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A History of Sanskrit Literature c7.s1: 1. The Origin of Sanskrit

A History of Sanskrit Literature c7.s1

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1. The Origin of Sanskrit

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SOMETIME in the course of the second millennium B.C. Indo-European tribes occupied, in varying degrees of completeness, vast areas in Iran, Asia Minor, and north-west India.¹ The problems of their movements and affiliations are still far from solution, but on linguistic grounds we postulate a group conveniently styled Aryan, whose speech can be regarded as the ancestor of the speeches of India and Iran. Of these Indian speeches² our oldest evidence is the *Ṛgveda*, and the language of this great collection of hymns is obviously a hieratic and conventional one. It testifies to the cultivation of sacred poetry by rival families of priests among many distinct tribes during a considerable period of time, and in various localities. Some of the hymns were doubtless composed in the Panjāb, others in the region which in the Brāhmaṇas is recognized as the home of the Kurus and Pañcālas, tribes representing the consolidation of units familiar to us in the *Ṛgveda*. It is even claimed that Book vi is the poetry of the period before the tribes entered India proper, though the contention is still implausible. That, under these circumstances, the speech of the *Ṛgveda* should show dialectic mixture is only to be expected, and, despite the great difficulties involving the attempt to discriminate, some progress is possible towards determining the characteristics of the dialect which lies at the basis of the *Ṛgveda*. It was marked by the open pronunciation of intervocalic *dh*, *bh*, *ḍ*, and *ḍh* as *h*, *ḷ*, and *ḷh*; by the change of *l* into *r*; and by the intrusion of the pronominal instrumental plural termination *ebhis* into the nominal declension. Borrowings from other dialects can here and there be confidently asserted; in some cases the forms thus found may be regarded as of equal age with those of the *Ṛgveda*, as in the case of words in *l* and *jajjhatī*, with *jjh* in lieu of *kṣ* for Aryan *g̑žh*, but in other instances we find forms¹ which are phonetically more advanced than those normal in the *Ṛgveda*, and attest loans either from tribes whose speech had undergone more rapid change, perhaps as the result of greater admixture with non-Aryan elements, or from lower classes of the population. Thus we have irregular cerebrals as in *kaṭa* beside *kṛta*, *kāṭa* beside *karta*; *ch* for *pṣ* in *kṛchra*; *jy* for *dy* in *jyotis*; *i* for *ṛ* in *çithira*; *busa* for *bṛça*, and many other anomalous forms. To localize these dialects is in the main impossible; the rhotacism of the *Ṛgveda* accords with its western origin, for the same phenomenon is Iranian. The use of *l* is later a sign of eastern connexion, and in one stereotyped phrase, *sūre duhitā*, we perhaps find *e* for *az*, as in the eastern Prākrit.

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¹ Cf. Keith, *Religion and Philosophy of the Veda*, Chap. I.

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² Cf. Wackernagel, *Altind. Gramm.*, i, pp. ix ff.; H. Reichelt, *Festschrift Streitberg* (1924), pp. 238 ff.; Macdonell, *Vedic Grammar* (1910); Meillet, IF. xxxi. 120 ff.; JA. 1910, ii. 184 ff.; *Mélanges Lévi*, p. 20; Grammont, MSL. xix. 254 ff.; Bloch, *Formation de la langue marathe* (1920); S. K. Chatterji, *Bengali* (1926).

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¹ In some cases, no doubt, forms have been altered in transmission.

