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Prakrit, Sanskrit, and the Language Order of Premodern India

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Prakrit, Sanskrit, and the Language Order of Premodern India Language of the Snakes Prakrit, Sanskrit, and the Language Order of Premodern India Andrew Ollett Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2016 ©2015 Andrew Ollett All Rights Reserved ABSTRACT Language of the Snakes Andrew Ollett Language of the Snakes is a biography of Prakrit, one of premodern India’s most important and most neglected literary languages. Prakrit was the language of a literary tradition that flourished om roughly the 1st to the 12th century . During this period, it served as a counterpart to Sanskrit, the preeminent language of literature and learning in India. Together, Sanskrit and Prakrit were the foundation for an enduring “language order” that governed the way that people thought of and used language. Language of the Snakes traces the history of this language order through the historical articulations of Prakrit, which are set out here for the first time: its invention and cultivation among the royal courts of central India around the 1st century , its representation in classical Sanskrit and Prakrit texts, the ways it is made into an object of systematic knowledge, and ultimately its displacement om the language practices of literature. Prakrit is shown to have played a critical role in the establishment of the cultural-political formation now called the “Sanskrit cosmopolis,” as shown through a genealogy of its two key practices, courtly literature (kāvya-) and royal eulogy (praśasti-). It played a similarly critical role in the emergence of vernacular textuality, as it provided a model for language practices that diverged om Sanskrit but nevertheless possessed an identity and regularity of their own. Language of the Snakes thus offers a cultural history of Prakrit in contrast to the natural-history amework of previous studies of the language. It uses Prakrit to formulate a theory of literary language as embedded in an ordered set of cultural practices rather than by contrast to spoken language. Table of Contents List of Figures iv List of Tables v 1 Prakrit in the Language Order of India 1 Language Orders ...................................... 4 The Prakrit Archive .................................... 7 Unlocking the Language Order .............................. 14 New Modalities of Language ................................ 16 Natural and Cultural Histories of Language ........................ 19 Broad and Narrow Senses of “Prakrit” ........................... 27 Inventing, Figuring, Knowing and Forgetting Prakrit ................... 32 2 Inventing Prakrit: The Languages of Power 36 Introduction ........................................ 36 Inventing a Discourse ................................... 40 The Question of Language ................................. 50 The Legacy of the Sātavāhanas ............................... 64 i Conclusion ......................................... 67 3 Inventing Prakrit: The Languages of Literature 71 The Two Histories of Prakrit Literature .......................... 71 Prakrit’s Kings ....................................... 77 Three Myths of Continuity ................................ 103 Prakrit’s Monks ...................................... 108 Pādalipta’s Taraṅgavatī ................................... 116 Conclusions ........................................ 124 4 The Forms of Prakrit Literature 127 Sweet Syllables ....................................... 129 Quavering Verses ...................................... 137 Inexhaustible Collections .................................. 147 5 Figuring Prakrit 156 Introduction ........................................ 156 The Archetypal Schema .................................. 160 Opposition ......................................... 162 Identity .......................................... 175 Totality ........................................... 185 Iterability .......................................... 192 The Half-language ..................................... 195 The Six Languages ..................................... 200 Conclusions ........................................ 202 ii 6 Knowing Prakrit 204 Prakrit Knowledge ..................................... 204 An Archaeology of Prakrit Knowledge ........................... 207 Grammar, Metagrammar and the Regional ........................ 223 Prakrit in the Vernacular .................................. 236 7 Conclusions: Forgetting Prakrit 245 Summary .......................................... 245 Reordering Language ................................... 249 Displacement ........................................ 253 The New Duality ..................................... 255 Translation and Abridgement ............................... 