Fwd: LANGUAGES IN INDUS VALLEY & GANDHARA: Sanskritic & Prakrit Legacy

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gandhara , " yashwant0k " <yashwant0k wrote:

 

 

The Sanskritic Legacy

 

Sanskrit became the elitist language of the Indus Valley from about

1000 B.C and remained in use in some domain or the other, generally

religion and the state, till the Muslim conquest when Persian took

its place. Thus, although the Prakrits which finally changed into

the vernacular languages of the people of Pakistan were

simultaneously in use as I will argue later, let us look into the

development of Sanskrit first. The Rigveda itself gives importance

to language which is personified as a goddess. In Esa Itkonen's

translation it glorifies itself as follows:

 

I gave birth to the father on the head of this world. My womb is in

the waters, within the ocean. From there I spread out over all

creatures and touch the sky with the crown of my head.

 

I am the one who blows like the wind, embracing all creatures.

Beyond the sky, beyond this earth, so much have I become in my

greatness. 36

 

 

Language was sacred and change was seen as corruption. But all

living languages change and the spoken languages of the people, the

Prakrits, changed all the time. This threat was countered by making

grammatical rules which would petrify language. The most well known

of this set of rules was made by the great grammarian Panini who was

born at 'Salatura' which is about twelve miles from Jahangira near

the Attock bridge in the North West Frontier Province of Pakistan.

In those days this village was part of Gandhara which, according to

Panini, comprised 'the valley of the Kabul river, with its frontier

outpost at Takshasila'. 37 Panini's grammar contains about 4000

rules which were memorized and orally transmitted 'for a couple of

hundred years' and was not written down at all. 38 So sacred was the

language of the religious texts, Sanskrit, that the grammar itself

acquired a central and almost sacrosanct place in the education

system of the Indus Valley Aryans. 39

 

Since Panini lived in what is now Pakistan it was the speech of the

elite of this region that was considered 'correct' and it was this

that he wrote about. 40 There are, indeed, passages in the

Sanskritic texts which bear this out. The following quotations from

them are in Hock's translation:

 

 

(1) In the northern region, speech is spoken particularly distinct

(ly). People go to the north to learn speech. Or if someone comes

from there, they like to hear/ learn from him ... For this is known

as the region of speech (Kausitaki-Brahmana 7.6).

 

(2) Through Pathya Svasti they recognized the northern quarter/

region. Therefore there speech speaks better, among the Kuru-

Panchalas. For she is really speech (Satapatha-Brahmana 3.2.3.15). 41

 

 

 

Panini was not memorized in isolation. Katayayana (c.250 B.C) and

Patanjali (c. 150 B.C), who wrote commentaries on his work, were

also part of the canon which aspiring scholars at great centres of

Brahmanical learning like Taxila had to learn. 42

 

The Emergence of the Prakrits

 

In all probability the Indo-Aryans did not speak one uniformly

standardized language but mutually intelligible non-standardized

dialects. The process of standardization must have been started by

the Brahmins earlier but Panini perfected it in about 400 B.C so

that this polished (samskrita) language did not change and was

considered superior to the ever-changing dialects which were spoken

by the people. As the elite looked down upon the uneducated people,

it also held their languages in contempt. Thus the Prakrits were a

sign of rusticity and illiteracy as the languages of the ordinary

people are even nowadays. But the term prakrriti means 'root'

or 'basis' according to Katre who suggests that they existed when

Sanskrit was standardized. 43 It is in the light of this insight

that we can study the development of the Prakrits into the

vernaculars spoken in Pakistan today.

 

According to George Grierson the Primary Prakrits were living

languages in Vedic days. Later they were also fixed by grammarians

who wrote their grammars and the living languages of the people were

called Secondary Prakrits or 'Sauraseni'. When even these were

fossilized by grammarians the Tertiary Prakrits or 'Apabhramasas'

were born. By 1000 A.D even the tertiary Prakrits became dated and

from this time onward, as we shall see, the modern Pakistani

vernaculars emerged. 44 But before we come to the actual emergence

of the Pakistani languages let us look at the language of Gandhara.

