Age of the Nandas and Mauryas c12.s12.19

c12.s12.19

As for literary Indo-Aryan of the Nanda and Maurya periods we have to reckon first with classical Sanskrit, which became fully established as the language of Brahmanism and Brahman organisation before the Nanda regime. It was at first confined to the Brahman schools, and as a language, in the 5th century B. C. when Pāṇini flourished in the Udicya region, it was sufficiently near to the spoken dialect of Pāṇini's home districts as to merit from him the name Laukika i.e. ‘popular or current’ as differentiated from the elder Vedic dialect which he called Chāndasa or Chandas i.e., ‘poetic speech’ which was tantamount to ‘archaic speech’. Classical Sanskrit was not the creation of the Udicya people only; just as the modern literary forms of the Hindi or Hindustani language of Delhi, viz. High Hindi and Urdu, are the creation not only of High Hindi and Urdu writers of Delhi and Agra and Meerut, but also of Lahore and Lucknow and Haidarabad and Mathurā and Allahabad and Benares. The śiṣṭas or learned men, i.e. Brahmans, in the Midland, in the Prācya, and also in the Dākṣiṇātya, also helped to build it up; and it came to be closely connected with the Midland as here the Brahman synthesis of Aryan and non-Aryan cultures into Hindu culture and religion seems to have started. Because of its archaic character and the clarity of its forms, it obtained the homage of the Buddhists and the Jains as well, just from the end of the Maurya period.