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A History of Sanskrit Literature c7.s5: 5. Apabhraṁça

A History of Sanskrit Literature c7.s5

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English

5. Apabhraṁça

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Pischel¹ and Sir G. Grierson² have given currency to the view that the term Apabhraṅça denotes the true vernaculars as opposed to literary Prākrits, and the latter has constructed a scheme for the derivation of modern vernaculars from the various local Apabhraṅças; thus from Çaurasena (or Nāgara) Apabhraṅça came Western Hindī, Rājasthānī, and Gujarātī; from Māhārāṣṭra Apabhraṅça Marāṭhī; from Māgadha Bengālī, Bihārī, Assamese, and Oṛiyā; from Ardhamāgadha Eastern Hindī; from Vrācaḍa Sindhī; and from Kaikeya Lahndā. Unfortunately this theoretical scheme will not stand investigation, for the evidence of texts and even of the literature proves clearly that Apabhraṅça has a different signification.³

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¹ *Gramm. der Prakrit-Sprachen*, § 4.

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² BSOS. I. iii. 62 ff.; cf. IA. li. 13 ff.

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³ Jacobi, *Bhavisatta Kaha*, pp. 53 ff.; *Sanatkumāracaritam*, pp. xviii ff.; *Festschrift Wackernagel*, pp. 124 ff.

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The essential fact regarding Apabhraṅça is that it is the collective term employed to denote literary languages not Sanskrit or Prākrit. Bhāmaha⁴ expressly gives this threefold division, and Daṇḍin⁵ expressly says that Apabhraṅça is the term applied to the idioms of the Ābhīras, &c., when they appear in poetry. Guhasena of Valabhī, whose inscriptions have dates from A. D. 559–69, is declared to have composed poems in the three languages, Sanskrit, Prākrit, and Apabhraṅça. Rudraṭa,⁶ in the ninth century, asserts that Apabhraṅça is manifold through the difference of lands, doubtless in agreement with Daṇḍin. Hemacandra also does not identify Apabhraṅça with the vernaculars. The vernacular (*deçabhāṣā*) is a different thing; hetairai are required to be skilled in the eighteen vernaculars according to the Jain canon; the *Kāmasūtra*, in enumerating their sixty-four accomplishments, includes knowledge of vernaculars as well as of literary speeches (*kāvyakriyā*); moreover, it preserves the interesting notice that a man of taste would mingle his vernacular with Sanskrit, as is the way with modern vernaculars, not with Apabhraṁśa. The identification of the vernaculars and Apabhraṁśa is given as the opinion of some authorities by the commentator of the *Prākṛta Piṅgala*, and other late authorities adopt this view. But the oldest authority who has been cited¹ for it is the Kashmirian Kṣemendra (11th cent.), and it is extremely doubtful whether he meant anything of the sort when he refers to poems in vernacular; it is as likely as not that in Kashmir, as probably in the case of Mahārāṣṭra, Apabhraṁśa was never a literary language, vernacular poems supervening directly on Prākrit poetry.

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⁴ i. 16.

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⁵ i. 32. Nobel's effort (*Indian Poetry*, pp. 132, 159) to distinguish between Bhāmaha's and Daṇḍin's use of Apabhraṅça is a failure.

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⁶ ii. 12.

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¹ Jacobi, *Bhavisatta Kaha*, p. 69, corrected p. 214.

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The first actual remnants of Apabhraṁśa preserved occur in a citation in Ānandavardhana, in the *Devīçataka*, and in Rudraṭa. By preserving *ṛ* and *r* it is clear that these verses belong to the species of Prākrit styled by the eastern school of grammarians (Kramadīçvara, Mārkaṇḍeya, Rāma Tarkavāgīça) Vrācaṭa, which also is styled the speech of the Ābhīras. This tribe appears to have entered India some time before 150 B. C., when it is mentioned by Patañjali. Its early home was Sindhudeça, by which is meant² not Sindh but the Peshāwar district of the Rāwalpindi division, where they had as eastern neighbours the Gurjaras.³ Later both tribes spread; the Gurjaras are found as Gūjars in the United Provinces; in the main, however, they went south and occupied Gujarāt. The Ābhīras are recorded in the *Mahābhārata* as in the Panjāb, later they are heard of in Kurukṣetra, and their descendants, the Ahirs, range as far east as Bihar; some went south and settled on the coast to the west of Gujarāt; they won considerable fame, and an Ābhīra dynasty is stated in the *Viṣṇu Purāṇa* to have succeeded the Andhrabhṛtyas. Both Ābhīras and Gurjaras were probably of the Dardic branch of the Indian race, to judge at least from the strong Dardic element in Lahndā, the speech of the western Panjāb. As they grew in civilization, they must have sought to create a literature; whether they attempted it in their own dialect at first and later produced Apabhrañça must remain uncertain; what is clear is that Apabhrañça originally was an effort to infuse into Prākrit a measure of their vernacular.

