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Ancient Jaina Hymns
403
frequent ignoring of Sandhi-rules,245 even in compounds, such as in namira-sura-asura, sāra-upayāra, vişaya-vişama-amiya-bhara, nami-astaram, all these peculiarities go to stamp the language of our hymn as true to type. So does the word alajayă ( st. 20 ), if taken as a loan-word from Arabic-Persian, equivalent246 to Modern Gujarati alijahāṁ, meaning ‘august', and being here an attribute of the Jina.247
Tadbhava-like, hybrid formations, such as padiyau, cadiyau, sāhaga, moaga, jagi, jaga-jantu, vaņa-rāji, kammāņi, samsiddhae, upayāra, jāgaramaņā, haratāra, along with genuine Prāksta forms such as mentioned above, as well as Sanskritisms, like mama, karavāni ( for karavāni, first person singular imperative ), dehi, gami, obviously represent attempts of the poet to express himself in archaic style, in order to enhance the dignity and solemnness of his eulogy. Nominal and verbal forms in -o and -e ( for -i and -u ) may also fall under this category of phenomena, though, on the other hand, they may also be recent development, representing cases of 'contracted svara-yugma’,24% so typical of Middle and Modern Gujarati.
The language of the interlinear commentary ( ‘Tabbā' ) is far more developed, and can be defined as Modern Gujarati of rather an early type, to judge from formations like eņi parim, dihāļau ( Modern Gujarati dahāļo ), mū and mūhanai ( Modern Gujarati mane ), atibhāgu ( modern atibhāṁgyo ), lāgau ( modern lāgyo ), lādhi ( modern ladhi ), hus gāyasuṁ ( modern huṁ gāiś ), hur joyusu ( modern hum jois).
Out of the 21 stanzas of the present hymn, the first 20 are in a metre of twenty mātrās in each of its four lines with caesura after the tenth mātrā and paired end-rhyme : the metre which Hemacandra in his 'Chandonuśāsana' ( IV, 8; Vrtti p. 32a ) designates as *Avali' ( mātrās 6+4+4+4+2 ).249 The last stanza is in Harigīta, likewise with paired end-rhyme.
As regards his own identity, the poet says in st. 20:"797756
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