Mahabharata, Manipur and the Bishnupriya Manipuris

Bishnupriya Scholars like Shri Mahendra Kumar Singha, Pandit Sena Singha and some other history writers hold that Babhrubahana and his descendants, consisting of many other colonies of Indo-Aryan

Indo-Aryans

Indo-Aryan is an ethno-linguistic term referring to the wide collection of peoples united as native speakers of the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-Iranian family of Indo-European languages...

 stock, are called Bishnupriya, speaking a language of Indo-Aryan

Indo-Aryan languages

The Indo-Aryan languages constitutes a branch of the Indo-Iranian languages, itself a branch of the Indo-European language family...

 origin.

According to these scholars, they are worshippers of Vishnu and Lord Vishnu was installed by Babhrubahana from Hastinapura. Their view is that, Meiteis and Meitei language is of kuki-chin origin and a kuki-chin group language group cannot be related with the people and language of epic

Epic poetry

An epic is a lengthy narrative poem, ordinarily concerning a serious subject containing details of heroic deeds and events significant to a culture or nation. Oral poetry may qualify as an epic, and Albert Lord and Milman Parry have argued that classical epics were fundamentally an oral poetic form...

 Mahabharata

Mahabharata

The Mahabharata is one of the two major Sanskrit epics of ancient India and Nepal, the other being the Ramayana. The epic is part of itihasa....

.

They hold that BPM is highly influenced by the Sanskrit and Maharastri as well as Sauraseni Prakrits that is colloquial language of the soldiers and the people of Kuru Panchaya and Mathsadesh including Hastina Indraprastha

Shri Jagat Mohan Singha and Sri Birendra Singha developed the theory on observation of morphology

Morphology (linguistics)

In linguistics, morphology is the identification, analysis and description, in a language, of the structure of morphemes and other linguistic units, such as words, affixes, parts of speech, intonation/stress, or implied context...

, vocables and phonology

Phonology

Phonology is, broadly speaking, the subdiscipline of linguistics concerned with the sounds of language. That is, it is the systematic use of sound to encode meaning in any spoken human language, or the field of linguistics studying this use...

 of Bishnupriya Manipuri (BPM) language. They hold that BPM is highly influenced by the Sanskrit and Maharastri as well as Sauraseni Prakrit

Prakrit

Prakrit is the name for a group of Middle Indic, Indo-Aryan languages, derived from Old Indic dialects. The word itself has a flexible definition, being defined sometimes as, "original, natural, artless, normal, ordinary, usual", or "vernacular", in contrast to the literary and religious...

s.(17) Sauraseni Prakrit colloquial language of the soldiers and the people of Kuru Panchaya and Mathsadesh including Hastina

Hastina

Hastina is a genus of moth in the family Geometridae.-References:*...

 Indraprastha etc. All the characteristics of Mahararstri and Sauraseni

Sauraseni

A Dramatic Prakrit, Shauraseni was the chief language used in drama in northern medieval India. Most of the material in this language originates from the 3rd to 10th centuries AD, though it was probably a spoken colloquial around the 5th century BC...

 Prakrits are exactly found in the BPM. For example, the verbal forms change following number, gender or the subjects in Bishnupriya Manipuri as visible in the Vedic, Pali and Prakrit language -

Singular

1st person - Mi Jauriga ( I am going )

2nd Person - Ti Jarga ( You go )

3rd person - Ta Jarga ( He goes ), Ta Jakga ( he may go )

Plural

1st person - Ami Jiarga ( We are going )

2nd Person - Tumi Jaraiga ( You go )

3rd person - Tanu Jitaraga ( They go ) , Tanu Jakaga ( They may go )

W.Shaw and Raj Mohan Nath , two eminent scholars are of the view that " Bishnupriya " with its Devanagari script had been language of ancient Manipur

Manipur

Manipur is a state in northeastern India, with the city of Imphal as its capital. Manipur is bounded by the Indian states of Nagaland to the north, Mizoram to the south and Assam to the west; it also borders Burma to the east. It covers an area of...

.(18) On the other hand, some other Bishnupriya Scholars like Dr. K.P. Sinha has objected to claim of Manipur to the alleged connection of Hindu legend. Dr. Sinha tried to prove his theory on the basis that Bishnupriya Manipuri language as a resultant language of Magadhi Prakrit

Magadhi Prakrit

Magadhi Prakrit is of one of the three Dramatic Prakrits, the written languages of Ancient India following the decline of Pali and Sanskrit. Magadhi Prakrit was spoken in the eastern Indian subcontinent, in a region spanning what is now eastern India, Bangladesh, and Nepal. It is believed to be the...

.(19) According to him the origin of a language is to be inferred not from the history of the people; the origin of a community and the origin of their language do not necessarily go together.