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JULY, 1904.)
SOME TERMS IN THE KSHATRAPA INSCRIPTIONS.
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Protected by the benevolent neutrality of the Kshatrapas of the North (Sndāsa, &c.) and the Kushanas, but held either by the remains of superstitious scrople or by imitations of the consecrated forms of their canonical dialects, they combined Sanskrit and Prakrit in their private inscriptions.
More andacious and happier than their neighbours of the North, the Kshatrapas of Surāshțrs and Mālava took op the direction of the movement which displayed itself in favour of literary Sanskrit. Local circumstances favoured it; carried by invasion to the confines of the Dekban, the dynasty of the Sakas was soon isolated from its parent tribes which occupied the North-west of India, the Kharðshtri writing, an expressive indication of a political orientation towards central Asia, disappears from the Kshatrapa coins immediately after the second of their princes Chashtana ; the only trace of foreign influence which remains is the presence of the Greek or [120] quasi-Greek characters, the interpretation of which remains more or less an enigma. The Indian legend, which is the counterpart of it, is traced in Brahmanic writing, the real Hinda script. Its language is, as I have said, Prakrit ; and the purposed, deliberate, and obstinate retention of this numismatic dialect, parallel with epigraphic Sanskrit, seems to me to define clearly the problem of the two languages. If the Kshatrapas who engraved Sanskrit on the rocks and columns, have excluded it from their coins, without being led away by the example set by one of themselves, Satyadāman, it is because the two categories of documents had a very distinct destination : the royal inscription, on rock and column, borrowed from its origin a sort of sacred character; the almost divine majesty of the kings reflected its glory directly upon them ; it was still a sort of hymn to the grandeur of a god (dera, the official designation of the king in learned literature). The money had & vulgar fonction; mixed with the most trivial and ordinary practices of daily life, it passed from hand to hand, without respect of birth or caste, exposed to the most impure contact; the Greek, the Prākrit, accommodated themselves to it without difficulty ; the Sanskrit would have given offence, and the political sagacity of the Kshatrapas, proved by their long standing, understood how to spare the strong scraples of the conquered Hindus. The Sanskrit, just descended from the heights of heaven, was averse to treading altogether on the earth. The distribution of dramatic parlance, as [121] fized by the theorists of the theatre and as practised with docility by its writers, seems to correspond with this phase of onsettled equilibrium between the invading Sanskrit and the Prakrits in a state of possession. The convention which has introduced and maintained upon the scene the nsage of four languages concurrently with one another, is a fact not so simple as to explain itself; it would be difficult to find outside of India another theatre where the language regularly and necessarily changes in its vocabulary and grammatical forms, with each category of personages. The hypothesis which would attempt to justify this singularity as an exact reproduction and volantary imitation of the social condition, would be in contradiction to the essential genius of Hindu art in all its manifestations; Hindu art keeps away, on principle, from the real, which contaminates and spoils the creations of fancy and the pleasures of imagination. Besides, it is sufficient to observe, in order to do away with this supposition, that in all other kinds of literature, unity of language is an absolute rule; in the tales, as in the learned epice, kings and valets, Brahmans and Parias, speak the same language. Bat, in the theatre, Sanskrit is reserved for the gods, kings, monks, great people ; others share divers languages according to a minute technique. From this it appears, and it is the conclusion to which we have been led by the study of the words with which we commenced - that the Sanskrit theatre must have been constituted at [122] that epoch when Sanskrit, secularised, was not yet vulgarised, under the auspices of these Kshatrapas who realised for a moment in the history of India the particularities of language and protocol which dramatic conventions afterwards perpetuated. Situated behind the port of Bharukachchha (Broach, on the Narmadá, the classical Bapuyata), which Hellenic commerce had adopted as an entrepôt since the discovery of the periodical monsoons, Ujjayini commanded the three highways required for importation and exportation : in the North, the Mathuri (Medopa) road, where there reigned over the Sūrasõnas (Soupconnor) a dynasty related to the Kshatrapas (Sodisa, &c.); in the
