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MAGADHI VERSES
These are eighteen in number: 455, 456, 458,4 60, 461 463, 464, 466, 467, 469, 470, 472, 473 and in a later narrative 772–776. One refrain verse is given four times and another twice. There are clearly corruptions in the text which has however been left exactly as given in the MS. An attempt has been made to divide up the verses which from 461 to 470 are left unnumbered by the copyist who seems to have been unable to analyse them metrically. In fact except for 455, 456 and 776 which are ārya these Māgadhi verses appear to be composed in gana metres of varying length, of which each pāda ends in -o-, They are clearly not prose.
In gāthā 454 these verses are expressly designated as Māgadhi (... Māgahie bhāsāe tīse lakkhanam eyam repho ya bhanijjai la-kāro) but apart from the substitution of 1 for v the only apparent Māgadhi feature which they show is the nom. sing in e. In the first passage they are all put in the mouth of the girl from Magadha '--Māgadhasenā, in the second they belong both to Māgadhasenā and to her interlocutor.
The custom of composing poems in successive verses from different dialects or of interlarding a longer work with stanzas in languages other than that of the main narrative was a not uncommon one particularly in erudite circles in the medieval period. Schubring has given some specimens of this macaronic poetry drawn from Jaina sources. But the Māgadhi verses of the MPC seem to be quite other than an attempt to display erudition. The analogy would be rather with the dramas where a particular dialect is by convention appropriate for a given character.
It may well be that they represent actual Māgadhi popular songs which in the course of transmission from copyist to copyist have lost most of the original dialectal characteristics.
1 Prakrit-Dichtung und Prakrit-Grammatik (Jacobi-Festgabe. Bonn 1926, pp. 89-97).
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