OLLETT | LANGUAGE OF THE SNAKES LaNguage of the SNakes Luminos is the Open Access monograph publishing program from UC Press. Luminos provides a framework for preserving and reinvigorating monograph publishing for the future and increases the reach and visibility of important scholarly work. Titles published in the UC Press Luminos model are published with the same high standards for selection, peer review, production, and marketing as those in our traditional program. www.luminosoa.org Language of the Snakes SOUTH ASIA ACROSS THE DISCIPLINES Edited by Muzaffar Alam, Robert Goldman, and Gauri Viswanathan Dipesh Chakrabarty, Sheldon Pollock, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Founding Editors Funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and jointly published by the University of California Press, the University of Chicago Press, and Columbia University Press For a list of books in the series, see page 309. Language of the Snakes Prakrit, Sanskrit, and the Language Order of Premodern India Andrew Ollett UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advanc- ing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Oakland, California © 2017 by Andrew Ollett Suggested citation: Ollett, Andrew. Language of the Snakes: Prakrit, Sanskrit, and the Language Order of Premodern India. Oakland: University of California Press, 2017. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/luminos.37 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND license. To view a copy of the license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Ollett, Andrew, 1986- author. Title: Language of the snakes : Prakrit, Sanskrit, and the language order of premodern India / Andrew Ollett. Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2017018705 (print) | LCCN 2017019745 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520968813 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520296220 (pbk. : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Prakrit literature—History and criticism. | Prakrit languages. | Sanskrit literature—History and criticism. | Language and culture—India. Classification: LCC PK4994 (ebook) | LCC PK4994 .O45 2017 (print) | DDC 891/.3-dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017018705 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 य봾 मे श봾ꅍ鄿र봾饍봾य봾म봾奍봾य봾ं यवन봾यते | त뵈 सव㔵स्वभूत봾य봾 इदं सव픂 च सव㔵द봾 ॥ contents List of Illustrations ix List of Tables x Acknowledgments xi 1. Prakrit in the Language Order of India 1 2. Inventing Prakrit: The Languages of Power 26 3. Inventing Prakrit: The Languages of Literature 50 4. The Forms of Prakrit Literature 85 5. Figuring Prakrit 111 6. Knowing Prakrit 141 7. Forgetting Prakrit 169 Appendix A 189 Appendix B 193 Appendix C 205 Notes 213 Bibliography 259 Index 297 List of Illustrations 1. The Nāṇeghāṭ Cave 29 2. Aśvamedha coin of Śrī Sātakarṇi and Nāganika 32 3. Sātakarṇi making a donation to Buddhist monks at Kanaganahalli 34 4. The “Queen’s Cave” at Nāsik 36 5. Stela from Sannati with praśasti of Gautamīputra Śrī Sātakarṇi 37 6. Map of important Sātavāhana sites 49 ix List of Tables 1. Comparison of the introductory portion of Uṣavadāta’s inscriptions 40 2. Time line of Sātavāhana kings 189 3. Time line of Mahāmeghavāhana kings 191 4. Time line of Ikṣvāku kings 191 x Acknowledgments I’m thankful to a great number of people at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the University of California Press for support, comments and suggestions. These include participants in the MESAAS post-MPhil seminar (Nasser Abdurrahman, Omar Farahat, Yitzhak Lewis, Wendell Marsh, Timothy Mitchell, Casey Primel, Kenan Tekin, Sahar Ullah), the INCITE program at Columbia (coordinated by Bill McAllister), in whose basement office the majority of this book was written, the South Asia Graduate Student Forum (Fran Pritchett, Jay Ramesh, Joel Bordeaux, and Joel Lee), and my colleagues at the Society of Fellows (Alexander Bevilacqua, Stephanie Dick, Alisha Holland, Abhishek Kaicker, Ya-Wen Lei, and Adam Mestyan). My research would not have been possible without the support of the staff at MESAAS and GSAS at Columbia, including Jessica Rechtschaffer, Michael Fishman, Irys Schenker, Sandra Peters, and Kerry Gluckmann. I also thank the staff at Harvard’s Society of Fellows: Yesim Erdmann, Kelly Katz, Diana Morse, and Ana Novak. Bill Nelson produced the map in chapter 2. I thank Whitney Cox, Owen Cornwall, Irene SanPietro, Dalpat Rajpurohit, David Shulman, and Anand Venkatkrishnan for feedback at various points over the life of this project. Yigal Bronner, Allison Busch, Jack Hawley, and Sudipta Kaviraj were generous with comments and suggestions when this book was a dissertation. The late Barney Bate introduced me to much of the literature that is cited in these pages. Sheldon Pollock provided constant support and guidance; it was he who encouraged me to begin this project in