Ghosts from the past

India’s undead languages

Datos Bibliográficos

ID8961998
AutoresAndrew Ollett (0000-0002-2425-2806, Columbia University, New York, autor de correspondencia)
Año2014
Volumen51
Número4
Páginas405-456
Fecha de publicación2014-10-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaThe Indian Economic & Social History Review (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0019-4646 • E-ISSN: 0973-0893
EditorialSAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/0019464614550761
OpenAlexW2007736206
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas1
Referencias citadas21

What is Paiśācī 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 Paiśācī 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 Paiśācī was integrated into Indian classifications of language at a later stage (ninth–tenth centuries), through the related influences of theatrical knowledge (nāṭyaśāstra) and Prakrit grammar; third, that the Bṛhatkathā—which has always been imagined to be ground zero for Paiśācī—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 Paiśācī is a playful reinterpretation of bhūtabhāṣā, ‘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

Aesthetics · Art · Grammar · Linguistics · Literary language · Literature · Ninth · Reinterpretation · Sanskrit · Textuality · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Chinese history and philosophy · History · Indian and Buddhist Studies · Philosophy