 Ghosts from the past: India’s undead languagesAndrew Ollett
The Indian Economic & Social History Review, 2014, vol. 51, issue 4, 405-456 Abstract: What is PaiÅ›Ä cÄ« and how does it fit into a larger history of language and literature in pre-modern India? A re-examination of the sources suggests three points: first, that when people first started talking about PaiÅ›Ä cÄ« in the mid-first millennium CE, it was not thought to be a language in the same sense that Sanskrit and Prakrit were languages; second, that PaiÅ›Ä cÄ« was integrated into Indian classifications of language at a later stage (ninth–tenth centuries), through the related influences of theatrical knowledge (nÄ á¹yaÅ›Ä stra) and Prakrit grammar; third, that the Bá¹›hatkathÄ â€”which has always been imagined to be ground zero for PaiÅ›Ä cī—was ‘lost’ not just in the weak sense (of a text that is no longer available at a certain time and place) but in a stronger sense (of a text that is fundamentally incompatible with the principles of textuality operative at a certain time and place). I conclude that the term PaiÅ›Ä cÄ« is a playful reinterpretation of bhÅ«tabhÄ á¹£Ä , ‘the language of the past’, and that the language is a relic of a textual culture that itself became a ‘ghost’ with the advent of the Sanskrit cosmopolis around the second century CE. Keywords: PaiÅ›Ä cÄ«; bhÅ«tabhÄ á¹£Ä; Bá¹›hatkathÄ; Guá¹‡Ä á¸ hya; Prakrit (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:indeco:v:51:y:2014:i:4:p:405-456 Access Statistics for this article More articles in The Indian Economic & Social History Review |
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