenged by Mr. Ghose who has tried to prove that this suppositi based upon some kind of misconception. All along it was supposed by most of the scholars that the specific use of the word Präkrit as distinguished from its generic use to denote the whole group of the middle Indian languages, always meant Māhārāstrī and was taken to be true on the authority of the grammarians like Vararuci and the statement of Dandin in his Kāvyādarśa.
Mr. Ghosh has put these facts to a searching criticism and has come to think that all the evidence on which this view is based proves to be unreliable and in fact is a mistake on the part of later writers, who failed to understand the stand-point of the earlier ones. He comes to the conclusion that Sauraseni was really the Prākrit par excellence and what is known as Māhārāstrī is nothing but a later phase of it, developing under the influence of the Prākrit grammarians, if at all any reason is to be attributed for this change.
This view requires a careful consideration as it aims at the revaluation of the values of the various Prākrits and if true would lead us to a different solution of the whole of the Prākrit problem.
Mr. Ghosh relies upon a number of arguments to prove his position. Of them many may be admitted as facts proved, but it remains to be seen to what conclusion they should reasonably lead us. Hemacandra and many others do not mention the name Māhārāstrī and we can also add Vararuci to them, for his 12th chapter in which the word occurs only at the end, may be regarded as spurious and a later interpolation for which Mr. Ghosh has made out a strong case. Whether Vararuci wrote any 12th chapter which is lost and the deficiency was made up by some later writer producing the present inconsistency of arrangement or Vararuci could never have written