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From the language of the *Ṛgveda* we can trace a steady development to Classical Sanskrit, through the later Saṁhitās and the Brāhmaṇas. The development, however, is of a special kind; it is not the spontaneous growth of a popular speech unhampered by tradition and unregulated by grammatical studies. The language of the tribes whose priests cherished the hymns of the *Ṛgveda* was subject doubtless to all the normal causes of speech change, accentuated in all likelihood by the gradual addition to the community of non-Aryan elements as the earlier inhabitants of the north, Muṇḍā or Dravidian tribes, fell under their control.² But, at least in the upper classes of the population, alteration was opposed by the constant use of the sacred language and by the study devoted to it. Parallels to such restricted evolution are not hard to find; the history of the Greek Koine, of Latin from its fixation in the first century B.C., and of modern English, attests the power of literature to stereotype. In India the process was accentuated by the remarkable achievements of her early grammarians whose analytical skill far surpassed anything achieved until much later in the western world. In the normal life of language a constant round of destruction and reconstruction takes place; old modes of expression disappear but new are invented; old distinctions of declension and conjugation are wiped out, but new differentiations emerge. In Sanskrit the grammarians accepted and carried even farther than did contemporary vernaculars the process of the removal of irregularities and the disuse of variant forms, but they sanctioned hardly any new formations, producing a form of expression well ordered and purified, worthy of the name Sanskrit which the *Rāmāyaṇa* first accords to it. The importance of the part played by religion in preserving accuracy of speech is shown by the existence of a special form of sacrifice, the Sarasvatī, which was destined to expiate errors of speech during the sacrifice, and in the *Mahābhāṣya* of Patañjali (150 B.C.) it is recorded that there were at one time seers of great knowledge who in their ordinary speech were guilty of using the inaccurate *yar vā ṇas tar vā ṇaḥ* for *yad vā nas tad vā naḥ*, but who, while sacrificing, were scrupulously exact.

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² Cf. W. Petersen, JAOS. xxxii. 414-28; Michelson, JAOS. xxxiii. 145-9; Keith, *Camb. Hist. India*, i. 109 ff. Common sense renders Dravidian and Muṇḍā influences inevitable, though proof may be difficult; Przyluski, MSL. xxii. 205 ff.; BSL. xxiv. 120, 255 ff., xxv. 66 ff.; Bloch, xxv. 1 ff.; Lévi, JA. cciii. 1-56. Przyluski endeavours to prove Austroasiatic influence on culture; JA. ccv. 101 ff.; ccviii. 1 ff.; BSL. xxvi. 98 ff. Cf. Poussin, *Indo-européens*, pp. 198 ff.; Chatterji, i. 170 ff., 199.

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The influence of the grammarians, whose results were summed up in Pāṇini’s *Aṣṭādhyāyī*, probably in the fourth century B.C., is seen in the rigid scheme of euphonic combination of the words within the sentence or line of verse. This is clearly artificial, converting a natural speech tendency into something impossibly rigid, and, as applied to the text of the *Ṛgveda*, often ruining the metrical effect. Similar rigidity is seen in the process which substitutes in many cases *y* and *v* for the *iy* and *uv* of the earlier speech. Dialectic influence may be traced in the recognition of *l* in many words in lieu of *r*, and a certain distinction between the dialect which underlies the *Ṛgveda* and that of Pāṇini is revealed by the absolute ignoring by the latter of the substitution of *ḷ* and *ḷh* for *ḍ* and *ḍh*.¹ Otherwise the chief mark of progress is the growth of the tendency to cerebralization, possibly under Dravidian influence.

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¹ Cf. Lüders, *Festschrift Wackernagel*, pp. 294 ff.

