‘Prakrit is, like Sanskrit, a literary language’: Infosys Prize 2025 winner Andrew Ollett
The Infosys Prize 2025 in Humanities and Social Sciences was recently awarded to Professor Andrew Ollett, who teaches at the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago, USA. Professor Ollett is a leading scholar of Prakrit, and his book Languages of the Snakes (University of Chicago Press, 2017), which emerged out of his PhD dissertation, presents what he calls “a biography of Prakrit,” the life-story of the language and its function in the cultures of the subcontinent over the past couple of thousand years. It also intervenes in discussions about its relation to Sanskrit and the vernacular languages. Ollett has coined the term “language order” to understand the specific cultural conceptualisation and working of languages in the pre-modern world. These, among other fundamental ideas about understanding the philosophies of language generally and in South Asia, are the subject of this conversation with Scroll. Excerpts: I wanted to begin by asking a question of value, as it were. We are going to get into the importance of Prakrit for historical knowledge, anyway. Is there any significance, you think, of studying Prakrit to the way in which we live our lives today, to the way in which we study in the academia, the way in which humanities scholarship is done? As though something is missing that studying Prakrit brings. That’s a very difficult question but I may have a general and a specific answer. First, there’s a sense in which what literary scholars do, especially philologists do – which is, read texts from the past, read them with attention and care and try to figure out their wider network of signification and meaning – is obviously missing from our everyday life. Even, unfortunately, in the everyday life of the literary scholar. Yes. Here, it doesn’t matter what you kind of literature you plug that hole with: it could be English literature, it could be Kannada literature, it could be anything. Now, if you do think about the specific features of Prakrit, it has, like any other literary tradition, it has its own particular aesthetic, particular set of values, and if you sit down – I mean, this depends of course on which Prakrit text you’re reading – but if you sit down to read an anthology like the Gāhā Sattasaī, and you read it carefully, with the commentary, and you think about what even a single verse means, and work at it, wonder again and again if it really means what you’ve arrived at, or if it might be saying something else, asking yourself “What am I not getting here?”…The idea of always thinking that we haven’t quite cracked it, that there’s some other level of meaning there: I think that’s actually something that readers of Prakrit are very good at doing. Not resting content with what seems to be the surface meaning, but always going a little bit deeper, and trying to find whether there’s something that we might have missed. And that’s something you’re suggesting we can take into the way in which we do not just our academic business, but also everyday life: to not assume certainty in what we already know and what we immediately grasp. Yes. This general attitude is usually captured with this phrase by Paul Ricouer: “the hermeneutics of suspicion.” Trying to describe the way of reading of Freud, Nietzsche, and Marx: things are always not what they seem, and we need to go beneath the surface. But there is an alternative way of thinking about, simply, reading attentively that doesn’t involve suspicion, but a…search for meaning. Could we think of Freud and Marx also that way – for later, and perhaps, for myself. In any case, that’s a helpful shift. Thank you. Will you tell me what incited you towards Prakrit as a of launching pad of your entire research? I had been studying ancient languages in college. I studied Greek, and then moved to Sanskrit. I had two important Sanskrit teachers: Gary Tubb and Sheldon Pollock. It was Pollock who suggested that I look at Prakrit lyric poetry as a way of thinking about language and language-difference as a way of encoding certain literary ideas. This would be parallel to the tradition of Greek poetry which sometimes uses literary dialects. What did I know? I was a kid from the suburbs of New York City. I had never encountered anything like this before. I started looking into it, and it was so enormously interesting that it became the key question of my dissertation project. And your work on Prakrit departs, you say, from the Natural History framework. What is the Natural History framework, and why should we study Prakrit differently? There are lots of ways of thinking about language that are all legitimate in their own ways, and one of them is to say that language is like an organism, and it evolves. It speciates. Foucault wrote a book about this: it’s not a coincidence that the way that we represent species evolution and the way that we represent language evolution is the same. These trees of relations and inheritance. That captures one reality of language, which is that language changes over time, and those changes are inherited by and propagated to later generations of speakers. But it fails to capture a lot, of course. Anyone who works with South Asian languages realises that this sense of a neat tree that starts with Indo-European, and then goes to Sanskrit, and then Prakrit, then Apabhramsa, and then Hindi is a joke. There’s no way that model can have any type of explanatory role when we’re trying to understand how these languages are used and cultivated and learned. There are so many examples that this hypothesis has to confront. People in Indonesia learning to compose Sanskrit, and then composing inscriptions in Sanskrit verse – and it has nothing to do with the language that they speak, or the languages of inheritance around them. We then are told that Prakrit is ostensibly derived from Sanskrit by way of phonological changes, but, in fact, it is, like Sanskrit, a literary language that comes to be used towards the beginning of the Common Era, for certain literary, religious, and philosophical purposes. So a way of thinking about languages and