On the Aindra School of Sanskrit Grammarians, their Place in the Sanskrit and Subordinate Literatures c8.41

c8.41

It is remarkable that the phonetic character here assigned to the Southern style would reduce the alphabet to very nearly the Dravidian phonetic system, and the alleged contrary preference of the aspirates and sibilants (which is a feature so noticeable in the N. Indian vernaculars) indicate that Daṇḍin’s remark has a solid foundation⁵), though I have not been able to prove it in spite of a careful analysis of the letters in several different passages. I have, however, noticed that the S. recension has, e.g., krūra instead of the Northern ghora. The other alleged peculiarities of the Southern style are not capable of analysis in this way, but they show accurate observation. That the influence of local style must have been powerful is a necessary consequence of the circumstances under which the later Sanskrit books were composed. The language was then dead, and cultivated for literary purposes by people of very different races and varied habits. It is difficult to imagine two languages the construction and phonetics of which differ more completely than is the case with Hindī and Tamil, and it is easy to see in the perfectly correct and grammatical Sanskrit compositions of writers of these two races that there is a perceptible difference of style, and, the Sanskrit vocabulary being amazingly copious, difference of race has led to the preference of peculiar words in different parts of India, as more harmonious¹. The authors of N. India have (except in verse) preserved a good deal of the primitive terseness of the oldest Sanskrit prose; the writers of the South (e.g. Śaṅkarācārya and Sāyaṇa) are, on the other hand, remarkable for excessively involved and long sentences chiefly constructed by the aid of ‘iti’ which is there used just like the Tamil ‘eṉṟu’. The effect of these influences is very remarkably evident in the dialects now spoken by tribes which have emigrated from N. to S. India. The Dakhnī differs from Urdū not only by a softer pronunciation but also in construction and vocabulary, and this is still more the case with the dialect of Mahrāṭhī spoken by the silk-weavers of Tanjore who (they say) originally came from Devagiri in the Deccan.