Vol. X, No. 10.] Bardic and HistL Survey of Rajputana. 377 



[N.8.-] 



difference between the two stages is more in points of phone- 

 tics and morphology than lexicography, and the unintelligi- 

 bly of Dingala largely depends on the use of obsolete words, 

 which are no longer understood by the people. The same 

 modernising influence which has been exercised on Later 

 Dingala, has not been without an effect on the poetry com- 

 posed during the Old Dingaja stage, which has therefore come 

 down to us in an incorrect and uncritical form, and this 

 accounts for the modern bards ignoring its very existence. 

 To restitute Old .Dingala into its original form must now be 

 one of the tasks of the editor, and it can be accomplished 

 through the analogy of the Old Western RajasthanI of Jain 

 writers, of which numbers of good and reliable manuscripts 

 are available, and also through searching for very old bardic 

 manuscripts, which, though I have never seen any to this day. 

 yet are sure to be found. 



Besides Dingala and Pingala, which are the languages 

 used for the poetry, the editor of the Bardic and Historical 

 Literature will have to consider the various modern vernacu- 

 lars of Rajputana, which are used for the prose, and chiefly 

 in the composition of khyatas, vatas, genealogies etc. It is 

 certain that some of these works were composed during the 

 Old Western RajasthanI period, and in course of time under- 

 went the same modernising process as Old Dingala, Should 

 any of these works in prose be found of such an interest as to 

 deserve to be edited, it is clear that the text should be restitu- 

 ted to its original form. Prose-chronicles written in modern 

 Marwarl or in any other of the modern vernaculars of Rajpu- 

 tana present no particular difficulty. The practical conclu- 

 sion to be drawn from the above considerations in regard to 

 our Scheme is that Dingala is no artificial jargon, but an old 

 dead language, the key to the understanding of which cannot 

 be attained through guessing at random, but only through a 

 critical study of all the factors in its derivation and develop- 

 ment, made according to the principles of modern philology 

 and on all the available materials. These materials are the 

 manuscripts. 



Bardic manuscripts are, as a rule, very incorrect. Hence 

 the necessity of obtaining many manuscripts for each text 

 that is to be edited. Happily they exist in large numbers, so 

 that in the case of famous works different copies can easily be 

 procured. Of the Vacanika Rava Ratana Singhajl ri, I was 

 able to collect a dozen manuscripts from Marwar only, in less 

 than a month. The search for a sufficient number of manu- 

 scripts is therefore the first step preliminary to the editing. 

 Bardic and historical manuscripts are found with Caranas, 

 Bhatas and inferior classes of bards, Sevagas, Pancolis, and, 

 though not necessarily, with Rajput Jagirdars and Jain 

 Jaiis. Most of these people, and especially those who keep 