their development as purposive and categorical, rather than temporally and genealogically changed through time? Sure. A cultural history of language as opposed to this Natural History model that focuses only on phonological change. If we focus only on phonological change, we are just not looking at the cultural roles of language. I was thinking of my dissertation therefore as a biography of Prakrit, and not as a natural history of Prakrit: a way of telling the life-story of this language. And, to my surprise, David Shulman published A Biography of Tamil right before I published my book. It is built on the same conceit, which is the one I like. Okay, I’ve parsed that distinction. Thanks. Let me ask a crude-ish question. What are, say, one or two ideas about how we have commonly understood Prakrit that need significant alteration based on your study? Number one. That Prakrit is a vernacular language. The idea that Prakrit is the language of everyday people, and there are as many Prakrits as there are regions. That there are many regional varieties of Prakrit like Magadhi, Shauraseni, Maharashtri, and that they represent the spoken vernaculars of particular regions. The reality is that the texts that actually present Prakrit to us – literary works, commentaries, religious texts – do not think of Prakrit as a vernacular. It is a literary language. It is like Sanskrit. In fact, many texts actually say that there are two languages that you can choose – the Jain tradition makes this case in its commentary literature: you can either write a commentary in Sanskrit or in Prakrit. They’re both available for the same use. These pseudo-regional names like Shauraseni, and Magadhi, and Maharashtri. We need to be very, very careful with them because they are all totally conventional, and they probably have almost nothing to do with the actual speech of those regions. Tied to that idea is that Prakrit was the spoken language of whatever region, and that there are many different types of Prakrit you can pick. Throw a dart at the map of India, and you will find some a regional Prakrit: this is also not true. The Prakrit used in literary texts is pretty uniform, and pretty standardised. Right. Prakrit is a consistent literary language. Then – a basic question – what would we say is the relationship between Sanskrit and Prakrit? Should we take them together as “classical” languages or literary languages? In relation to other languages that were also developing to what we may call the vernaculars? How do we map this? I understand that you have a book-length answer to this question but… (Laughs.) My answer, which comes from the book, is that Prakrit, Sanskrit, and other Indian languages are part of what I call a “language order.” Depending on where you are within this language order, and what your question is, things will look different. From the perspective of, let’s say, the language practices of Indian theatre, the languages in question are Sanskrit and Prakrit. Prakrit is as far away as you can go from Sanskrit while still being intelligible to an audience. In that world, the difference between these two languages are emphasised and conventionalised: Sanskrit is for high characters, Prakrit for low characters, as you know. “…But”? But that’s very specific to one particular genre of literature. And if you look at, Kavirajamargam, it has a verse where it’s talking about, let’s say, “classical” languages that have lakshya and lakshana: so there’s literature composed in those languages, and grammar that tells us how to use them. From the perspective of Kavirajamargakara – Srivijaya or whoever you want to call him – Kannada is in a very different situation from Sanskrit and Prakrit. It names them together – sakkadamum, pāgadamum – as two languages that are different from Kannada, as having a large corpus of literature and a grammatical guide. So they would be – the word is anachronistic and problematic for all sorts of reasons – “classical” from the perspective of a 9th century Kannada writer. Very interesting. Given what you’ve detailed, what would you say of the historical work and sociopolitical work that have translated what happens in the theatrical texts – say in a Kalidasa, where there is this Sanskrit-Prakrit divide between the high and low characters – to the world of the audience, suggesting that Sanskrit was the language of the high classes and castes, and Prakrit was… Then there’s usually an ellipsis here. I’m going to leave that as an ellipsis because usually we are not very clear about what we’re gesturing towards. Yeah, that’s true. Because we cannot entirely suggest a kind of separatism, which does exist in the social world, with the speakers of these languages, for, if both characters are in the play, most times talking to one another, then they must be able to comprehend one another. So let me leave the ellipsis there. But the broad suggestion is that Prakrit is the language of the lower castes and classes. Is your suggestion, then, that this divide is actually a very genre specific thing, and that we can’t translate it to society with some modifications? Yeah, that would be fair. So what might be the picture in the speaking world? Were people speaking Sanskrit? Were people speaking Prakrit? Who were these people? These are the questions that immediately open up. So the reason I focused on literary languages in my book is that that’s what we have the most evidence for, and the context in which people use words like saṃskṛta and prākṛta is literary as well. When we move out of the realm of literature and into the realm of everyday life – which, let me emphasise, we don’t really have direct access to, and we can only base any assertion on clues that we get mostly from literature – – which would itself open more questions about methodology, which I want to note – – and also from comparative philology and linguistics, it’s… I think I would say that the linguistic situation that we see in India today is pretty similar to what we had in the past. The names of course of the languages were different, the forms of the languages that were spoken were different, but we had a huge variety of spoken languages. I’ll give