34 SANSKRIT, PRAKRIT, AND APABHRANQA
element in Lahnda, the speech of the western Panjab. As they grew in civilization, they must have sought to create a literature ; whether they attempted it in their own dialect at first and later produced Apabhranca must remain uncertain ; what is clear is that Apabhranca originally was an effort to infuse into Prakrit a measure of their vernacular.
The effort to make Prakrit more readily intelligible to the people was not new ; in the earliest epic in Jain Maharastrl known to us, the Paumacariya x of Vimala Suri, probably not before A. D. 300, we find the free use of what the grammarians style Decicabdas, words for which no derivation from Sanskrit is obvious or normally possible ; similarly it seems that Padalipta's Tarangavati, mentioned in the Anuyogadvdra (5th cent.), though written in Prakrit, contained very many of such words. The large number of Dec! terms preserved in the Deginamamala of Hemacandra, some four thousand in all, testifies to the prevalence at one time of this practice, which, however, failed to retain favour. The reason for this may easily be conjectured ; the words takenjrom the vernaculars were a barrier to comprehension in a wide circle, and with the rapid change of the vernaculars became obscure even in the poet's own land, so that poets who desired permanence of repute and wide circles of readers pre- ferred to content themselves with those terms which had general currency. In Apabhranca, however, the effort was made to simplify Prakrit by adopting as the base of the grammar the vernacular, while using in the main the Prakrit vocabulary, and to some extent also Prakrit inflexions. There is a certain parallel with modern vernaculars which borrow freely from Sanskrit as opposed to Prakrit, but they do not use Sanskrit inflexions at all.
The Prakrit used as the base of early Apabhranca seems to have been often Maharastrl, but sometimes also Qaurasenl. But once Apabhranca had become popular, perhaps through the activity of the Abhlra and Gurjara princes, it spread beyond the west and various local Apabhrancas arose, as is recognized by Rudrata ; in these, we may assume, the special characteristics of the Vracata or Vrajada Apabhranca were refined. We find this
1 Jacobi, ERE, vii, 467.