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In morphology there was elimination of double forms; *ā* as a variant for *ena* in the instrumental singular of *a* stems disappeared, *a* and *ā* yielded to *au* in the dual, *āsas* to *ās*, *ā* to *āni*, *ebhis* to *ais*, *ām* to *ānām* in the plural; *ni* alone is permissible in the locative singular of *an* stems; the effective distinction of root and derivative stems in *ī* disappears; the intrusion of weak forms into the place of strong and vice versa is banished; the irregular *vas* of the vocative of *vant* stems is abandoned, and by eliminating the nominative *yuvam* and ablative *yuvat* the pronominal declension is harmonized with the simplicity of the three forms of the nominal. Similarly, in verbal forms the variant *masi* in the first plural active is laid aside, the *e* of the third singular middle yields to *te*, *dhva* in the second plural to *dhvam*, and forms in *r* in the third plural are confined to the perfect and the root *çī*; in the imperative *dhvāt* is dropped, and *dhi* is no longer permitted to rival *hi* in the second person. Far more important is the laying aside of the subjunctive, whose functions were felt to be adequately performed by the optative, save in so far as a complete set of forms was made up for the imperative by utilizing the first persons. Even in the optative the wealth of forms is seriously diminished, only the present and a specialized precative being allowed. The rich variety of infinitives is steadily lessened; the final result allows only that in *tum*, while of the gerunds that in *tvā* supersedes *tvī* and *tvāya*. Against these losses can be set little more than the development of two forms of periphrasis, the future middle in *tāhe*, and the perfect¹ composed of a nominal accusative form with the auxiliaries *kṛ*, *bhū*, or *ās*, the extended use of gerundives in *tavya* and *anīya*, the creation of a perfect active participle in *tavant*, the invention of a new third singular aorist passive as in *adāyiṣi*, and the development of tertiary verbal forms.

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¹ On changes in the use of verbal forms see L. Renou, *La valeur du parfait dans les hymnes védiques* (1925), pp. 88 ff., 188 ff.

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In some of these losses Sanskrit keeps pace with popular speech, but the evidence is conclusive against ascribing too much weight to this fact. While such categories as the dual of noun and verb alike, the middle, and the past tenses, practically vanished from popular speech, Sanskrit rigidly retains them. On the other hand it rejects irregularities which popular speech permitted to survive, such as the *ā* of the instrumental singular and nominative plural neuter of *a* stems, the *āsas* of the masculine plural, the form *gonām*, the pronominal plurals *asme* and *yuṣme*, the short forms *yāt* and *tāt*, and verbal forms in *r*. Traces of the subjunctive, the infinitive in *tave*, the aorist *akar*, the instrumental in *ebhis* exist in Prākrit, but are banned in Sanskrit. On the other hand, although Pāṇini recognizes fully the Vedic accent, it can hardly be doubted that already by his time in actual speech in many regions it had yielded in part to an expiratory accent. The tendency to such a result is already visible in the *Ṛgveda*, where *duhitā* by the testimony of the metre must at times be read *dhitā*, comparable with Pāli *dhītā*;¹ the weakening of *bh* and *dh* to *h* occurs there normally after unaccented syllables,² and the curious mode of notation of the accent in the *Çatapatha Brāhmaṇa* has with some ground been ascribed to a stage of transition from the musical to the expiratory accent.³

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¹ Lüders, KZ. xlix. 236 f.

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² Wackernagel, *Altind. Gramm.*, i. 252 f.

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³ Leumann, KZ. xxxi. 22 f.

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We must not, however, exaggerate the activity of the grammarians to the extent of suggesting with some writers that Classical Sanskrit is an artificial creation, a product⁴ of the Brahmins when they sought to counteract the Buddhist creation of an artistic literature in Pāli by recasting their own Prākritic speech with the aid of the Vedic language. It is, in point of fact, perfectly obvious that there is a steady progress through the later Saṃhitās, the Brāhmaṇas, and the Āraṇyakas and Upaniṣads, and that the Bhāṣā, the spoken language of Pāṇini's grammar, is closely related to, though not identic with, the language of the Brāhmaṇas and the older Upaniṣads. Nor in point of fact does Classical Sanskrit present the appearance of an artificial product; simplified as it is in comparison with the redundant luxury of the Vedic texts, it yet presents no artificial symmetry, but rather admits exceptions in bewildering profusion, showing that the grammarians were not creators, but were engaged in a serious struggle to bring into handier shape a rather intractable material.

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⁴ Hoernle and Grierson, *Bihārī Dict.*, pp. 33 ff.; Senart, JA. sér. 8, viii. 318 ff. Contrast Franke, *B. Beitr.*, xvii. 86; Boxwell, *Trans. Phil. Soc.* 1885–7, pp. 656 ff. Poussin (*Indo-européens*, pp. 191 ff.) stresses the literary character of Sanskrit.

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