OUTLINES OF THE HISTORY OF SANSKRIT 59 skrit had achieved at this time. Here also we may observe that Sanskrit established its ascendancy first in the north. The Thera vadins of South India and Ceylon remained faithful to Pali* The Jains were slower in making a change than the Buddhists, They were the most conservative of Indian sects and up to the time of the final constitution of the present canon of the Svet- ambaras (at the council of Valabhl in a. d. 526) they used Prakrit exclusively. But even they turned to the use of Sanskrit in the succeeding period. At the same time they continued to culti- vate Prakrit seriously, beside Sanskrit, at a time when in other literary circles the traditional Prakrit was being employed as little more than a literary exercise. In these fields we may observe the transition which led to the predominance of Sanskrit. Elsewhere lack of material makes a clear picture more difficult. In poetic literature there was under the Satavahanas and their successors an active tradition of lyrical poetry in Maharasfri of which fragments are preserved in the anthology of Hala. At the same time the major poetic works of the early period were in Sanskrit. The Mahabharata and the Ramayana have an importance in the literary history of India which nothing in Prakrit could even remotely approach, and they were the productions of a period when to judge by inscriptions Prakrit had almost superseded Sanskrit in everyday use. Thus it is obvious that the inscrip- tional evidence gives a very one-sided picture of contemporary linguistic conditions. Outside the sectarian religions Sanskrit was always, even when the use of Prakrit was most flourishing, the primary literary language of India. The growing predominance of Sanskrit as opposed to Prakrit in the period succeeding the Christian era can be attributed to two reasons, one ideological and one practical. In the Maurya period the heterodox religions of Buddhism and Jainism had attained such influence as to threaten the existence of the old Brahmanical order. In the succeeding period, beginning with the usurpation of Pusyamitra (c. 188 b.c.), a reaction set in and there began a gradual decline of these systems in the face of victorious orthodoxy. This change in the religious atmosphere was reflected in language, and Sanskrit, associated with the traditional Vedic religion gained ground at the expense of Prakrit, whose cultivation was mainly due to the activities of the unorthodox sects.
