376 Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. [Nov., 1914. 



Gujarat! or the Marwari tendency. It has seemed to me that 

 as far as Old Western RajasthanI goes, the difference between 

 these two currents of speech is not so important as to justify 

 the classing of them as separate ; otherwise I would have dis- 

 tinguished in the later Old Western RajasthanI stage two 

 different dialects to be named Old Gujarat! and Old Marwari. 

 With the latter , whether we call it Old Marwari or simply Old 

 Western RajasthanI, Dingala is to be identified. 



Dingala is therefore in origin Old Western RajasthanI, 

 i.e. the old local speech of Western Rajputana, and conse- 

 quently identical with the language so well preserved to us in 

 the works of Jain commentators and poets of the fifteenth and 

 sixteenth century and described in my "Notes" mentioned 

 above. It is, however, the Marwari side of the Old Western 

 Rajasthani, and it is partly for this reason and partly also 

 because of its having been somewhat modernised in orthogra- 

 phy during the four or five centuries in which it came down to 

 us, that the bards nowadays ignore and deny its identity with 

 the knguage preserved in Jain works, which they call " JatiyS 

 rl boh ", and attribute its invention to themselves. The term 

 Dtngala, which has nothing to do with Dagara nor with any 

 other of the fantastic etymologies proposed by the bards and 

 pandits of Rajputana, but is a mere adjective meaning prob- 

 ably « irregular ", i.e. " not in accordance with the standard 

 poetry ' or possibly " vulgar ", was applied to it when the 

 use ot the Braja Bhasa (Piiigala) as a polite language of the 

 poets was in general vogue. Dingala is therefore the old 

 vernacular of Rajputana which, though long a dead language, 

 has survived in the songs of the bards, a fact which, however 

 strange and inexplicable it may appear at a first sight, yet 

 is quite natural in the case of professional poets, whose oral 

 patrimony— art, style, language and manuscripts— is transmitted 

 trom father to son. But this should not be taken to mean 

 that Dingala has been transmitted qualis talis and that there 

 are no differences in it. It is obvious that the Dingala poetry 

 composed during the Old Western RajasthanI period, i.e. 

 betore the seventeenth century, must necessarily partake of all 

 the Old Western RajasthanI peculiarities of which the most 

 characteristic is the hiatus in the vocalic nexus ai and air, 

 whereas the Dingala poetry composed within and after the 

 seventeenth century, i.e. after the development of modern 

 31arwari, must to a certain extent have undergone some modi- 

 fications under the influence of the latter language. Thus in 

 the later Dingala ai and aii cannot be expected to remain in 

 hiatus but they are contracted into ai (e) and au (o) after the 

 example of modern Marwari. We shall have therefore to dis- 

 tinguish, in the Dingala literature, two stages, namely Old 

 pmgala, included in the Old Western RajasthanI period, and 

 Later Dmgala, included in the modern Marwari n«riod. The 



