A Study on the Origin and History of Sanskrit Poetry

The practically unbelievable advancement of detail in custom recognition; the phenomenal abundances of austerity; the abnormal portrayals of folklore in workmanship; the incessant work of tremendous numbers in depiction; the huge greater part of the legends; the unparalleled brevity of one of the types of composition; the immense mixes constantly utilized in the later style, are among the all the more striking appearances of this imperfection of the Indian personality. In different parts of logical writing, in phonetics, punctuation, arithmetic, space science, medication, and law, the Indians additionally accomplished eminent outcomes. In a portion of these subjects their achievements are, in fact, far ahead of time of what was practiced by the Greeks. History is the one frail spot in Indian writing. It is, truth be told, non-existent. The absolute absence of the authentic sense is characteristic to the point, that the entire course of Sanskrit writing is obscured by the shadow of this deformity, experiencing as it completes a whole nonappearance of definite order. So obvious is this, that the very date of KĀLIDĀSA, the best of Indian writers, was long a matter of contention inside the points of confinement of a thousand years, and is even now suspicious to the degree of a century or two. Along these lines the dates of Sanskrit creators are in most by far of cases just known around, having been derived from the backhanded proof of association, citation or suggestion, improvement of language or style. With regards to the occasions of their lives, we ordinarily know nothing by any means, and just in a couple of cases a couple of general realities. Two causes appear to have consolidated to achieve this exceptional outcome. In any case, early India composed no history since it never made any. The old Indians never experienced a battle forever, similar to the Greeks in the Persian and the Romans in the Punic wars, for example, would have welded their clans into a country and created political significance. Also, the Brahmans, whose task it would normally have been to record extraordinary deeds, had early grasped the principle that all activity and presence are a positive abhorrence, and could along these lines have felt however little tendency to annal chronicled occasions. The old Indian language, similar to the writing created in it, falls into the two primary divisions of Vedic and Sanskrit. The previous varies from the last in general about as much as Homeric from established Greek, or the Latin of the Salic songs from that of Varro. Inside the Vedic language, in which the holy writing of India is composed, a few phases can be recognized. In its changes from one to the next it bit by bit develops progressively current till it is at last converged in Sanskrit. Indeed, even in its most punctual stage Vedic can't be viewed as a prominent tongue, however is somewhat a misleadingly bygone lingo, passed on from one age to the next inside the class of holy artists. Of this the language itself supplies a few signs. One of them is the work one next to the other of structures having a place with various etymological periods, a training in which, be that as it may, the Vedic does not venture to such an extreme as the Homeric lingo. The verbally expressed language of the Vedic clerics likely contrasted from this lingo of the songs just without wherever a writing has grown up; yet in India it has been more unequivocally set apart than in some other nation.

