60 OUTLINES OF THE HISTORY OF SANSKRIT The practical reason was that Sanskrit offered a united lan- guage for the whole of India. In the early Middle Indian period the differences between the various local vernaculars were not so great as to preclude mutual understanding, but even at this period Asoka found it necessary to engrave his edicts in three different dialects. With the progress of time the differences between the local dialects grew greater, so that Sanskrit became a necessary bond for the cultural unity of India. Furthermore the Prakrits were unstable and subject to continual change through the centuries. Any literary language established on the basis of a vernacular rapidly became obsolete. The tradi- tional Prakrits in the later period were as artificial as Sanskrit, and did not have the advantage of its universal appeal and utility. For such reasons alone Sanskrit was the only form of language which could serve as a national language in Ancient India, whose cultural unity, far more influential and important than its political disunity, rendered such a language essentiaL The relation between Sanskrit and Prakrit in the classical period is admirably illustrated by the Sanskrit Drama. Here it is the convention that certain characters speak Sanskrit and others speak Prakrit, and the usage of the drama no doubt accurately represents the actual practice at the _time. The use of Sanskrit is fairly narrowly limited to the highest classes of society, namely kings, ministers, learned Brahmans and so on. Women, with few exceptions, speak Prakrit, and also children, showing that it was everybody's first language. Furthermore, Prakrit is spoken not only by all the lower classes, but also predominantly by the wealthy and influential class of merchants and bankers. The comic figure of the vidusaka , an unlearned Prakrit-speaking Brahman, shows that not all members of this class were capable of mastering the strenuous discipline necessary for the acquisi- tion of Sanskrit. Only the earliest dramas, of which Mrcchakatika is the best surviving example, reflect living usage in this way. In the greater number of extant dramas which belong to a later period (a.d. 500-1000), the composition is according to tradition, and the Prakrit becomes merely a transmogrified Sanskrit composed according to the rules of the grammarians learned by rote. In this period the vernacular had advanced much further on the road to Modem Indo-Aryan.
