Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World (39 page)

Patanjali conveniently places the limits of
Āryāvarta
more or less at the borders of the
Śunga
empire of which he was a citizen.
¹³
This would not have been so convenient a century earlier, when the political world revolved around the vastly larger, but less centrally located, empire of the Mauryas. Its centre was
Pā
aliputra
(modern Patna), which is in eastern India beyond the confines of the then
Āryāvarta.
Furthermore, it extended as far to the east as the Brahmaputra, as far to the north and west as the southern part of Afghanistan, and to the south it reached modern Mysore and the Nilgiri hills. These bounds are marked by monumental inscriptions, set up on pillars or carved into the living rock, placed by the greatest Maurya emperor
Aśoka
(’grief-less’—or, as he preferred to called himself,
Piyadasi
, Sanskrit
Priyadarśin
, ‘of friendly aspect’.)

The role of politics in the early spread of Sanskrit across India remains obscure. Very likely, the process of military conquest and dynastic subordination in the third century BC spread not Sanskrit as such but the Magadhi Prakrit, which was the language of the Maurya court; Sanskrit would have taken up its position thereafter, establishing itself here, and no doubt elsewhere, as the common language for educated discourse of all those who spoke some Indian Prakrit in day-to-day life. This has been its position in India ever since, although in the last millennium other languages, notably Persian (under the Mughals) and English (under the British), have entered the subcontinent and competed for this status as the prime language of education.

In fact, the kind of linguistic advance achieved by military conquest seems to have been particularly impermanent. There is a cluster of Aśoka’s edicts round Raichur, on the borders of modem Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh; but this is now the very heart of the area where Kannada and Telugu are spoken—both Dravidian languages unrelated to Magadhi, or indeed to Sanskrit. Later, a series of Aryan-speaking empires based on the lower Ganges (such as Aśoka’s) rose and fell: this happened in the second century BC, and the second and fifth centuries AD; after each fall Bihar, the area centred on the lower Ganges, relapsed into the (likewise unrelated) Munda language. It seems that the east and centre of India succumbed to the Aryan tendency only gradually, and fitfully: Bengal in the fourth century AD, Orissa in the seventh. Farther to the west, even in the fourteenth century, the official inscriptions of
Mahārā
ra
(’great kingdom’) were still in Kannada; but it then became another totally Aryan-speaking area, with a language known as Marathi.
^*
It appears that the social strata must have been speaking different languages for some time, with (in this case, at least) Aryan favoured much more by the lower orders.

Aśoka’s inscriptions, the earliest in a decipherably Aryan language to survive, are not in Sanskrit but Magadhi Prakrit; and this absence of Sanskrit from inscriptions, or rather its presence only for literary decoration while the guts of the message are given in Prakrit, continues for several centuries. It is not until two hundred years later that the first inscriptions in Sanskrit are found, farther west, in Ayodhya and Mathura (south of Delhi). There is a clear division of function between Sanskrit and Prakrit visible in these inscriptions, which contain both: Sanskrit is used for the verse, Prakrit for the prose dedications. Ultimately, Sanskrit did come to predominate, and indeed to be the exclusive language of inscriptions. But this tradition did not get fully established for another 250 years, starting in AD 150 with the rock inscriptions of a fairly minor king,
Rudradāman
, at
Junāga
h
(’Greek fort’) on the western coast, in Gujarat.

Something of the same division of function between Sanskrit for high and Prakrit for everyday use is also shown by the language conventions of Sanskrit drama. Every play was multilingual, or multi-dialectal. From the sixth century AD, noble males speak in Sanskrit; ladies speak in
Śaurasenī
(the Mathura Prakrit), but sing in
Mahārā
rī;
meanwhile, low characters are scripted in Magadhi (ironically, the descendant of the dialect that had had royal overtones, nine hundred years before). We can only suppose that intervening political reversals (e.g. the rise of the
Sātavāhana
kings in the Maharashtra area over the first centuries BC and AD) had a more or less permanent effect on the perceived status of the dialects.
^*

Rājaśekhara
, making recommendations
C.
AD 900 for the ideal poet, says that he should have servants fluent in
Apabhra
śa
(’falling off, the quite generally used, but unflattering, term for later forms of Śauraseni Prakrit, on its way to becoming modern Hindi), maids in Magadhi and the like; but his wives should speak Sanskrit, or else ‘Prakrit’, which for him means Maharashtri, and his friends all languages.
¹⁴
The social imperative for Sanskrit had become inescapable, despite the poet’s own personal enthusiasm for his local Prakrit. But to a large extent, the status of the dialects seemed to have become fully detached from awareness of their local origins, or their history.

Interestingly, Magadhi had probably also been the dialect of Gautama, the founder of Buddhism, though about one millennium earlier. (His contemporary,
Mahāvīra
, the founder of Jainism, lived in the area too.) Magadha was also the area of the earliest Buddhist councils, which established the outlines of this faith for later generations. And Buddhism’s most famous, and influential, early convert was King Aśoka himself, another resident of Magadha, in its chief city,
Pā
aliputra
(modern Patna in the state of Bihar on the Ganges).

This geographical coincidence might have been expected to lead Buddhism to favour Magadhi. The Buddha had advised his monks to teach in their own language (
sakayā niruttiyā).
His view here seems to have involved not only a respect for the vernacular, but also a positive belief that his caste, the warrior
K
atriya
, was actually superior to the priestly
Brāhma
a
with its Sanskrit associations. This was part of his persuasive redefinition of the whole caste system and of what it was to be truly
ariya
(Aryan)—though this word is usually translated in Buddhist English as ‘noble’—based on personal merit rather than birth.