Mother of All Brothers

In the last two decades, Prakrit increasingly starred in modern anthologies of ancient verse, usually of love poetry. Grow Long, Blessed Night: Love Poems from Ancient India, translated by Martha Ann Selby (OUP, 2000) is a superb example. This had to do with Arvind Krishna Mehrotra’s English translation in the ’80s of the Sattasaai or Gatha Saptasati, the Seven Hundred Songs of Hala, a Salivahana of the second or third centuries of the last millennium who collected this poetry, full of deep emotion and tight, sparse construction. The Sattasaai opened a new box of chocolates for readers accustomed to thinking of Prakrit as the preferred scriptural language of Jainism and Buddhism (the Dhammapada and Tipitakas in particular). Or, as the ‘‘common’’ language used by ‘‘women and inferiors’’ in Sanskrit drama. (And has that changed? Think of the obscene new bill passed in J&K dispossessing women who marry ‘‘outsiders’’.)

But Prakrit was waiting to happen, after sustained Sanskrit studies got most of that canon out in English, French and German translation, with enough commentaries on the commentaries to daunt the most eager classicist. Today, just as the 19th and 20th centuries were the Second Spring of Sanskrit, it seems that the new millennium might belong to Prakrit. And to get perspective right, here’s a new book by an Indian scholar, the late Professor Jagdish Chandra Jain (1909-1994), put together by his son Anil with a glowing forward by scholar N.N. Bhattacharya (Encyclopedia of Jainism). Professor Jain, a freedom fighter and associate of Bapu, Gurudev Tagore and Pandit Nehru, occupied at various times the Chair of Jainological and Prakrit Studies in three universities (Bombay, Peking and Kiel in Germany), besides lecturing extensively in the universe of classical discourse across Europe, the former Soviet Union, US, Canada and Latin America. Among his 80 books, his life of Bhagwan Mahavir, rendered in several languages, is particularly famous, as is his Life in Ancient India as depicted in Jain Canons.

This book on the history and development of Prakrit literature makes a fair sweep of time and text: the evolution of the Prakrit languages (thrilling names like Sauraseni, Ardha Magadhi, Maharashtri, which branched off into ‘‘Apabrahmsa’’, from which came modern Indo-Aryan languages like Hindi, Gujarati, Marathi, Bengali, Punjabi, Sindhi and others). Religious literature in Prakrit, specially the contribution of Jain thinkers, the canonical texts of the Digambaras and post-canonical literature of the Svetambaras, the nature of poetic composition in Prakrit, the narrative literature in Maharashtri, the (famous) instance of how Prakrit was used in Sanskrit drama, the literary structures (grammar, prosody, lexicography and poetics – one of the best chapters, where you see the nuts and bolts of the language), secular literature: erotica like “Vaisika Sastra” or the art of harlotry, the science of omens including dream-interpretation, “Tajika” texts that reveal the influence of Islam; treatises on music, perfumery, mining, horses, elephants, the art of stealing! Replete with quotations, this book sketches the outlines of Prakrit. We now await its colouring through translations by younger scholars, which will give us Prakrit as Sanskrit was given to us.