The Cambridge History of India, Vol. I: Ancient India v1.c17.176

v1.c17.176

The language of the Saṃhitās in their verse portions is similar to that of the Rigveda, especially in the tenth book and in the later additions to the other books. The language of the prose represents the speech of the Brāhman schools of the day: it differs from that of the verse by the removal of abnormalities, and by much greater precision shown, for example, in the exact use of the tenses, the ‘narrative perfect’ being at first carefully eschewed, and by the disappearance, except in a narrow sphere, of the use of the unaugmented past tenses of the verb with modal meaning. There seems in one passage of the Çatapatha Brāhmaṇa to be a curious admission that other tribes had not preserved the purity of the Vedic speech: the Asuras are credited in that text with the utterance of the words *he ’lavo*, which may be interpreted *he ’rayaḥ*, ‘Ho! ye foes!,’ and, if so, can be explained as Prākrit forms. Similarly, as we have already seen, the Vrātyas are described as regarding the Vedic speech as difficult to pronounce, no doubt because of its conjunct consonants which the Prākrits avoid. In both cases the reference is probably to tribes of the Magadha country, and the Māgadhī Prākrit is marked by both the points alluded to¹. There are also signs of this corruption of the language through the contact with the aborigines in the fact that in the spells of the Atharvaveda are found several forms which can only be accounted for as Prākritisms. Beyond these generalities we cannot affect to estimate how far the process of the transformation of the language in the popular speech had gone: the earliest foreign evidence, that from the Greek records, shows that many names were reported by Megasthenes and others in Prākrit form; and, in the middle of the third century B.C., the inscriptions of Açoka are all written in Prākrit dialects varying considerably in detail from one another. It is therefore reasonable to suppose that, beside the language of the Brāhman schools, there existed more popular forms of speech; but everything points to the fact that the deeds of princes were still sung in a language of the same form as the priestly speech. In metre a significant change can be seen: the later hymns exhibit, when written in the eight syllable metre, a distinct tendency to be composed of stanzas in which the four lines are no longer independent in structure, but the first and third and the second and fourth respectively are assimilated. The latter pair is made to end with a definite iambic cadence, while the first and third on the contrary are made to end with an iambus followed by a trochee, thus producing an effect of contrast and setting a gulf between the old and the new form of versification. This new form is far from being exclusively employed even in the latest versification of the period, but in the epic it is firmly established, and the variants reduced to narrow limits¹.