Consider the following statements about the literary language Apabhramsha: 1. It appeared in recognizable forms by the sixth century. 2. It developed out of mixtures of regional vernaculars with the Prakrits and Sanskrit. Which of the statements given above is/are correct?

Correct — C, Both 1 and 2. Apabhramsha is the last stage of Middle Indo-Aryan — the stretch of language history that runs Sanskrit, then the Prakrits, then Apabhramsha, then the modern north Indian languages. Statement 1 is sound. The word is far older than the literature: Sanskrit grammarians had long used apabhramsha for a form that had 'fallen away' from correct usage. But recognisable Apabhramsha, treated as a language in its own right rather than as bad Sanskrit, is in place by about the sixth century, and by the seventh Bhamaha and Dandin both list it among the languages a poet may compose in, alongside Sanskrit and Prakrit. Dandin's Kavyadarsha says in so many words that in poetry the speech of the Abhiras and the like is called Apabhramsha. Statement 2 is the standard account of how it was made. Apabhramsha is not one language but a family of literary registers, and each of them took shape where a regional spoken vernacular met the older written languages: the vocabulary and the case endings of Prakrit, a steady borrowing of Sanskrit words, and a grammar already sliding towards what Hindi and Gujarati would become. That is why manuscripts speak of Shauraseni, Magadhi and Maharashtri Apabhramsha rather than of a single tongue.

• (a)1 only — Keeps the dating and rejects the account of how the language formed. But the mixed origin is the least controversial thing about Apabhramsha — the surviving texts are visibly regional speech carrying Prakrit inflection and Sanskrit vocabulary.
• (b)2 only — Doubts the sixth-century date. Nothing supports pushing it later: the seventh-century theorists of poetics already treat Apabhramsha as an established literary medium, which means it existed as one before they wrote.
• (d)Neither 1 nor 2 — Rejects both, and there is nothing in either statement to reject. This is the pick of a candidate who has met the word only as a grammarian's term of abuse and does not know there is a literature.

Indo-Aryan is usually divided into three ages. Old Indo-Aryan is Vedic and classical Sanskrit. Middle Indo-Aryan covers the Prakrits — Pali, the inscriptional dialects, and the literary Shauraseni, Magadhi and Maharashtri — and closes with Apabhramsha, roughly the sixth to the thirteenth century. New Indo-Aryan is Hindi, Gujarati, Marathi, Punjabi, Bengali and the rest. Apabhramsha is therefore the hinge: the last stage at which a north Indian could still write in a language felt to be Prakrit, and the stage from which the modern languages are directly descended.

Both statements in this item are drawn from the way historians describe Apabhramsha, and neither carries a hidden reversal, which is unusual for a two-statement question and is worth noticing early. The trap is the word itself. Apabhramsha literally means a falling away or a corruption, and a candidate who has only met it in that sense will assume it names a mistake rather than a language and will reach for 'Neither'. The second trap is chronology: most surviving Apabhramsha literature is Jain and late — Svayambhu's Paumachariu belongs to about the ninth century and Pushpadanta's work to the tenth — so a candidate reasoning from texts alone may think the sixth century is too early. The statement says the language appeared in recognisable forms by then, not that its masterpieces did.

• Apabhramsha is the third and final stage of Middle Indo-Aryan, conventionally placed between about the sixth and the thirteenth centuries CE.
• Sanskrit grammarians used the word apabhramsha for a corrupt or fallen-away word form long before there was any Apabhramsha literature.
• Dandin's Kavyadarsha, of the seventh century, states that in poetry the speech of the Abhiras and similar groups is called Apabhramsha — evidence that it was already a recognised literary language.
• It is a family rather than a single tongue: Shauraseni, Magadhi and Maharashtri Apabhramsha are distinguished in the manuscripts.
• Most of the surviving corpus is Jain, headed by Svayambhu's Paumachariu of about the ninth century and the tenth-century works of Pushpadanta.
• Hindi, Gujarati, Marathi, Punjabi and Bengali all descend through Apabhramsha stages, which is why it is treated as the hinge between Prakrit and the modern languages.

• Reading apabhramsha only in its grammarians' sense of 'corrupt speech' and concluding it is not a language at all.
• Dating the language from its surviving masterpieces, which are ninth century and later, rather than from when it is first recognised.
• Treating Apabhramsha as one language; the sources distinguish Shauraseni, Magadhi and Maharashtri varieties.

Either as a two-statement item on its date and formation, as here, or as a one-liner asking what the term denoted in medieval Sanskrit texts — the form UPSC used in 1996.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Apabhramsha is best described as which stage in the history of the Indo-Aryan languages?

  • (a)The earliest stage, older than Vedic Sanskrit
  • (b)The final stage of Middle Indo-Aryan, between the Prakrits and the modern languages
  • (c)A branch of Dravidian influenced by Sanskrit
  • (d)A script rather than a language stage

  Answer(b) The final stage of Middle Indo-Aryan, between the Prakrits and the modern languages — the modern north Indian languages descend through it.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Paumachariu, one of the earliest surviving works in Apabhramsha, was composed by which poet?

  • (a)Bhamaha
  • (b)Svayambhu
  • (c)Rajashekhara
  • (d)Hemachandra

  Answer(b) Svayambhu — his Apabhramsha Paumachariu, of about the ninth century, retells the Rama story in the Jain tradition.