________________
274
THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY.
[SEPTEMBER, 1892.
If the definitive fixation of the Prakṣits, and, as a consequence, the drawing up into their present form of the works which have come down to us, cannot have been appreciably earlier than the third century, it is very plain that neither these languages, nor these works could have one day sprung from nothing. They must have had antecedents. There certainly existed, in a more or less rudimentary condition, long before this epoch, a popular and profane literature, hardly or not at all written, but nevertheless living. We find positive traces of it in the inscriptions. I need not refer, in the inscription of Siripulumâyi (Nâs. No. 14), to the wellknown allusions to the Epic legend. The religious sects could have, nay, must have, from the age of their foundation, preserved teachings and relations, and, at the same time, & more or less altered tradition of the language which had at first served for their propa. gation. It is from these sources that the arbiters of the literary renovation were able to draw the characteristic elements of the idioms to which they gave a definitive form. In several respects the situation of the Prakrits is altogether analogous to that of Sanskrit as I understand it, and as I have sketched it above.
If Maharashtrî has become, in preference to every other dialect, the language of song.. poetry, it is because it was in Maharashtra more than elsewhere, that there had spontaneonsly developed a poetry which served as a model for more learned attempts. The Jainas, while using the Maharashtri, have introduced into it the termination of nominatives masculine. The name Magadhi preserved for their dialect well shews that this innovation is, as it were, a last echo of the recollections which they had kept of this country of Magadha, with which more than one historic tie connected them. It is evidently an analogous recollection which is expressed in the application of the same name, Magadhỉ, to the language of the Sinhalese Tripitaka. A few rare Magadhisms can hardly pass for a mark of origin. Several traces of Magadhisms, however, appear in the most ancient inscriptions of Ceylon, which seem to testify that, as we might expect, it was a kind of Magadhi which was employed in the propaganda of Piyadasi. The Sinhalese canon pretends to descend directly from it; in reality, an altogether different influence rules the language in which it is couched, - an influence probably emanating from the west of India. The Mixed Sanskțit of the Buddhists of the North-West is the Prâksit orthography which was the most closely allied to Literary Sanskrit, and it was it which, in all likelihood, was the soonest fixed in a lasting tradition. It is very possible that PAli owes something of its archaic character to this leaning towards etymological orthography of which Western India has furnislied us with multiple proofs. The tradition of it must have been, to a certain degree, preserved by the sect to which we are to attribute the drawing up of the southern Tripitaka.
From this point of view there is one fact which seems to me to be sufficiently striking to deserve being mentioned here. Three provincial Prakrits hold the place of honour in the grammars, the Maharashtri, the Magadhi, and the Saurasêni. It would give quite a false idea of the Prakrit grammarians to imagine that they claimed, under these three names, to include all the principal families of the popular dialects. Their only aim was always practical utility, and we shall be in no danger of wronging them if we affirm that they never conceived the idea of a general and methodical classification of all the Prakrit dialects. It is upon special conditions, local or bistorical, that the importance of these three dialects must be founded. Now, we learn from their origins, as indicated by their names, that they exactly correspond to the homes of the three systems of writing which the monuments allow us to descry in periods earlier than the grammatical one; the Maharashtri to the Monumental Prikrit of the West coast; the Magadhi to the official orthography of Piyadasi, and the Saurasôni, the one which possesses the most archaic aspect, to the Sanskritizing Prikrit of Mathura and the North-West. It seems that the more or less obscured recollections, the more or less interrupted perpetuation, of a tradition, founded on early attempts at writing, set in movement in these three homes, and at least facilitated the creation of literary dialects.
Whatever may be the value of this conjecture, one conclusion is certain. It is only in
