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THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY.
[JULI, 1904
North-East, the road to Pāšalipatra (llah dopa), the old capital of Magadha and the central market of the Ganges; in the South, the Dekhan (Aaxcasadne) route, and that of Pratish thāna (Ilarbara), the capital of the Satakarņi princes of Mahārāshtra. The three great literary Prakrits, Saurasēni, Māgadhi, Mahārāshtri, radiate like a fan roand: Ujjayini, the capital of Mālava, where Sanskrit bad for a long time tended to emerge. The style of the edicts of Piyadasi engraved on the rooks of Girnar, side by side with the first inscription in Sanskrit of Radradāman, distinguishes itself among all other parallel writings by its tendency to Sanskrit. In a bow old work on the Indian theatre I have called attention to the Sakāra, the illegitimate step-brother of the king, and to the Sakári parlance, which has fallen to him as to all the Sakas, [128] his congeners. Among & people so, indifferent to the memory of their past as the Hindus are, the Sakāra and Sākárt can only be explained 18 & sacred legacy inspired by tradition. The Sakārs and the Säkäri come into existence either with a prince hostile to the Sakas, or immediately after the fall of the Sakas, while the memory of the personage and bis language still lived among his contemporaries. The Msichohhakatika, if it did not borrow from several of its forerunners, now lost, must date back still further than the rest of the Hinda theatre. Must we return to the theory of Wilson, w). thought that the political events described in the piece were not pure fiction, and that Pālaka, by his inclination towards Buddhist doctrines and his disdain for Brahmanic privileges, had actually raised the rebellion related by the drama and which ends in a change of dynasty apon the throne of Ujjayini? (Theatre, ed. Rost, Vol. I p. 158). The tradition contained in the prologue to the drama, attributing the authorship of the drama to king Südraka, may have its origin in actual facts, but tangled and confused. A group of legends studied by Bhan Daji, Mandlik, and Jacobi, represent king Sūdraka as the adversary of Sāta vābans and of his dynasty ; to avenge an insult received, he allies himself with the son of the king of Ujjayini whom Sātavāhana had dethroned; be conquers the son of Sātavāhana, takes Pratishthana and Kollāpura, but spares the inhabitants. We seem to hear an echo of these combats between the [124] Kshatrapas and the Sāta kargis: the rain. of Nahapana and of his race, exterminated by Götamiputa, thon the revenge of Rudradāman who triumphed twice over Palumayi, son of Götamipata, reconquered the lost territories, and won glory by sparing the vanquished. The more we study the tradition in the light of historical documents, the more we feel the bonds tighten, which unite legend and history. Great names and great facte, imprinted on the imagination of the people and preserved also in documents, in inscriptions and on coins, which did not cease enddenly, between one day and the next, to be legible and intelligible, have been altered and transformed in the course of time without entirely disappearing.
If the Sanskrit theatre came into existence at the court of the Kshatrapas, the theory of Greek infinence seems to gain probability. The country of the Kshatrapas was doubtless the most Hellenised of India, because of its being the most important market for Hellenic commerce. But there is nothing to lead us to believe that Greek inflaence ceald have extended to litersture: the Greek characters engraven on the coins of the Kshatrapas still resist all attempts at interpretation and seem to prove that the Hellenisation remained very superficial.
The sum of the facts I have gathered here, leads me to admit that the Kshatrapa "Sakas played a decisive role in the final constitation of Sanskrit literature; these rough Scythian invaders, carriers of civilisation through the world, [125] precipitated by their sudden intrusion the slow development of India. Varnished, through the chances of their adventarous existence, by Iranism, Hellenism, Brahmanism and Buddhism, they burst the bonds of the Brahmapic organisation, still too rigid, in introducing themselves within them; these barbarian conquerors, condemned by orthodoxy, prepared the unity of India. In wresting from the schools and liturgy of the Brahmans their mysterious language, they raised up against the confused variety of local Prākrits an adversary 'which alone was capable of triamphing over it. India, in guarding faithfully the era of the Sakas as its owners, bus been without knowing it, gratefak and just. Their accession opens a new and lasting epoch. The donquered Sanskrit gives to India a common literature, in default of a national literatore.
