A History of Sanskrit Literature c7.s5.13

c7.s5.13

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.