Prolegomena to Prakritica et Jainica

Author(s): Satyaranjan Banerjee
Publisher: Asiatic Society

Page 22

BANERJEE : ORIGIN OF PRAKRIT
the Northern Indian Vernaculars as of Non-Aryan origin but he discovers many Dravidian words even in Sanskrit Vocabulary. 1 He gives a list of thirty-seven Sanskrit words which he regards as certainly borrowed from the Dravidian tongues. Of these 'atavi' (forest), ambā (mother), 'kala' (fine art), 'sava' (corpse), 'nānā' (several), 'nīra' (water), 'bhaj' (to share) and 'mīna' (fish) may be mentioned as examples. Whether such words were naturalised in Sanskrit from the Dravidian tongues or borrowed from Sanskrit by those languages remains an open question. That these words are a property of Sanskrit may be proved by literary evidence of more than two thousand years but we possess no literary evidence of their existence in any of the Dravidian tongues even approaching the earlier centuries of the Christian era.
To meet this extreme view it is but enough to refer to the Comparative Grammar of the Modern Aryan Languages of India by Mr. J. Beames (1872), the three volumes of which work are a reasoned refutation of the view of the Dravidian Origin of the Northern Indian Vernaculars held by Rev. Caldwell and his followers. Mr. Beames shows that this view is untenable because it is geographically, historically and philologically impossible and absurd. The Dravidians were separated from the Aryan Colonists of Northern India by the Mundas lying between both and any borrowing by the Aryans from the Dravidians instead of from the Mundas with whom they came in direct contact is geographically impossible. It is also historically impossible. We must first answer the question when did the Aryans first come in to contact with the Dravidians ? Was it in the Vedic age? Or after the Mahomedan Conquest ? If it was in the Vedic age then how can the Prakrit dialects, the vernaculars of Northern India of the intermediate period and of which we possess literary records in the Pali literature, in the Jaina 16. Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian Languages,
pp. 439-48.