Indian Epigraphy: A Guide to the Study of Inscriptions in Sanskrit, Prakrit, and the Other Indo-Aryan Languages c8.s2.t2.10

c8.s2.t2.10

Thus the combined evidence of grammar and usage speaks against the assumption that the hybrid language simply represented failed attempts to write Sanskrit and supports the notion that hybrid was a coherent (though not rigidly standardized) language in and of itself, and that those who wrote it did so intentionally. This is not to say, however, that the hybrids were consciously formulated and developed. Rather, the available evidence suggests that hybrid Sanskrit arose in the course of a gradual Sanskritizing movement which had its origins in the late centuries B.C., expanded in the early centuries of the Christian era, and culminated in the final triumph of classical Sanskrit in the Gupta era. Early tendencies toward Sanskritization, in the form of sporadic semi-Sanskritized orthography, appear in some Prakrit inscriptions of the pre-Christian era. Such "Prakrit influenced by Sanskrit" is seen, for example, in the Besnagar pillar inscription (Appendix, no. 2) in such spellings as *bhāgabhadrasa trātārasa* (l. A-6; cf. n. 18), and in the Pabhosā cave inscription (SI I.96), *rājño gopālīputrasa* (l. 1). The hybrids would seem to reflect the extension and regularization of these early tendencies toward Sanskritization. In other words, it seems that the semi-Sanskritized Prakrits of the early Christian era gradually attained a de facto status of their own as semiliterary languages; in Jean Filliozat's words, it was not merely a matter of "seulement sanskritisation de textes, mais encore sanskritisation de dialectes."³⁸