 

The Language of Gandhara

 

According to A.H.Dani 'the new cultural trends of the centuries were

identified in the swat, Dir, and Peshawar valleys, and because of

its original location in that area, it was termed " Gandhara Grave

Culture " '. 45 This region was inhabited by the Dasas who worshipped

the snake and must have spoken the Indus Valley's Dravidian languages

(s) before the Aryans established their supremacy here. 46 By the

first millennium B.C, however, 'the Aryanization of most of the

population of the northern areas of the subcontinent was complete'.

47 The elite used Sanskrit as we have seen but the common people

used what scholars have called 'North-Western Prakrit' or

the 'language of Gandhara'. 48 This language, opines Gankovsky, was

probably made up of elements from the languages of the 'local pre-

Indo-European population and Indo-Aryan tribes, as well as the

Dardic and East-Iranian ethnic elements'. 49

 

Among the pre-Vedic languages the Dardic languages of the first wave

of Aryans who settled down in the Pamir mountains were mentioned

earlier. These languages influenced the Indo-Aryan language of

Gandhara as the language of the Gandhari Dhammapada bears out. This

Buddhist text was written in the Kharoshthi script, which was

derived from Armaic and will be dealt with in more detail later, and

was discovered in the Chinese Turkestan. The dates of this text is

c. 269 A.D. and the language agrees closely with the (Post-Asokan)

Kharoshthi inscriptions from N.W.India and (slightly less closely)

with the Prakrit version of the Dhammapada. Moreover, it shows

sufficient characteristics in common with the modern Dardic

languages to be assigned definitely to that group, and among these

languages it would seem to be most closely allied to Torwali.'50

 

 

Torwali is still spoken in the Kohistan region of Pakistan. But

Dardic is not the only influence on the Gandharan language. Another

influence was Persian.

 

36. Esa Itkonen, Universal History of Linguistics: India, China,

Arabia, Europe (Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing

Company, 1991), p. 6.

 

37. V.S.Agrawala, India as Known to Panini: A Study of the Cultural

Material in the Ashtadhyayi (Lucknow: University of Lucknow, 1953),

p. 37.

 

38. Itkonen, op. cit. p. 12.

 

39. J.F.Stall (ed),A Reader on the Sanskrit Grammarians (Cambridge,

MA: The MIT Press, 1972), pp. 11-17.

 

40. Itkonen, op. cit, p. 12.

 

41. Hans Henrik Hock, 'A Critical Examination of some Early Sanskrit

Passages Alleged to Indicate Dialectical Diversity'. In Bela

Brogyanyi & Reiner Lipp (eds), Comparative-Historical Linguistics:

Indo-European and Finno-Ugric (Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John

Benjamins Publishing Company, 1993), p. 217.

 

42. Stall, op. cit., pp. 11-17.

 

43. Sumitra Mangesh Katre, Prakrit Languages and Their Contribution

to Indian Culture (Poona: Deccan College, Post-Graduate and Research

Institute, 1964), p. 2.

 

44. George Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India Vol.1, Part. 1:

Introductory Ist ed. 1927 (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidas, 1967), pp. 121-

126.

 

45. A.H.Dani, The Historic City of Taxila (Paris: UNESCO, 1986), pp.

38-39. Taxila was excavated by Sir John Marshall. See his

Excavations at Taxila: The Stupas and Monastries at Jaulian (New

Delhi: Memoirs of the Archaeological Survey of India, No. 7; 1921).

 

46. Ibid, p. 35.

 

47. Yu. V.Gankovsky, The Peoples of Pakistan: An Ethnic

History .Trans. from the Russian by Igor Gavrilov (Lahore: Peoples'

Publishing House, 1964), p. 54.

 

48. S.Konow, 'Note on the Ancient North-Western Prakrit', Bulletin

of the School of Oriental and African Studies Vol. VIII: Pts. 2-3

(1936), pp. 503-612.

 

49. Gankovsky, op. cit., p. 58.

 

50. Katre, op. cit. , p. 33.

 

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