Looking for a Gandhari Buddhist Language Politics

The discovery in the last thirty years of more than 150 Buddhist manuscripts from Pakistan and Afghanistan written in the Gandhari language and Kharoṣṭhī script has helped to shed light on one of the earliest South Asian scribal cultures. Dating from roughly the first century BCE through the third century CE, the manuscripts reflect a transition from strict orality towards the adoption of writing as complementary medium for transmitting Buddhist texts. These texts offer a fragmentary glimpse into a distinct regional Buddhist culture defined in part by its language and script. In this paper, I explore several questions related to this particular literary expression of Buddhism. What is unique about Gandhari language Buddhist texts in relation to texts known to have been produced, compiled or redacted elsewhere? Can we identify in the corpus any reflexive views on the Gandhari language itself? For that matter, can we find signs of a Gandhari Buddhist language politics, or a Gandhari Buddhist linguistic identity?

Gandharan Buddhist scribal culture is an inheritor of a long-standing, multilingual clerical tradition in the region. It is possible that it was in Gandhara that a South Asian language was first put into writing (Falk 2018). This is due to the influence of Achaemenid Persian and later Macedonian-Greek modes of administrative communication throughout their empires, both of which stretched from the Mediterranean to Gandhara. The Achaemenid empire relied on a network of clerical scribes writing in Imperial Aramaic to maintain communication across its vast territories. This network operated in northern Afghanistan (Bactria) and Gandhara even after Alexander overthrew the Achaemenids in the late 4th century BCE, when Greek too earned widespread use. The Kharoṣṭhī script was almost certainly intentionally developed from the Aramaic script, probably in an effort to use the authority of Aramaic to build a clerical tradition in local languages (i.e. Gandhari), as Harry Falk puts it, “usable for generations to come, independent of clerks or rulers preferring foreign languages” (ibid, 12). By the mid-third century BCE, the Mauryan king Aśoka recognized the need to developed such a clerical tradition to manage his empire. He used both Kharoṣṭhī/Gandhari and the newly developed Brāhmī script to have political decrees inscribed across his territories. In this first datable evidence of writing in South Asia, Aśoka does not impose the Brāhmī script on the people of Gandhara; their inscriptions are the only ones in Kharoṣṭhī/Gandhari, suggesting that they already had a well-established scribal tradition. So it is the authority of the political and administrative documents of the Persians, Greeks, and Mauryans that play a role in the early history of the written Gandhari language and form the cultural backdrop of the Gandhari scribe’s identity.

It is difficult to determine what more immediately precipitated a Gandharan Buddhist scribal culture. The Pali Buddhist tradition records (Dīpavamsa) that ultimately it was the fear of forgetting texts during a time of famine, war, and a struggle for royal patronage that led Buddhists to commit Pali texts to writing in the first century BCE (Normal 1983, 10-11) as a kind of “back-up system” (Salomon 2018, 53). Though no such tradition is known in Gandharan materials, given the successive waves of foreign invaders and political instability that characterized Gandhāra in the few centuries just before and after the common era, one might assume that a similar kind of institutional instability gave rise to the Gandhāran Buddhist scribal culture. But in this period Gandhāran Buddhism in fact thrived. It was under the foreign rule of the Sakas, Parthians, and Kushans from the first century BCE to the third century CE—what Salomon calls the “golden age of Buddhism in the northwest”—that the production of Gandhāran Buddhist literature increased dramatically. Gandhāran Buddhism and the Gandhari language in turn have been said to play a key role in the flourishing of these various foreign powers (Salomon 2018, 29). For instance, it was during the Kushan empire that the Gandhari language came to serve an important administrative role even at the far eastern reaches of the empire’s influence along the Tarim Basin.

If one is searching for a language politics, it is useful to consider the association of some of these political leaders with Gandhāran Buddhist narrative tales. Local rulers are called kṣatrapa and mahakṣatrapa (=satrap) (Neelis 2008, 161), titles formerly used in the Achaemenid empire. Several local kings known from coins also appear in the stories. Two local Apraca rulers Aśpavarman and Zadamitra have Iranian-derived names (Salomon 2007, 269). Saka leaders such as Yola Arutega are named, and others identified solely by their Saka identity (Kardamaga King = Kārddamaka lineage of Sakas; Neelis 2008: 161). Such examples remind the reader that in at least some Gandharan Buddhist communities, the cultural identity was oriented to the west as much as east, and that the audience of some of the narratives may have been royal patrons or those sympathetic to them. In this case is not the Gandhari language that is of interest, but the distinctly non-Indic titles and names, which so often inflect Gandhari language materials with an Iranian character, setting them in a very different cultural context than the greater Magadha of the early sutras.

Looking more closely at the language of the manuscripts itself, unlike the Pali of Buddhaghosa’s time, there is no evidence of a systematized Gandhari language dependent on a local grammar. The evidence points to the opposite scenario. The Gandhari of the manuscripts is characterized by significant flexibility and variation from scribe to scribe. It indicates that Gandhari in Gandhara never reach a fixed form prior before tending towards Sanskritization in the third century. This is perhaps surprising given the apparent role that Gandhari played in facilitating communication across cultures in the Gandhara region. But maybe it was the very malleability of the language, perhaps born out of the multilingual context in which it was developed in written form, which allowed it to spread so easily, and which made the Buddhist messages it conveyed accessible to readers and listeners from Afghanistan to China.