Apabhramsha

01Speech that had ‘fallen’

To the grammarians, apabhramsha meant a word that had slipped from the correct Sanskrit form; Patanjali uses the term that way. By the 7th century the name belonged to a whole literary language, and Dandin in his Kavyadarsha lists four: Sanskrit, Prakrit, Apabhramsha and the mixed. Its endings had worn down, case forms were collapsing into postpositions, and many words were already close to Hindi or Gujarati.

02Jain epics and siddha songs

Jain poets made Apabhramsha a language of epics. Svayambhu retold the Ramayana in his Paumachariu, and Pushpadanta wrote his Mahapurana at the Rashtrakuta capital Manyakheta in the 10th century. In the east, Buddhist siddhas such as Saraha sang their dohas in an eastern Apabhramsha. Hemachandra of Patan, in the 12th century, closed his great grammar with a section on Apabhramsha, quoting folk verses that read almost like old Gujarati or Rajasthani.

03Into the modern languages

Between about 1000 and 1300, the regional Apabhramshas became the early forms of today’s languages. Scholars sometimes call the last stage Avahatta; Vidyapati of Mithila wrote his Kirtilata in it in the 14th century, while composing his songs in Maithili. When a Hindi speaker says ghar, or a Bengali says hat for hand, they are using words that passed through Apabhramsha on their way from Sanskrit.

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