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Studies in Jainology, Prakrit
like love-lyric in Sanskrit literature. Prof.S.K.De remarks : “Neither the culture of the age nor its social environment was favourable to the development of pure love-poetry in the orthodox literature of the higher classes which was dominated mainly by a serious and didactic motive.”19 But in folk-literature, the tradition of which is niccly prescreved in Prakrit, the sentiment of love must have been nourished with zcal. It is because of this fact that a large number of such lyric songs in Prakrit had already grown some three centuries before Kalidasa and an anthology of them, compiled and edited by King Hala, has come down to us in the form of the Sattasai or Gāthāsaptaśali20. These little songs of love and life have considerably influenced the later Indian literature, including that of Bhakti, divine longing for union with God. A peculiarity of these lyric songs is thcir realistic touch and closeness to the family and social life of the ancient and medieval rural India.
Prakrit literature is also endowed with ornate and stylistic poetic tales and prose-romances like the Setubandha, the Gaudavaho, the Kuvalayamala, the Lilavai, the Samaraiccakahā, etc. which have influenced some branches of modern Indian literature including that of Kannada. Some of them give realistic pen-pictures of the social and cultural life of medieval India. But the Dhürtākhyāna of Haribhadra (8th century A.D.) is a unique satire in Indian literature. It takes a critical view of the Hindu Puranic legends.
Now coming, lastly, to the dramatic literature, we have half a dozen purely Prakrit dramas which are called Sattakas. The Karpūramañjari is the carliest available one composed by Rajasckhara (10th century A.D.). The term Sattaka?" has a Dravidian element viz., āța (meaning play) which word is also used even today for the crude type of play enacted in rural Karnataka i.c., ata or bailāta, suggesting thereby that the Sattaka had a popular origin.22 Leaving aside the Sattakas, almost every Sanskrit drama has its Prakrit portions i.e., some characters speak in Prakrit in its various dialects. The early dramas of Ašvaghosa,
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