[INDOLOGY] Question about Gandhari Prakrit

[Andrew Ollett]

I will not refer to my own book on the history of Prakrit and its forms of
knowledge (well, I guess I just did), but I did want to make a few points
in this connection and see if anyone has anything to add.

(1) "Gandhari Prakrit" is of course a modern designation. The
term "Gandhari" was made up by H. W. Bailey in 1946, and we don't know (or
at least I don't know) how the speakers of the language referred to it, or
whether they knew of "Prakrit" as a designation for a language or a type of
language.

(2) The earliest Prakrit grammars were grammars of one specific literary
language, which they called "Prakrit," and even they were probably composed
at a time when Gandhari had ceased to be used as a literary language in the
Northwest. (This certainly seems to be true of the earliest grammar that
survives in its entirety, the Prākṛtaprakāśa, which in its original form
only described a single language, as Nitti-Dolci showed 83 years ago.)

(3) One exception to the above is the Nāṭyaśāstra, which briefly describes
a number of notionally regional languages (alongside a more general
distinction between Sanskrit and Prakrit). Sylvain Lévi argued 119 years
ago that the languages of Indian theater "radiate like a fan around
Ujjayinī." Now it doesn't seem that anything like Gandhari is used in any
surviving plays. But languages like Bāhlīkā, Śakārī, and Ābhīrī are
mentioned in the Nāṭyaśāstra, and it seems likely that they were at least
notionally connected to the speech of the Northwest. (Of course the
theatrical languages are based on conventions of representation, and not on
a premodern "Linguistic Survey of India.")

Andrew

On Sat, Jan 23, 2021 at 7:29 AM Madhav Deshpande via INDOLOGY <
indology at list.indology.info> wrote:

> Thanks, Johannes and Herman.  Your responses are along the lines that I
> suspected, but I wanted a more authoritative confirmation than my own
> hunch.  I have suggested that Pāṇini survives in Patañjali's Āryāvarta, but
> his homeland is no longer within its limits.  Best wishes,
>
> Madhav
>
> Madhav M. Deshpande
> Professor Emeritus, Sanskrit and Linguistics
> University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA
> Senior Fellow, Oxford Center for Hindu Studies
> Adjunct Professor, National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore, India
>
> [Residence: Campbell, California, USA]
>
>
> On Sat, Jan 23, 2021 at 12:19 AM Johannes Bronkhorst <
> johannes.bronkhorst at unil.ch> wrote:
>
>> Dear Madhav,
>>
>> You raise an interesting question. One factor that must probably be taken
>> into consideration in trying to answer it is the following: Though a center
>> of Vedic culture at the time of Pāṇini (i.e., presumably before Alexander's
>> invasion and the Maurya Empire), Gandhāra was no longer Brahmanical
>> territory after the collapse of that empire. This I argue at length in my
>> book *How the Brahmins Won* (Brill 2016), especially § I.1.3.
>>
>> Johannes Bronkhorst
>>
>>
>> On 23 Jan 2021, at 00:58, Madhav Deshpande via INDOLOGY <
>> indology at list.indology.info> wrote:
>>
>> Dear Colleagues,
>>
>>      I have a question about the Gandhari Prakrit.  From the Gandhari
>> Dharmapada edited by John Brough to recent publications of the Buddhist
>> Gandhari materials, we have come to learn of Gandhari as a variety of
>> Prakrit.  To my memory, the Prakrit grammars do not mention Gandhari
>> Prakrit, while they do refer to numerous regional varieties.  I am just
>> wondering why the Gandhari Prakrit did not enter into the description of
>> Prakrit varieties by the Prakrit grammarians.  If Pāṇini's grammar coming
>> from the Swat valley survived and prospered in the mainland of India, why
>> did the Gandhari Prakrit remain unknown?  Any suggestions?
>>
>> Madhav M. Deshpande
>> Professor Emeritus, Sanskrit and Linguistics
>> University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA
>> Senior Fellow, Oxford Center for Hindu Studies
>> Adjunct Professor, National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore,
>> India
>>
>> [Residence: Campbell, California, USA]
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