Indian Antiquary Vol 60

Author(s): Richard Carnac Temple, Charles E A W Oldham, S Krishnaswami Aiyangar, Devadatta Ramkrishna Bhandarka
Publisher: Swati Publications

Page 354

9 62 )
ON THE MODERN INDO-ARYAN VERNACULARS
[ SEPTEMBER, 1931
3 Mk., xvi, and Comm. to xviii, perhaps calls it Takki,' or perhaps Pāácătya,' Cf. RT., III, III, 6, 12, in IA, LII (1923), 21, 23, and Al. Gd. Ur., 15, note 1.
62. The phase referred to at the end of the preceding paragraph is that known as Apabhramsa,'1 The word ' Apabhrasta ' means 'corrupted ' or 'decayed. Applied to a language, from the point of view of a philologist, it means 'developed.' The Secondary Prakrits became fixed and stereotyped for literary purposes by the grammarians, but the actual spoken languages (descs-bhārās) on which they were founded continued to develop, and, as compared with the literary Prakrits, were looked upon as corrupt, though nevertheless popular narrative poems were also composed in them. Such poems were written for the general public, and, unlike the works in contemporary literary Prakrit, they borrowed freely from the form of speech current in the locality where each was composed. In this way, a work composed in the dëśn-bhäni of, say, Kõsala would differ widely in its vocabulary and in its methods of expression from one composed in, say, Gujarāt. The popular words,-known as dēbya, or local,'-used in such works had no literary authority, and hence had no permanence, their meanings, becoming forgotten as time went on, fell into disuse, and became superseded by others, so that ultimately these narrative poems became unintelligible and required translation, for which purpose vocabularies were compiled of the dēsya words used in them. An example of such popular poems is the Tarangavati, composed in Kõsala by Padalipta not later than the fifth century A.D. This has been lost, but eight hundred or a thousand years later it was translated into literary Apabhramsa, under the name of Tarangalõla by an anonymous writer. Later writers applied the name 'Apabhramsa'to these dëba-bhānüs, and as the works composed in them became more and more popular a tradition of style became developed, and certain of them, particularly the local dialect of the Abhiras, became specially used in poetic works. Finally, a variety of this Vrãcata, or Vracada, dialect of the Abhiras received, like Prakrit, fixation at the hands of the grammarians as a literary dialect, in which, in western India, works in Apabhramsa were henceforth composed. As so used, it became a kind of literary Kouvh, varying slightly from place to place, though these variant forms,--they can hardly be called true dialects, were, it must be under. stood, not the same as the several independent dēša-bhāņās or other languages spoken by the people among whom it was employed for literature. They were each a local variation, not of any dēša-bhänä, but of the one language which we may call 'Literary Apa bhramba.' Rāma-Tarkavāgisa and Markandēya each give us a list of no less than twenty-seven 6 of these forms of literary Apabhramsa, with brief notices of the peculiarities of each, and each named after the country in which it was employed.
As go fixed, Titerary Apabhramsa (with due regard to phonetic development) closely agreed with literary Prakrit in its vocabulary, while its grammar, and much of its phonetics, were in the main still those of the Dēša-bhāşās of western India. The western grammarians
-Hēmacandra and so forth.--called this literary Apabhramsa simply 'Apabhramsa,' tout court; but the eastern grammarians gave it a special name, viz., 'Nagara Apabhramsa,' with which they couple two subordinate literary forms,-Vrācata (or Vracada) and Upanāgara.8 The earliest grammarian, of whom we have literary remains, and who gave an account of literary Apabhramsa, was Hēmacandra (twelfth century A.D.), and in his time it was a dead language. He and the other writers on the subject treated it as a dialect of literary Prakrit, ignoring its relationship to the local vernaculars. To them it was Prāk to 'pabhrambah (Pr. Gr., p. 30), i.e., they clescribed a Prakrit modified by the peculiarities of the contemporary and older vernaculars, not in the true vernacular,-the real Desa-bhāsā or real Apabhramsa, itself. Just therefore as is the case with the literary Prakrits, we cannot expect the literary Apabhramsa to give a true picture of the real vernacular. The works in this form of Apabhramsa are of varying date and differ among themselves as to the extent to which the
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