A History of Sanskrit Literature c7.s2.23

c7.s2.23

The extent to which Sanskrit was used or understood is further attested by the epics. It is perhaps hardly necessary now to do more than mention the implausible conjecture³ which ascribes the writing of the epics in Sanskrit to some period after the Christian era and sees in them translations from some Prākrit. The silence of antiquity on this vast undertaking is inexplicable, and it is incredible that the translation should have taken place at a period when Buddhism was triumphant and Brahminism comparatively depressed. The language itself has a distinctive character which renders the idea of translation absurd;⁴ we have in Buddhist literature of the so-called Gāthā type abundant evidence of the results produced by efforts to Sanskritize, and the arguments which are adduced to establish the reality of translation would suffice to prove that Vedic texts were likewise translations. Moreover, there is conclusive evidence that Pāṇini⁵ knew a *Mahābhārata* or at least a Bhāratan epic in Sanskrit, and that the bulk of the *Rāmāyaṇa*⁶ was composed long before Açoka. Now, though the Brahmins made the epics largely their own, they were not the earliest composers of this form of literature, and the fact is attested in the simpler, more careless, language which shows indifference to many of the refinements of Brahmanical speech. Pāṇini ignores these deviations from his norm; it was no part of his aim to deal with the speech current outside the hieratic circle, and in the epic speech we have doubtless the form of language used by the Kṣatriyas and the better educated of the Vaiçyas during the period when the poems took shape. Both the *Mahābhārata* and the *Rāmāyaṇa* are, it must be remembered, essentially aristocratic; they correspond to the *Iliad* and the *Odyssey*, and like them became the objects of the deep interest of wider circles. In recent times, no doubt, the epics have been unintelligible to the audience, to whom interpretation has been requisite, though delight is still felt in the sound of the sacred language. But this doubtless was not the case in older times; we must postulate a long period when the epic was fairly easily intelligible to large sections of the people.