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² Jacobi, *Festschrift Wackernagel*, p. 124, n. 2; cf. *Raghuvaṁça*, xv. 87, 89. See *Mahābhāṣya*, i. 2. 72, v. 6.

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³ See references in EHI. pp. 427 ff.; R. C. Majumdar, *The Gurjara-Pratīhāras* (1923). The view of them as Khazars or Huns is unproved, and their earliest date unknown, but Alexander did not find them in the Panjāb. Cf. Grierson, IA. xliii. 141 ff., 159 ff.

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The effort to make Prākrit more readily intelligible to the people was not new; in the earliest epic in Jain Māhārāṣṭrī known to us, the *Paumacariya*¹ of Vimala Sūri, probably not before a. d. 300, we find the free use of what the grammarians style Deçīçabdas, words for which no derivation from Sanskrit is obvious or normally possible; similarly it seems that Pādalipta’s *Taraṅgavatī*, mentioned in the *Anuyogadvāra* (5th cent.), though written in Prākrit, contained very many of such words. The large number of Deçī terms preserved in the *Deçīnāmamālā* of Hemacandra, some four thousand in all, testifies to the prevalence at one time of this practice, which, however, failed to retain favour. The reason for this may easily be conjectured; the words taken from the vernaculars were a barrier to comprehension in a wide circle, and with the rapid change of the vernaculars became obscure even in the poet’s own land, so that poets who desired permanence of repute and wide circles of readers preferred to content themselves with those terms which had general currency. In Apabhrañça, however, the effort was made to simplify Prākrit by adopting as the base of the grammar the vernacular, while using in the main the Prākrit vocabulary, and to some extent also Prākrit inflexions. There is a certain parallel with modern vernaculars which borrow freely from Sanskrit as opposed to Prākrit, but they do not use Sanskrit inflexions at all.

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¹ Jacobi, ERE. vii, 467.

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The Prākrit used as the base of early Apabhrañça seems to have been often Māhārāṣṭrī, but sometimes also Çaurasenī. But once Apabhrañça had become popular, perhaps through the activity of the Ābhīra and Gurjara princes, it spread beyond the west and various local Apabhrañças arose, as is recognized by Rudraṭa; in these, we may assume, the special characteristics of the Vrācaṭa or Vrājaḍa Apabhrañça were refined. We find this confused condition reflected in the grammarians. Hemacandra, who belonged to the western school which goes back to the *Vālmīki Sūtras*, describes one kind of Apabhraṅça, but alludes to others; in the eastern school we find a division as Vrācaṭa, Nāgara, and Upanāgara, in all of which *r* after consonants is kept while in the first *r* before consonants also. Faint traces of the observance of this rule may be found in a few verses cited by Hemacandra; the great poems, *Bhavisattakaha* and *Nemināhacariu* assimilate *r*, and thus belong to a later type of Apabhraṅça. In Bengal we find a type of Apabhraṅça long in use in Buddhist texts, and a much degraded form, Avahaṭṭhā, is evidenced in the *Prākṛta Piṅgala* (14th cent.), but the basis even of this Apabhraṅça is Māhārāṣṭrī, not Māgadhī, testifying to its ultimate western origin.

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From the nature of Apabhraṅça it follows naturally that in Old Gujarātī we find a considerable amount of resemblance in inflexion to Apabhraṅça, as was to be expected from the fact that the vernacular is a descendant in considerable measure of that vernacular which was applied to Prākrit to form the early Apabhraṅça. In other cases we could not expect to find any such important coincidences; thus in Bengal the Apabhraṅça used was not formed by applying vernacular inflexions to the local Prākrit; at most some local colour was given to a speech which came from the west, and the same remark clearly applies in other cases. Sir G. Grierson's efforts¹ to establish a Māhārāṣṭra Apabhraṅça as a connecting link between Prākrit and Marāṭhī are clearly unsuccessful. Nor indeed, it must be added, is there yet any adequate proof even of the relations suggested by him between the Prākrits and the vernaculars;² thus traces of Māgadhī in Bengālī are extremely difficult to establish with any cogency.³

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¹ BSOS. I. iii. 63.

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² E. g. his view (JRAS. 1925, pp. 228 ff.) as to single consonants in the North-West Prākrit is clearly improbable.

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³ M. Shahidullah, IHQ. i. 433 ff. Bloch (*Formation de la langue marathe*; JA. 1912, i. 336) insists that the modern dialects presuppose a Prākrit koine.

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There is no reason to suppose that Apabhraṅça formed a necessary step towards composition in vernaculars, and in Mahārāṣṭra and Kashmir Apabhraṅça appears to have been unknown, while in the latter region vernacular poetry appears to have been practised in the eleventh century. Literary evidence of compositions in the vernaculars is fragmentary, but at least from the twelfth century there was a Hindī literature, from the thirteenth one in Marāṭhī, and probably enough still earlier dates may be assigned to the adaptation of vernaculars to literary uses.¹

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¹ For Bengal see Dinesh Chandra Sen, *Hist. of Bengal Lang. and Lit.* (1911) and S. K. Chatterji, i. 129 ff.

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