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THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY.
[AUGUST, 1892.
popular, of the same forms. So also, the classical language, being derived directly from the learned and Vedic tradition could have made no delay in noting the duplication of consonants.
It should not, however, be assumed that Literary Sanskrit must have sprung at once from the schools into public life. The necessary grammatical elaboration, even the accommodation of the alphabet to its needs, must have required a greater or less length of time, but the course of its development was certainly not the same as that which the inscriptions allow us to see in the case of Mixed Sanskrit, with its inconsistencies, and its blunders.
While Mixed Sanskrit is neither the reflected imitation nor the source of classical Sanskrit, it is, nevertheless, something of both. If Sanskrit had previously existed in common use, Mixed Sanskļit would never have existed at all; but at the same time, unlees Sanskrit had been in existence to serve for its type, the existence of Mixed Sanskrit would have been equally impossible. This paradox is not difficult to solve, if we place before us the very peculiar conditions which have ruled the linguistic development of India.
Sanskrit presents itself to our notice under an aspect calculated to perplex the observer. Literary languages are usually vulgar tongues in current use, which, being applied, at a moment of high intellectual development, to works destined to endure as abiding national monu. ments, have been through the means of these works crystallised into a shape which becomes the norm for fature writers. Not so with Sanskřit. It does not issue directly from the popular idiom. It first appears at an epoch when the vulgar and general tongae had, for centuries, arrived at a much further advanced degree of phonetic and grammatical degeneration. It represents an archaic language preserved at first by oral tradition, and subsequently retouched by the labours of learned men. It is, in a manner, a literary language in the second degree, – a profane language, grafted on a more ancient religious one; or, to state the matter more accurately, it represents the reform of an earlier literary language.
The oral preservation of the Vedio hymns down to an epoch when the language in which they were composed had long ceased to be used by the people, is a cardinal point in the linguistic history of India. A caste bad kept guard over the treasure of religious songs. Their importance for ritual assured their conservation to the most minute degree; the necessity of protecting their efficacy together with their material form gave rise to rules of pronunciation. These gradually developed into a phonetic system which was refined even to subtilty, and which prepared the way for the study of grammar properly so-called. The religious bearing of the hymns inspired the zeal necessary for assuring their oral transmission; and the fear of making the privilege common to all, maintained the oral tradition even down to an epoch when it would have been easy to substitute for it preservation by the art of writing.
Whatever may have been the authority of this tradition, the knowledge of writing could not have failed to exercise a sensible action on the future of the language, and this action was the more certain, because the attention already paid to the phonetic questions had the better prepared men's intellects for the application of writing and for the comprehension of the questions of grammar.
Being given this state of things and the introduction of so new and so powerful a factor, we have now to see how affairs actually occurred, and how, on the one hand Classical Sanskrit and on the other hand Mixed Sanskrit were developed.
Sanskrit by its roots which dive deep into the language and the tradition of the Vedas, by its regularity founded on earlier phonetic studies, by its most ordinary applications, is essentially a Brahmanical language.63 By the manner in which it was constituted and fixed, it is a scholastio language, born and elaborated in restricted and exclusive surroundings.
This character is so marked, that the foot, that such inscriptions is those of NAnaghat, although entirely devoted to the commemoration of liturgic ceremonies, are couched in PrAkrit, would almost of itself suffice to prove that, at the period to which they must be referred, Sanskrit had not yet expanded into exterior use. At any rate, it furnishes a remarkable confirmation of the conclusions on which I am endeavouring to throw some light.
