________________
( 112 )
lost and we should even not know what they were like if we had not seen Prakrit works of this description written by Jain authors. The oldest and most important of these books is the Samaraditya Katha by Haribhadra named by Hemachandra as the model of the Sakala Katha. The work has been written in the 9th century more than 1,000 years ago. It contains love stories, adventures on land and sea, court intrigues, wars in short most various scenes of Indian life in the middle ages. It cannot be doubted that these subjects form the materials from which the Prakrit romances that once were the delight of the cultivated public were written. What is the reason that all these works of fiction in Prakrit which were once in abundance, have been allowed to go to destruction; apparently the knowledge of Prakrit literature which once was the refined from of the language of the people and therefore easily intelligible to them had, as time went on and the popular language changed, become so different from the latter that it wanted proper study to understand the works written in the old language. Thus the old language lost the advantage it had in the eyes of the general public, over the learned language and Prakrit books found no more readers except in the rank of Jains scholars who regarded
Shree Sudharmaswami Gyanbhandar-Umara, Surat
www.umaragyanbhandar.com
