________________
another influx of roving Aryans, who in a short time not only overran the entire length and breadth of the country, lying between the Vindhyas and the Himalayas, but also made their influence felt in the Antardesa itself. The settled Aryans found it difficult to maintain their position, their civilization and their culture, and so they devised a plan of incorporating on equal terms this vast body of roving Aryans amongst them. This was done by a ceremony of purification, called Vrālyastoma which forms such a prominent feature of the later Brähmanas and Sūtras. This incorporation of a vast extra population however skin to themselves meant a vast change in the language. The Vedic Sanskrit began rapidly to change. The Lakāra let gradually disappeared. The varicd infinitives of the Vedic language gradually dwindled into one form and infinitives began lo be indicated by other forms of expression, such as gerunds, and so on. This, I believe, is the reason why the language of the Aranyakas and the Upanisads look so different from the earlier Brāhmaṇas and the Rgveda. But it was not yet Sanskrit. When the Aryans had settled their inter-tribal affairs on a satisfactory basis, and the incorporated nomad Aryans had formed one body of Aryans with the carlier settlers, there began a process of Aryanizing the non-Aryan population, imparting Aryan civilization. Aryan culture, Aryan thoughts and Aryan ideas to the black population, some of whom had a civilization and culture of their own. This produced a chaos in the languages – a veritable Babel of tongues. The upper strata of the society showed a leaning to the Vedic form of speech and the lower strata to the non-Vedic form. The Dictionary became richer, but the language began to lose the angularities of inflexions, infinitives, suffixes, tenses and moods. Al this stage, thoughtful Aryans found it necessary to formulate rules for the language of the higher class Aryans and grammars began to be wrillen. Grammatical language was regarded as Samskrila and the non-grammatical Prākrita. Even this, I think, is a later stage. In the earlier stages of the altempt to Aryanize the Indian clement, the pronunciation was a very great stumbling block. The Indian element unable to pronounce the Aryan speech began to soften them down, and the Aryans to preserve their own pronunciation began to formulate rules. The same word was pronounced by the Aryans in one way and by the Indians in another. Thus the process began with the pronunciation and not with language. In a chapter of the Bharata Nātya Sastra dealing with language and pronunciation, with Bhāșă and Patha, we find that there were two different Pathas or modes of pronunciation, the Samskrta and the Prakrta. The meaning, of course, is that the same word, the same sentence, the same verse had two
106
TRÍ WETT 31. 116 117
Jain Education International
For Private & Personal Use Only
www.jainelibrary.org
