Prakrita Prakasha, a book attributed to Vararuchi, summarizes various Prakrit languages. Prevalence Prakrit literature was produced across a wide area of South Asia. Outside India, the language was also known in Cambodia and Java. Prakrit is often wrongly assumed to have been a language (or languages) spoken by the common people, because it is different from Sanskrit, which is the predominant language of the ancient Indian literature. Several modern scholars, such as George Abraham Grierson and Richard Pischel, have asserted that the literary Prakrit does not represent the actual languages spoken by the common people of ancient India. This theory is corroborated by a market scene in Uddyotana's Kuvalaya-mala (779 CE), in which the narrator speaks a few words in 18 different languages: some of these languages sound similar to the languages spoken in modern India; but none of them resemble the language that Uddyotana identifies as "Prakrit" and uses for narration throughout the text. Literature Literary Prakrit was among the main languages of the classical Indian culture. Dandin's Kavya-darsha (c. 700) mentions four kinds of literary languages: Sanskrit, Prakrit, Apabhramsha, and mixed. Bhoja's Sarasvati-Kanthabharana (11th century) lists Prakrit among the few languages suitable for composition of literature. Mirza Khan's Tuhfat al-hind (1676) names Prakrit among the three kinds of literary languages native to India, the other two being Sanskrit and the vernacular languages. It describes Prakrit as a mixture of Sanskrit and vernacular languages, and adds that Prakrit was "mostly employed in the praise of kings, ministers, and chiefs". During a large period of the first millennium, literary Prakrit was the preferred language for the fictional romance in India. Its use as a language of systematic knowledge was limited, because of Sanskrit's dominance in this area, but nevertheless, Prakrit texts exist on topics such as grammar, lexicography, metrics, alchemy, medicine, divination, and gemology. In addition, the Jains used Prakrit for religious literature, including commentaries on the Jain canonical literature, stories about Jain figures, moral stories, hymns and expositions of Jain doctrine. Prakrit is also the language of some Shaiva tantras and Vaishnava hymns. Besides being the primary language of several texts, Prakrit also features as the language of low-class men and most women in the Sanskrit stage plays. American scholar Andrew Ollett traces the origin of the Sanskrit Kavya to Prakrit poems. Some of the texts that identify their language as Prakrit include: Hāla's Gaha Sattasai (c. 1st or