Prakrit meaning "original, natural, artless, normal, ordinary, usual", i.e. "vernacular", in contrast to samskrta "excellently made", both adjectives elliptically referring to vak "speech") refers to the broad family of the Indic languages and dialects spoken in ancient India. The Prakrits became literary languages, generally patronized by kings identified with the ksatriya caste, but were regarded as illegitimate by the Brahmin orthodoxy. The earliest extant use of Prakrit are the inscriptions of Asoka, emperor of Northern India, and while the various Prakrit languages are associated with different patron dynasties, with different religions and different literary traditions, none of them were at any time an informal "mother tongue" in any area of India.
An elegant translation of the Sattasai (or Seven Hundred), India's earliest collection of lyric poetry, this book deals with love in its many aspects. Mostly narrated by women, the poems reveal the world of local Indian village life sometime between the third and fifth centuries. The Sattasai offers a more realistic counterpart to that notorious theoretical treatise on love, the Kamasutra, which presents a cosmopolitan and calculating milieu. Translators Peter Khoroche and Herman Tieken...
Introduction to Prakrit provides the reader with a guide for the more attentive and scholarly study of Prakrit occurring in Sanskrit plays, poetry and prose-both literary and inscriptional. It presents a general view of the subject with special stress on Sauraseni and Maharastri Prakrit system. The book is divided into two parts. Part I consists of I-XI Chapters which deal with the three periods of Indo-Aryan speech. The three stages of the Middle Period, the literary and spoken Prakrits, their...
Samkhya is one of the earliest schools of Indian philosophy and most systems, including yoga, have been drawn from or influenced by it. Samkhya is a dualistic philosophy and postulates two eternal realities: Purusha, the witnessing consciousness, and Prakriti, the root cause of creation, composed of the three gunas.This text highlights the unique contribution of Samkhya philosophy in man's quest to understand his true nature. It discusses the practical theories of causation, manifestation,...
This volume brings together eight contributions of Professor Madhav M. Deshpande relating to the historical socio-linguistics of Sanskrit and Prakrit languages. The studies brought together here represent his continuing research in this field. The main thrust of these studies is to show that patterns of language used and ideas about language, are deeply influenced by political, religious, geographical, and other socio-historical factors.
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