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with the modern grammarians there is constant confusion between the Category Paiśācī and the Category apabhramsa. But that confusion, may be noticed, is peculiar to modern grammarians who write at a period when Paiśācī, the use of which had completely disappeared from common use, is no longer but a name which is used altogether at random. Let us go back only as far as Hemacandra, and we shall see by the instances which he quotes, that Paiśācī individualizes itself by special characters, perfectly systematized and capable of keeping for to certain extent, a Sanskrit physiognomy which is not its least striking originality. It does not seem to me that it should be confsed with apabhramśa. As to the omission of Apabhramsa my opinion is that it can be accounted for by the fact that in his time apabhramca had not yet been used as literacy language.
Mr. Hoernle has also suggested the hypothesis that Paiśācī might be a spoken language, in that case it would be the language of the immigrant Aryans corrupted in the mouth of the Dravidian populations. We shall discuss that opinon later on. Lastly, Mr. Grierson does not hesitate to call modern" Paiśācī the dialects actually in use in Kafiristan, the upper, valley of Chitral of the Evat, of the Indus as far as Ladakh and Kashmere. Those languages of the North West have some phonetic peculiarities in common with Paiśācī, but it would be going too for give them the name of Paiśācī, which historically they have never borne, unless it be for co classification. It is by supposition only that their ancestors can be identified with the several paisācas recognized by the grammarians (V. infra), and they have certainly not sprung from Paiśācī as it taught us by Hemacandra.
Oragin of the name Paiśāci
The oldest prakrits, Sauraseni, Māgadhi, Mahāraştri bear local names. Must that necessarily be the case with Paisāści ? Certainly not. Saursenī, before it became a literary language, was the language of the Saurasenas who probably were the creators of the drama and had a popular poetry connected with the worship of Krsna it has not come by a sudden invasion into the written and learned literature, the day it was fixed by an artificial code, it had a poetical and religious 12 past. The case is the same with Māgadhi, the name of the official bards (Māgadhas) keeps alive the memory of the rhapsodies of Māgadha. Mahārāştri, the most famous and the most used of Prakrits in erotic poems, is reserved by the theoricians of the stage to the chanted stanzas, we are allowed to see in that fact the continuation of a local poetical tradition of the Mahārāștra Paiśācī, on the countrary, has no antecedent, it appears suddenly in literature only with Gunādhya. No doubt it was based on an existing language, but why should it have kept the name of one of the peoples who spoke that language, if these semi-barbarians had not made themselves famous by any literary work?
CATH Ul Haq - 7, 2004
A
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