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Age of the Nandas and Mauryas c12.s13.t2: Sanskrit Language

Age of the Nandas and Mauryas c12.s13.t2

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Sanskrit Language

c12.s13.t2.1

Though the nascent faiths of the Buddha and Mahāvīra had attempted to by-pass the Sanskrit language and contact the masses through the vernacular tongues, Sanskrit did not lose the position as a spoken language or the medium in which subjects of theoretical and practical value were cultivated by the Brahmanas in the several centres of learning. Among such centres Taxila in the north-west and the Mauryan capital Pāṭaliputra itself in the east were the most renowned. The Bṛhatkathā and the Buddhistic tradition make Pāṇini, connected with Śālātura in the north-west, a friend of a Magadhan Nanda, and bring Cāṇakya of the Taxila college to Pāṭaliputra in quest of a scholarly disputation ; and Brahmanical tradition recorded by Rājaśekhara speaks of a court of learning at Pāṭaliputra where Upavarsha and Varsha, Pāṇini and Piṅgala, Vyāḍi, Vararuchi and Patañjali attained fame by passing their tests in Śāstras.

c12.s13.t2.2

The appellation Bhāshā which Pāṇini gives to his language and many of the rules laid down by him are not intelligible except as having reference to a spoken language. Such evidences of Sanskrit being a spoken tongue do not grow less in Kātyāyana or Patañjali, both of whom mention local and other variations and popular corruptions. That Kātyāyana was a southerner, that southerners delighted in using derivative forms (Taddhita) and that in the South, a big lake or saras was referred to as sarasi are statements of Patañjali showing the inclusion of the southern regions in the provenance of Sanskrit speech. The well-known dialogue in Patañjali (under Pāṇini II. 4. 56) between the grammarian and the charioteer, sūta, involving a grammatical subtlety bears out the fact that Sanskrit speech was not confined to either the academic circles or the learned classes of society. The use of Sanskrit in literature was so securely established that even Buddhism and Jainism which began with using the Prākṛits had to line up early with Sanskrit literary tradition.

c12.s13.t2.3

In this period the abundant variety of the Vedic morphology had got simplified considerably on both the declensional and conjugational sides and this process of simplification could be seen in progress through the Brāhmaṇas and the older Upaniṣads. It is such a Bhāṣā which Pāṇini codified in order to render it more handy. Even after him a certain amount of fluidity persisted, as evidenced by the necessity for the work of the many Vārttikakāras, but at the close of the period of our study, Patañjali's work finally fixed the language as the unchanging Saṃskṛta. The language had become sufficiently distant from that of the Vedas to be characterised as classic Sanskrit, through its employment all this time in a growing body of epic and poetic literature. The Vedic accent had changed and the free use of verbal forms had given place to what may be called the nominal style characterised by participles; a small loss of vocabulary is to be seen, as also some amount of semantic change; a few new word forms were also added to the language in this period.

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