Assuming, in any case, Vedic was never again a characteristic tongue, yet was at that point the educational vernacular of a class, how much more genuine is this of the language of the later writing! Sanskrit varies from Vedic, however not in similarity with the characteristic improvement which shows up in living dialects. The phonetic state of Sanskrit remains precisely equivalent to that of the soonest Vedic. In the matter of syntactic structures, as well, the language shows itself to be practically stationary; for scarcely any new arrangements or articulations have shown up. However even from a syntactic perspective the later language has turned out to be altogether different from the prior. This change was hence realized, not by new manifestations, yet by progressive misfortunes. The most eminent of these were the vanishing of the subjunctive state of mind and the decrease of twelve infinitives to a solitary one. In declension the change comprised primarily in the dropping of various synonymous by-frames. This later period of the old language of India was stereotyped by the extraordinary grammarian PĀṆINI towards the finish of the fourth century B.C. It came to be called Sanskrit, the "refined" or "expand" (saṃ-skṛi-ta, actually "set up together"), a term not found in the more seasoned grammarians, yet happening in the soonest epic, the Rāmāyaṇa. The name is intended to be against that of the well-known lingos called Prākṛita, and is so contradicted, for example, in the Kāvyādarça, or Mirror of Poetry, a work of the 6th century A.D. The more established grammarians themselves, from YĀSKA (fifth century B.C.) onwards, talk about this traditional tongue as Bhāshā, "the discourse," in refinement from Vedic. The comments they make about it point to a verbally expressed language. Along these lines one of them, PATANJALI, alludes to it as utilized "on the planet," and assigns the expressions of his Sanskrit as "current on the planet." Pāṇini himself gives numerous guidelines which have no noteworthiness aside from regarding living discourse; as when he portrays the emphasize or the extending of vowels in calling from a separation, in welcome, or being referred to an answer. Once more, Sanskrit can't have been a minor artistic and school language, in light of the fact that there are early hints of its having had logic varieties. In this way Yāska and Pāṇini notice the eccentricities of the "Easterns" and "Northerners," Kātyāyana alludes to neighborhood divergences, and Patanjali indicates words happening in single regions as it were. There is, to be sure, no uncertainty that in the second century B.C. Sanskrit was really spoken in the entire nation called by Sanskrit essayists Āryāvarta, or "Place where there is the "taught" (çishṭa), the businesses of right discourse. Its utilization, be that as it may, reached out past the Brahmans; for we read in Patanjali about a head-groom questioning with a grammarian with regards to the historical underpinnings of the Sanskrit word for "charioteer" (sūta). This concurs with the conveyance of the tongues in the Indian show, an appropriation certainly dependent on a convention a lot more seasoned than the plays themselves. Here the lord and those of unrivaled position speak Sanskrit, while the different types of the well-known lingo are doled out to ladies and to men of the general population. The dramatizations additionally demonstrate that whoever did not speak Sanskrit at any rate got it, for Sanskrit is there utilized in discussion with speakers of Prākrit. The dramatic open, and that before which, as we probably am aware from regular references in the writing, the sagas were recounted, should likewise have gotten Sanskrit. In this manner, however established Sanskrit was from the earliest starting point an abstract and, it could be said, a fake tongue, it is wrong to deny to it out and out the character of a conversational language. It is in reality, as has just been referenced, even now really spoken in India by scholarly Brahmans, just as composed by them, for consistently purposes. The situation of Sanskrit, to put it plainly, has from the start been, and still is, much like that of Hebrew among the Jews or of Latin in the Middle Ages. The declaration of the engravings is informational in appearing continuous infringement of Sanskrit on the famous lingos utilized by the two non-Brahmanical religions. In this manner in the Jain engravings of Mathurā (presently Muttra), a practically unadulterated Prākrit wins down to the primary century A.D.

DISCUSSION

After that Sanskritisms become more and more frequent, till at last simple Sanskrit is written. Similarly in Buddhist inscriptions pure Prākrit is relieved by the mixed dialect, the latter by Sanskrit. Thus in the inscriptions of Nāsik, in Western India, the mixed dialect extends into the third, while Sanskrit first begins in the second century A.D. From the sixth century onwards Sanskrit prevails exclusively (except among the Jains) in inscriptions, though Prākritisms often occur in them. Even in the literature of Buddhism the mixed dialect was gradually supplanted by Sanskrit. Hence most of the Northern Buddhist texts have come down to us in Sanskrit, which, however, diverges widely in vocabulary from that of the sacred texts of the Brahmans, as well as from that of the classical literature, since they are full of Prākrit words. It is expressly attested by the Chinese pilgrim, Hiouen Thsang, that in the seventh century the Buddhists used Sanskrit even in oral theological discussions. The Jains finally did the same, though without entirely giving up Prākrit. Thus by the time of the Muhammadan conquest Sanskrit was almost the

recovering its ancient supremacy, the Prākrits had exercised a lasting influence upon it in two respects. They had supplied its vocabulary with a number of new words, and had transformed into a stress accent the old musical accent which still prevailed after the days of Pāṇini. In the oldest period of Prākrit, that of the Pāli Açoka inscriptions and the early Buddhistic and Jain literature, two main dialects, the Western and the Eastern, may be distinguished. Between the beginning of our era and about 1000 A.D., mediæval Prākrit, which is still synthetic in character, is divided into four chief dialects. In the west we find Apabhraṃça ("decadent") in the valley of the Indus, and Çaurasenī in the Doab, with Mathurā as its centre. Subdivisions of the latter were Gaurjarī (Gujaratī), Avantī (Western Rājputānī), and Mahārāshṭrī (Eastern Rājputānī). The Eastern Prākrit now appears as Māgadhī, the dialect of Magadha, now Behar, and Ardha-Māgadhī (Half-Māgadhī), with Benares as its centre. These mediæval Prākrits are important in connection with Sanskrit literature, as they are the vernaculars employed by the uneducated classes in the Sanskrit drama.

Roger D. Woodard (2014). The Ancient Languages of Asia and the Americas. Cambridge University Press. pp. 1–2. Bhaskar, B.V.S. (31 July 2012). "Mark of Sanskrit". The Hindu. pundits! !". The India Post. 9 April 2010. Retrieved 2012-04-05.

Colin P. Masica 2013, p. 146 notes of this diacritic that "there is some controversy as to whether it represents a homorganic nasal stop [...], a nasalised vowel, a nasalised semivowel, or all these according to context".