259 Resuscitation ........................................ 264 The Language of the Snakes ................................ 270 Bibliography 275 Primary Sources ...................................... 275 Secondary Literature .................................... 286 Appendices 318 A Timeline of the Sātavāhanas and their Successors 319 B Sātavāhana Inscriptions 323 C Fragments of Early Prakrit Grammars 340 iii List of Figures ⒉1 The Nāṇeghāṭ Cave ................................. 41 ⒉2 Aśvamedha coin of Śrī Sātakarṇi and Nāganika .................... 44 ⒉3 Sātakarṇi making a donation to Buddhist monks at Kanaganahalli ......... 48 ⒉4 Stela om Sannati with praśasti of Gautamīputra Śrī Sātakarṇi ........... 52 iv List of Tables ⒉1 Comparison of the introductory portion of Uṣavadāta’s inscriptions ......... 56 A.1 Sātavāhanas ..................................... 319 A.2 Mahāmeghavāhanas ................................. 322 A.3 Ikṣvākus ....................................... 322 v Acknowledgements I thank, first of all, my teachers, including all of the iends and colleagues om whom I still have much to learn. Evident throughout this dissertation is my debt to Sheldon Pollock, but even he probably does not know how great it is. Yigal Bronner, Allison Busch, Jack Hawley, and Sudipta Kaviraj were generous with comments and suggestions. There are many people who helped to make this dissertation better, perhaps without knowing it. These include participants in the MESAAS post-MPhil seminar (Yitzhak Lewis, Wendell Marsh, Timothy Mitchell, Omar Farahat, Kenan Tekin, Sahar Ullah, Casey Primel, and Nasser Abdurrahman), the INCITE program at Columbia (above all Bill McAllister), and the South Asia Graduate Student Forum (Fran Pritchett, Jay Ramesh, Joel Bordeaux, and Joel Lee), and discussions with many more, including Whitney Cox, Anand Venkatkrishnan, Owen Cornwall, Dalpat Rajpurohit, and Irene SanPietro. I am happy to thank the people at Columbia who made my research possible: Jessica Rechtschaffer, Michael Fishman, Irys Schenker, Sandra Peters, and Kerry Gluckmann. The L.D. Institute of Indology, the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, the Asiatic Society, and the Nepalese-German Manuscript Cataloguing Project all provided important manuscript materials. A. N. Upadhye used to say, at the end of every preface, karmaṇyevādhikāraste vi या मे शािराायामाायां यवनायते । तै सवभ तायाू इदं सव च सवदा ॥ vii Chapter 1 Prakrit in the Language Order of India What historical a priori provided the starting-point om which it was possible to define the great checkerboard of distinct identities established against the confused, undefined, faceless, and, as it were, indifferent background of differences? Michel Foucault1 “It should be understood that the people of India have a number of languages,” wrote Mīrzā Khān in his Gi om India in 1674, “but those in which books and poetical works may be composed— such as would be agreeable to those who possess a refined disposition and straight understanding—are three.”2 With these words, addressed to the son of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, Mīrzā Khān articulated 1 Foucault (1994 [1966]: xxiv). 2 Mīrzā Khān, A Gi om India, p. 53: bebāyad dānist zabān-i ahl-i hind mutaʿaddid ast. ammā ānchi badān tābhā o dīvānhā taṣnīf tuwān kard, o mat̤būʿ-i t̤abʿ-i salīm o ẕihn-i mustaqīm bāshad, bar sih gūnah ast… The translation by M. Ziauddin is on p. 3⒋ See also Keshavmurthy (2013). 1 an age-old principle of textuality in India: that of the bhāṣātraya, the “three languages.” However numerous the languages of India are—and depending on your definition of “language,” this number could easily shoot into the thousands—there were only a few that could serve the purposes of textuality, and especially the higher purposes of textuality that Mīrzā Khān alludes to.3 This is not in itself surprising: it is universally the case that the languages of literature and science are fewer, more constrained, more rarified than the languages of day-to-day communication. But this rarification is not the only meaning of the schema of three languages: it defines languages, apportions them, assigns each a significance and a domain, in short it brings the vast and unruly world of language practices to order. It is a blueprint of what I will call a “language order.” Mīrzā Khān’s three languages are Sanskrit, Prakrit, and the vernacular (bhākhā), which are more or less the same three that had appeared in schematic representations of literary language for the preceding 1500 years. But let’s now turn to his description of Prakrit: Second, Parākirt. This language is mostly employed in the praise of kings, ministers, and chiefs, and belongs to the under-world, that is, the world that is below the ground; they call it Pātāl-bānī, and also Nāg-bānī, that is, the language of
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