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Studies in Jainology, Prakrit
36
307
PRAKRIT LANGUAGES AND
KARNATAKA
In the course of the long history of about 3500 years of the Indo-Aryan speech, the Prakrits have played an important role by contributing their own significant mite to the cultural life of India, as reflected in their literature, and covering a lengthy period of about 1700 years from the days of Mahavira and the Buddha (600 B.C.) until the 11th century A.D., when the modern Indo-Aryan languages began to appear. And Karnataka has also been, naturally, a receptive ground for such a role to some extent. It is rather difficult to say exactly when the Prakrit speaking people came to Karnataka. But there is a persistent South Indian tradition, the historicity of which is accepted now by eminent scholars, of the immigration of the Jaina Sangha from the North, headed by Bhadrabahu I and accompanied by Candragupta Maurya to the South and establishing a colony at Kalbappu (Śravanabelgola) in 300 B.C. Or, according to some scholars, Candragupta came to Shravanabelgola which presumably formed a part of his own empire. It is also possible that the Jaina and the Buddhist monks, who spoke Magadhan Prakrit dialects, reached this region by different routes, including the one via Kalinga, still earlier.
The first historic evidence of the influence of Prakrit on the Karnataka region is borne by the Asokan Inscriptions found in its different parts viz., in the districts of Chitradurga, Raichur
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