Introduction

Sanskrit as a language has had a life span of more than thirty-five hundred years. Like the proverbial nine lives of a cat, Sanskrit has survived in changing circumstances, some of which we do not yet fully understand. Its manifestations range from its near-mother-tongue usage to its ritualized, technical, narrative, and poetic forms. Its changing geography extends from its original home in the northwestern corner of the Indian subcontinent to its use as a language of high social, literary, and political culture to a region extending from Central Asia to Cambodia and Vietnam, but most importantly surviving as the classical language of the Indian subcontinent. There must have been a time when a form of Sanskrit was a mother tongue of some Indo-Aryan group, and yet with all the sources available to us, we are today unable to recover that stage of Sanskrit. What we have is mostly a picture of Sanskrit embedded in a social context where it is a language of high prestige, but a language that must coexist and compete with other Indo-Aryan and non-Indo-Aryan languages. The sociolinguistic context of Sanskrit must be recovered from this massive literary, geographical, and social environment.

M. B. Emeneau remarks (Deshpande 1979b, foreword, 1):