Prakrit

Prakrit is the collective name for the Middle Indo-Aryan vernaculars standing between Vedic and Classical Sanskrit on one side and the modern North Indian languages on the other, and the word itself means natural or original, as against samskrita, refined or made. It is not one language. Ardhamagadhi, Maharashtri, Shauraseni, Magadhi and Jain Maharashtri are distinct literary registers with their own grammars and their own uses, and a reader trained in one is not automatically at home in another.

The Shvetambara Jain canon is preserved in Ardhamagadhi, and later Jain commentarial and narrative literature runs in Jain Maharashtri and in Shauraseni. That makes Prakrit the primary scriptural language of a living religion. Jain tradition holds that Mahavira taught in the vernacular of his hearers rather than in Sanskrit, so the choice of language is itself a doctrinal statement about who the teaching is for.

Buddhism made a related choice. Pali, the canonical language of Theravada, is a Middle Indo-Aryan language of the same period and the same family, and the two traditions together mean that the earliest surviving scriptures of two religions were composed in vernaculars deliberately preferred over the priestly language. Richard Salomon's guide to Indian epigraphy sets out the philological groundwork for all of it.

The oldest deciphered writing in India is Prakrit. The edicts Ashoka had cut on rocks and pillars in the third century BCE, in the Brahmi and Kharoshthi scripts, are in regional Prakrits, and they are a religious document as much as a political one. They set out dhamma as a public ethic, record the king's remorse after the conquest of Kalinga, and enjoin respect between sects and restraint in the killing of animals. Because they are dated, located and in the vernacular, they anchor the chronology of early Indian religion.

Prakrit then had a long literary career. Maharashtri became the language of lyric poetry, above all in the anthology of seven hundred verses attributed to a Satavahana king, and Sanskrit drama assigns Prakrit to particular characters by convention, so that a single play may carry three or four registers with the social position of the speaker determining which is used.

The survey edited by George Cardona and Dhanesh Jain places the Prakrits in the descent from Old to Middle to New Indo-Aryan, and the modern languages of the north, Marathi, Gujarati, Bengali, Hindi and the rest, come through them. Prakrit is therefore both a scriptural language still in liturgical use among Jains and the ancestral stage of the speech of several hundred million people.