the first place. The Lalbhai Dalpatbhai Institute of Indology, the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, the Asiatic Society in Kolkata, and the Nepalese–German Manuscript Cataloguing Project all provided important manuscript materials. xi 1 Prakrit in the Language Order of India What historical a priori provided the starting-point from which it was pos- sible to define the great checkerboard of distinct identities established against the confused, undefined, faceless, and, as it were, indifferent background of differences? —Michel Foucault, The Order of Things1 “It should be understood that the people of India have a number of languages,” Mīrzā Khān observes in his Gift from India in 1676, “but those in which books and poetical works may be composed—such as would be agreeable to those who pos- sess a refined disposition and straight understanding—are of three kinds.”2 With these words, addressed to the son of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, Mīrzā Khān articulated the age-old schema of the bhāṣātraya, the “three languag- es.” This was one of the most enduring ways of representing language in India. Of course, then as now, India was one of the most linguistically diverse places on earth. But the sense that Mīrzā Khān assigns to the schema of three languages is that these three alone answer to the purposes of textuality, and especially the higher purposes of textuality to which he alludes.3 Mīrzā Khān’s three languages are Sanskrit, Prakrit, and the vernacular (bhākhā). He is simply reframing what was common knowledge in India. The three slots in the schema were not arbitrary: for nearly fifteen hundred years, they had been filled in more or less the way that Mīrzā Khān describes.4 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 world, that is to say, the world that is below the ground; they call it Pātāl-bānī, and also Nāg-bānī, that is, the language of the lowest of the low, and of reptiles of mean origin, who live underground. This language is a mixture of Sahãskirt, mentioned above, and Bhākhā, to be mentioned next.5 On originally reading this passage, I had two reactions. The first was that of my inner historian, who recognized that Mīrzā Khān’s description was remote from what I knew about Prakrit—and, more important, what was known about Prakrit 1 2 chapter 1 even in Mīrzā Khān’s time. Nobody ever represented it as a language of the snakes, except, as I later found out, a handful of other authors from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.6 Given that this linguistic tradition began, as I’ll argue here, around the first century, Prakrit was only known as the “language of the snakes” at the tail end of its long history. Hence I wondered what Mīrzā Khān’s sources might have been. But my second reaction was to the description itself. Mīrzā Khān begins in a register of descriptive ethnography (“the people of India have a num- ber of languages”) and then transports us to a snake-infested subterranean realm. Prakrit, he tells us without a hint of contradiction, is the language of the lowest of the low and yet used to praise the highest of the high. At this point, the question of Mīrzā Khān’s sources gave way to another question: what would it mean for Prakrit to be the language of the snakes anyway? It is obviously not a language in the sense of the Linguistic Survey of India: we can’t send a field linguist into the underworld and have him ask the resident serpents how they say a couple dozen words. Is Mīrzā Khān simply reporting folk beliefs or myths? Does this mean that we have left the surface of the earth for good, and retreated into a fantastic realm of imaginary language? Or can we—should we—try to recover some shards of historical truth from Mīrzā Khān’s account? This passage, as Foucault famously said of Borges’s Chinese encyclopedia, shat- ters the familiar landmarks of our thought. Not because it presents a completely new picture of language, but because it presents the utterly familiar picture of the three languages in an uncanny way.7 Instead of asking how we can accommodate Mīrzā Khān’s remarks within “this world,” the world of truths to be discovered by social science, we are led to ask what worlds the language practices he describes belong to. Where can we accommodate them, if not within the familiar land- marks of our thought? Among experts, the question of the “reality” of Prakrit, or Sanskrit for that matter, has been debated for more than a century: where, when, and among whom did these languages exist, and what was their mode of exis- tence? Were they spoken or written, natural or artificial? What kinds of histories do they have, and how can they possibly be related to other kinds of histories—of spoken language, for example, or of society and politics, or of literature and the imagination? This book addresses these questions by telling the story of the mysterious snake-language.