<P> When the British introduced English to India in the 19th century, knowledge of Sanskrit and ancient literature continued to flourish as the study of Sanskrit changed from a more traditional style into a form of analytical and comparative scholarship mirroring that of Europe . </P> <P> The relationship of Sanskrit to the Prakrit languages, particularly the modern form of Indian languages, is complex and spans about 3,500 years, states Colin Masica--a linguist specializing in South Asian languages . A part of the difficulty is the lack of sufficient textual, archaeological and epigraphical evidence for the ancient Prakrit languages with rare exceptions such as Pali, leading to a tendency of anachronistic errors . Sanskrit and Prakrit languages may be divided into Old Indo - Aryan (1500 BCE - 600 BCE), Middle Indo - Aryan (600 BCE - 1000 CE) and New Indo - Aryan (1000 CE - current), each can further be subdivided in early, middle or second, and late evolutionary substages . </P> <P> Vedic Sanskrit belongs to the early Old Indo - Aryan while Classical Sanskrit to the later Old Indo - Aryan stage . The evidence for Prakrits such as Pali (Theravada Buddhism) and Ardhamagadhi (Jainism), along with Magadhi, Maharashtri, Sinhala, Sauraseni and Niya (Gandhari), emerge in the Middle Indo - Aryan stage in two versions--archaic and more formalized--that may be placed in early and middle substages of the 600 BCE - 1000 CE period . Two literary Indic languages can be traced to the late Middle Indo - Aryan stage and these are Apabhramsa and Elu (a form of literary Sinhalese). Numerous North, Central, Eastern and Western Indian languages, such as Hindi, Gujarati, Sindhi, Punjabi, Kashmiri, Nepali, Braj, Awadhi, Bengali, Assamese, Oriya, Marathi, and others belong to the New Indo - Aryan stage . </P> <P> There is an extensive overlap in the vocabulary, phonetics and other aspects of these New Indo - Aryan languages with Sanskrit, but it is neither universal nor identical across the languages . They likely emerged from a synthesis of the ancient Sanskrit language traditions and an admixture of various regional dialects . Each language has some unique and regionally creative aspects, with unclear origins . Prakrit languages do have a grammatical structure, but like the Vedic Sanskrit, it is far less rigorous than Classical Sanskrit . The roots of all Prakrit languages may be in the Vedic Sanskrit and ultimately the Indo - Aryan language, their structural details vary from the Classical Sanskrit . It is generally accepted by scholars and widely believed in India that numerous major modern Indic languages such as Punjabi, Hindi, Gujarati and Bengali have roots in Sanskrit in the broadest sense of the term, and are the descendants of the Sanskrit language . Sanskrit, states Burjor Avari, can be described as "the mother language of almost all the languages of north India". </P>

The characters in sanskrit drama spoke only one sanskrit dialect