CHARACTER AND EXTENT OF THE USE OF SANSKRIT 9 Anucasanas, Vidyas, Vakovakya, Itihasa, Purana, Gathas, and Naracansis, and the continuity of tradition is attested by the Mahabhasya l which includes under the range of Sanskrit speech the four Vedas with their Angas and Rahasyas, the Vakovakya, Itihasa, Purana, medicine. The Agvalayana Grhyasutra? pro- bably not far removed from Panini in date, repeats in the main the list of the fatapat/ia, but adds Sutras, Bhasyas, Bhdrata, Mahabharata, and the works of the Dharmacaryas. Other sciences such as those of the bow, music, architecture, and politics are recorded in the Mahabharata? and, so far as they were in the hands of the Brahmins, we need not doubt that Sanskrit here also had its place.
These facts are not in dispute, and the predominance of San- skrit in the sphere in question remained unchallenged until the Mahomedan invasions brought a new literary language into prominence. The evidence indicates clearly that Sanskrit must have been in constant use as a means of teaching and performing .religious duties arrrong the Brahmins at least. It has been denied that it was really even their vernacular in the time of Panini, and a fortiori later, but the evidence for this view is unsatisfactory. Panini has rules 4 which are meaningless for any- thing but a vernacular, apart from the fact that the term Bhasa which he applies to the speech he teaches has the natural sense of a spoken language. Thus the doubling of consonants is ex- pressly forbidden in passionate speech, as in the term of abuse putradinl applied to' a cruel mother ; he prescribes the use of prolongation in the case of calling from a distance, in greeting, question, and reply ; he gives information on the terminology of dicing and the speech of herdsmen ; he cites expressions redolent of real daily life. Indeed, it is the grammarians alone who preserve for us such usages as the repetition of the second person imperative followed by the present indicative to express intense action : khdda khadeti khadati, ' eagerly he eats ', whence we have in colloquial Marathl kha kha. khato ; other popular uses are udarapuram bhunkte, ' he eats filling his belly ' ; dandadandi £egakegi, l a. struggle in which sticks are brandished and hair is
1 i, 9. s iii. 3. 1 ; 4. 1. Cf. Utgikar, POCP. 1919, ii. 46 ff.
3 Hopkins, Great Epic, pp. 1 1 ff.
4 Wackernagel, 1, p. xliii ; Bhandarkar, JBRAS. xvi. 330.
