Was Sumati—the Author of the Prakrta Paingala?

S.N. Ghosh’s note ‘Was Sumati—the Author of the Prakrta Paingala?’ addresses the long-standing debate about the authorship of the Prākr̥ta Paiṅgala, a work on Prakrit grammar. Early scholars such as R.G. Bhandarkar attributed the treatise to the ancient prosodist Pingala, believing he wrote a Prakrit version of his Chandasūtra. Others, including Kashinath Parab, proposed that the author was Sumati, son of Apataratha, based on statements in later commentaries. Ghosh reviews these views and examines philological and historical evidence. He notes that the Prākr̥ta Paiṅgala employs linguistic features characteristic of the Apabhramsa dialect and refers to metrics and grammatical forms unknown in Pingala’s time. Additionally, the colophon of some manuscripts explicitly names Sumati as the author. Ghosh cites the commentary of Śrīpati, which states that Sumati, son of Apataratha, composed the work. He argues that the identification of Pingala as the author is untenable because Pingala lived before the rise of Apabhramsa and would not have used later grammatical categories. Ghosh also notes that the Jain scholar Haribhadra mentions a Sumati who composed a Paingala and that the name Pingala may have been mistakenly associated with the work due to the resemblance of names. By analysing the internal evidence of the text, such as its treatment of Prakrit nouns, verb conjugations and metres, Ghosh shows that the author was familiar with linguistic developments of the early medieval period. The article concludes that Sumati, not Pingala, wrote the Prākr̥ta Paiṅgala and that he likely lived in the early centuries CE.

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