Jain Journal 1998 10

Author(s): Jain Bhawan Publication
Publisher: Jain Bhawan Publication

Page 47

JAIN JOURNAL : Vol-XXXIII, No. 2 October 1998 PART II : THE DISCOVERY OF PRAKRIT
AND JAINA LITERATURE
7. The beginning of Prakrit studies in Europe
When the Europeans started studying Sanskrit sometime in the middle of the 17th cent. A.D., they did not have any idea about Prakrit, a language which was current in ancient India side by side with Sanskrit, at least, from the 6th cent. B.C. onwards. And for a long time till the translation of Sir William Jones (1746-1794) was published in 1789, there was no record, at least, in the Western world that they knew Prakrit. When the translation of Sakuntalā by Sir William Jones was published in 1789, they came to know the existence of Prakrit from the title page where it was captioned "translated into English from the original Sanskrit and Prakrit". This was, as far as we know till today, the earliest reference to Prakrit as a separate language in a book of the Western world. We do not know whether it had any impact on the Western world to increase the curiosity of the Western people to know about Prakrit, but it had, at least, one result quite clearly which was that Henry Thomas Colebrooke (1765-1837), a Sanskrit scholar, wrote two articles (The Sanskrit and Prakrit Language and the Sanskrit and Prakrit Poetry) on Prakrit published in the Asiatick Researches in 1801 and 1808 respectively. In these two articles he has practically given some information about the Prakrit language and a survey of its literature, where the books like Gathāsaptasati, Setubandha, Gaudavaha and similar other Prakrit texts are mentioned. However, these two articles have a great impact on the scholars in subsequent times. Colebrooke's later article -- 'Sketch of the Religious Sects of the Hindus (1832) also contains information about Prakrit and Jaina sects. In 1827 Horace Hayman Wilson's (1784-1860) 'Select Specimens of the Theatre of the Hindus' was published. There he puts the question whether Prakrit "represents a language that was ever spoken or is an artificial modification of the Sanskrit language, derived to adopt the latter to peculiar branches of literature. And he answered hesitatingly that "the latter seems to be the most likely".
However, after this, there appeared a sensational work in 1837. It was the work of Christian Lassen whose book, Institutiones Linguae Pracriticae (Bonnae ad Rhenum) had given for the first time the characteristic features of Prakrit in a modern linguistic method. He has also given some chapters of Vararuci's Prakrta-Prakasa and some portions of Kramadiśvara's Prakrit grammar. It is a voluminous work containing 581 (=488+93) pages. Because it was written in Latin, very few people could consult it in a proper way. This book has a supplementary by Nicolaus Delius whose Radices Pracriticae (1839)