you one example. So there’s a Prakrit novel by Uddyotana-sūri, called Kuvalayamāla. It was translated into French by Hampa Nagarajaiah and Christine Chojnacki. Then she arranged for it to be translated into English. The main character there goes into a marketplace, and he says that he hears eighteen desha bhashas, he gives four or five words of these desha bhashas. Mostly they are completely unintelligible. But for the majjima desi bhasha, he gives the examples of “meri,” “teri” and “aao.” This is in the 8th century. I have the impression that there were these standardised conventional languages that were used for literature, but in the markets and at homes, people were talking versions of the languages that they speak now. I see. Would that mean then that people would have had some knowledge, or at least people who wanted to and were allowed to read or listen to literature, let’s say, would have had some knowledge of Sanskrit and Prakrit, but that would not necessarily mean that they would be speaking them at home? Oh, yeah, absolutely. That responds not only to the political theory that translates Sanskrit and Prakrit to social hierarchies, but also, directly, to the contemporary, say, revivalist practises of “classical” languages – in which the suggestion is that the ancient people of this country used to speak Sanskrit and therefore they were all cultured. You might have heard of practices of people translating popular songs into Sanskrit and speaking the language in one’s homes, etc. I have. There may a time in the very distant past when people must have spoken Sanskrit. But for most of its recorded history – what, my teacher, Sheldon Pollock, has called the “Sanskrit cosmopolis” from about the year zero onwards – everyone who is writing Sanskrit also knows another language. There’s no question about it. The situation is exactly like the Latin situation in mediaeval Europe. Now, when we say this distinction of Sanskrit and Prakrit is a generic one, we have to deal with the vacuum we create in the social history of languages. As far as hierarchy itself is considered, would you suggest there existed one, and if so, how does it, if at all, relate to social stratification? Or should these philological facts change our perception of what social stratification looked like? Actually, given that we know the caste system existed, how did it work with languages? The evidence for social stratification and social inequality is enormous, and we are able to access that through texts in Sanskrit and Prakrit, as well as in inscriptions. That may not neatly map on to Sanskrit and Prakrit, but inequality was of course prevalent, as it is today. I only mean that these two languages are distinct and almost equal cultural practices. The person who can recognise “rāmo vanam gacchati” as Sanskrit could also recognise “rāmo vaṇam gacchaī”, almost exactly the same sentence, as Prakrit. The interpretations of these practices have differed enormously, in their own time, depending on your social position and worldview. Let me mention two of them. The Mimamsa tradition says that Sanskrit is obviously the original language and everything else is some kind of corruption. The Jaina scholars thought that Prakrit was the original language, and Sanskrit was an elaboration of that, created to form a secret esoteric language for a particular religious community. These are both interpretations that we must then critically consider. They are both interested and ideological, in the sense that they flow out of certain pre-commitments of those groups. Professor, is what you are saying related to the end of the abstract of your dissertation, about the study of Prakrit allowing us to conceptualise of a theory of “a language as an ordered set of cultural practices”? What does that phrase mean? Is this something that you’ve already pointed your finger at when you gestured at the distinction between the literary languages and the vernacular languages? Or is that what you already described as being against the natural history explanatory model? Or does it relate to the morphological similarity of the language – Prakrit – in that example of the 15th century and 3rd century texts? It’s related to some of what you’ve listed, but most importantly and primarily it is the critique of language as an inalienable possession, a reflexive practice of a particular group. The idea, for example, that the German people are united by the German language. My teacher Sheldon Pollock called this “primordialism,” based on Clifford Geertz’s work about primordial sources of identity. Language would be one of those sources of identity. His work, mine, and a lot of modern South Asian studies has been moving towards a different model of thinking about language as a cultural practice that is part of a larger repertoire of cultural practices that can be structured in various ways and that has its own logic. So, Vedanta Deshika would write in Sanskrit and Prakrit and Tamil based on different purposes and with different objectives. Same for writers like Ghanashyama. They wrote in both languages, and it was clear that the choice of language is not determined by identity – personal or national. So languages become sets of practices that you can learn, and how you do that is a structure. Do we have any evidence of suggesting that this structure has any correlation to social structures – or would that be a bit more complicated? Obviously, access to the world of writing literature in Sanskrit, Prakrit, and other languages is highly restricted in the pre-modern world. But we can easily find examples of people belonging to every religious community in India who used this language, and every region, from Tamil Nadu to Kashmir, Buddhists, Jains, Muslims, Hindus. Prakrit was like Sanskrit in that it was not the exclusive preserve of one particular social group. Thank you so very much for your time and work, Professor. Thank you, those were great questions. K RAJARAM IRS 18326 -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Thatha_Patty" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/thatha_patty/CAL5XZookiJJnr%3D9aheBQJ3EcSweRU7VeonOe0-rd8gbH1FhRUA%40mail.gmail.com.
