New History of the Marathas v1.c5.40

v1.c5.40

nal dialects which used to be spoken in the various wild recesses of the land. These local speeches came to be styled under the common denomination "Prakrit", meaning the natural and unartificial dialects used by the common folk as distinguished from Sanskrit, which was the refined medium employed by learned priests, poets and authors in their works. These Prakrit speeches came to be classified, according to their regional character or religious importance, into five or six main divisions each with a literature and a grammar of its own, viz. Mahārāshtri, Pāli or Māgadhi, Ardha-Māgadhi, Sauraseni and Paisachi, not to speak of Tamil and other primary Dravidian tongues which prevailed in the southern peninsula. Of all these mediæval languages, Mahārāshtri was the most highly cultivated and at one time it was most widely used in popular speech and literature, right from the borders of Malwa and Rajputana in the north to the banks of the Krishna and the Tungabhadra in the south. Buddhist literature mostly exists in Pāli and Jain literature in Ardha-Māgadhi, while Sauraseni prevailed in the region round about Mathura, the land of the Saurasenas, and Paisachi had its hold in the north-west, i.e., in the western Punjab and beyond. All these Prakrit languages have been freely employed by classical writers like Kalidas and others in the dramas that they produced, Sanskrit being spoken by the higher characters and the Prakrits by the females, servants and lower classes. It is clear that by about 500 B.C. Sanskrit had gone out of use as a spoken language and the Prakrits had taken its place in popular parlance. The most important of these Prakrits was doubtless Mahārāshtri in which there exists a copious literature, consisting of several well-known works of high merit, such as *Sapta-Shati*, *Setu-bandha*, *Gauda Vaho* and *Karpura-Manjari*, etc. The first of these, that is, *Sapta-Shati*, is a famous anthology of 700 verses selected from different writers by King Hala of the Sātavāhana dynasty, who flourished about the first century after Christ. This *Sapta-Shati* contains the names of mountains, rivers and towns of Mahārāshtra, many of which are still extant. Grammarians specifying rules for the various Prakrits mainly depend upon Mahārāshtri for their illustrations. The word Mahārāshtri came to be corrupted into Marhati or as it was latterly called, Marathi. Rajashekhar, a learned Mahārāshtra poet, who is known to have lived from 884 to 959 A.C., has written several Sanskrit and Prakrit works, *Ramayana*, *Bala-Bharata*, *Viddha-Shala-Bhanjika*, *Karpura-Manjari*, etc., and his Prakrit works in point of style mark the borderland between the outgoing Mahārāshtri and the incoming Marathi.