Some linguistic features of the Old Kashmiri language of the Bāṇāsurakathā

Abstract

The Bāṇāsurakathā is a sharada manuscript in Old Kashmiri composed by Avtar Bhatt, dated between the 14th and 16th centuries. It retells the love story of the demon Bāṇa’s daughter Uṣā with Krishna’s grandson Aniruddha, and the ensuing fight between Bāṇa and Krishna, as it is found in the Harivaṃśapurāṇa. This paper focuses on the linguistic features of the Old Kashmiri language in which this manuscript is composed. Old Kashmiri belongs to the Early New Indo-Aryan language stage, a stage crucial for a number of syntactic developments which determined the Indo-Aryan languages of today. First, the language found in the Bāṇāsurakathā is situated among the attestations of Old Kashmiri found in other manuscripts. The language is younger than that of the Mahānaya-Prakāśa, but older than the language used in the Lallā-Vākyāni. Second, a number of linguistic features of Old Kashmiri are presented, such as the case marking and the verb agreement. Third, the paper focuses on the phenomenon of pronominal suffixation, well known in Modern Kashmiri, but not present in Apabhraṃśa. It is shown that the first traces of pronominal suffixation already existed in the Bāṇāsurakathā, but their use was not yet grammatically fixed.