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@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@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@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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