What is Paiśācī and how does it fit into a larger history of language and literature in pre-modern India? A re-examination of the sources suggests three points: first, that when people first started talking about Paiśācī in the mid-first millennium CE, it was not thought to be a language in the same sense that Sanskrit and Prakrit were languages; second, that Paiśācī was integrated into Indian classifications of language at a later stage (ninth–tenth centuries), through the related influences of theatrical knowledge (nāṭyaśāstra) and Prakrit grammar; third, that the Bṛhatkathā—which has always been imagined to be ground zero for Paiśācī—was ‘lost’ not just in the weak sense (of a text that is no longer available at a certain time and place) but in a stronger sense (of a text that is fundamentally incompatible with the principles of textuality operative at a certain time and place). I conclude that the term Paiśācī is a playful reinterpretation of bhūtabhāṣā, ‘the language of the past’, and that the language is a relic of a textual culture that itself became a ‘ghost’ with the advent of the Sanskrit cosmopolis around the second century CE.
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