The Sanskrit Drama in its Origin, Development, Theory & Practice c7.s7.5

c7.s7.5

To what extent any other Prākrit was used in the earliest drama we cannot effectively determine. Bhāsa has only, besides Çaurasenī, Māgadhī of two kinds, and a few hints of what may be styled Ardha-Māgadhī, while Açvaghoṣa has three dialects which suggest much older forms of Çaurasenī, Māgadhī, and Ardha-Māgadhī. The use of these dialects for characters by Açvaghoṣa explains itself naturally from his familiarity with the Buddhist scriptures whose original was very probably in something approximating to the Ardha-Māgadhī² he knew, and the fact that the speaker of Old Māgadhī is the Duṣṭa, or bad man, reminds us of the bad character enjoyed³ by the Magadha. Lévi's⁴ suggestion that the Māgadhī of the drama comes from its epic element, and that the Māgadhas were the reciters of Prākrit epic compositions, is clearly untenable, and indeed seems to have been later abandoned by its author in favour of the suggestion that the Prākrits of the drama were evolved, because the drama was produced at Ujjayinī, which was a meeting place of different dialectical forms. This theory might be revised to adapt it to making Mathurā the headquarters of the drama and Māgadhī and Ardha-Māgadhī the other dialects, but the restricted use of anything but Çaurasenī by Bhāsa suggests that the introduction of other Prākrits was a gradual process. In point of fact it never attained great vitality, and in the developed drama Çaurasenī and Māhārāṣṭrī alone play any real part. The ground for the more extended use of dialects when found may be attributed to literary purposes rather than any attempt to imitate the speech of the day, as Sir George Grierson⁵ has suggested. The ground for this conclusion, apart from the improbability of so great an effort at realism, is that the dialects used for instance even in the Mṛcchakaṭikā are clearly literary and not attempts to reproduce true vernaculars.