A History of Sanskrit Literature c7.s1.1

c7.s1.1

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.