1. Reading Panini: into the world of Sanskrit grammarians

For readers with some knowledge of Sanskrit, and students of Linguistics in general

Most educated Indians would have had some amount of Sanskrit during their school years.  In my case, for instance, we were more or less forced to take up Sanskrit as the Third Language when we shifted to Kerala, as we could not really take Malayalam. I do remember that Sanskrit was a ‘scoring’ subject, with marks above 90% the norm. Later, in the Central School, too, there was enough of Sanskrit to get more than a passing interest in the language.

Later in life, this interest lies dormant, working in the background, but flaring up occasionally when one sees some volume in a bookstore, or nowadays comes across an article in the internet. Over the years, I have collected a tidy library of books on and in Sanskrit, including the hefty volume of the Rgveda published by the Kapila institute in Bangalore. I have tried reading portions of it, also of the Bhagavadgita and the Upanishads. Always, reading Sanskrit is a work-in-progress, since one has never really sat down to mastering it. The more one reads, the more it transpires that this is the case for most readers and students, even scholars. The nature of the language is such that it yields up endless possibilities, alternative interpretations, and obscure allusions, almost as if by design. The profusion of word forms, for instance the various ‘tenses’ and ‘moods’ of verbs, and the complicated rules of word concatenation, ‘sandhi’, ensure that each sentence is a riddle that has to be worked at. The old masters were adepts, and loved to produce finished pieces that would not yield their secrets easily except to those willing to put in the effort.

Now anyone who has been dabbling in this language, or indeed in Linguistics in general,  would not have failed to come across the name of Panini, that famed grammarian of the pre-Christian era. Like all other authors in ancient India, not much is known about him, except that he must have been one in a long chain of highly accomplished and learned scholars. Classical Sanskrit was described by him in a work of 4000 aphorisms, ‘sutra’, arranged in eight chapters or books: hence known as the ‘Ashtadhyayi’, the eight-chaptered. Scholars are stunned at the brevity of his formulations, the imaginativeness of the technical words he coins, at the elegance of the concept itself. Many draw parallels with computer flow-charts, as Panini apparently tried to account for each form and every variation he knew, through a sequential series of operations on root words or lexemes. Students of Linguistics are told that the very discipline of Phonetics owes its conception to Panini, discovered by the astonished Indo-Europeanists in the middle of the 19^th century with such fabled names as Bopp and Grimm and Jones and Monier-Williams and Max Muller and so on.

 So why is it that so few of us have any more detailed acquaintance with this massive work and this fabulous intellectual heritage of our forebears? All we get is a glimpse of the riches that lie hidden, through the glowing tributes and tantalizing suggestions of its modern relevance, in such works as alluded to above. The only brush with the actual work for me, and I am sure for most Indians with a little Sanskrit in their school days, is probably the technical terms used for the tenses and moods of verbs. I don’t remember the whole verse, but it starts like this: “Lat vartamane, Let Vede, bhute Lang Lung Litasthata…”… and then goes on to coin tongue-twisters like Lrng and Lrung (or maybe not!). We understand the first part of this: the ‘present tense’ is termed Lat, the Vedas use a form called Let, the  past tense ( ‘bhuta’, ‘that which has been’, hence ‘bhoot’ in Hindi for ghosts!) uses different forms called Lang, Lung, etc. At school, we would drill in the forms at least for present tense (bhavati, bhavatah, bhavanti…), past (abhavat, abhavatam, abhavan…) and simple future (bhavishyati, bhavishyatah, bhavishyanti…), apart from ‘imperative’ (bhavatu, bhavatam, bhavantu…), and the alternative forms of the ‘Active’ (Parasmaipada) and ‘Reflexive’ (Atmanepada) aspects. One could only wonder at the huge number of such meaningless labels developed by Panini for other categories, which obviously sound even more strange than Greek or Latin… they are no man’s language, a purely symbolic meta-language, probably the reason for computer geeks’ fascination with it.

Why would Panini use such nonsense terms for the ten0ses or other categories and entities? Why not nice simple explanatory names like the English ‘present tense’, ‘past tense’, etc? It’s probably because Panini was optimizing the terminology for oral recording and transmission, writing media obviously being in short supply.  The strength of the oral drilling is evident in the fact that after all these years, even a poor student like me has those basic forms imprinted on the mind and can reproduce them off the cuff, as above (printed page unseen). To compress a complex, inflectional language like Sanskrit into a manageable set of expressions, that could be readily mugged up and readily alluded to in instantly recognizable formulae, probably required the coining of such outlandish ‘words’ and phrases. So much so, that the venerable Shankaracharya even sniffs at the learned and dry pundits who go around muttering these strange formulae like crows going ‘dukram dikram’, whereas the way to God is through love and the heart…

So with such a tantalizing heritage in our own culture, it seems to me we should be making at least an effort to understand what makes Panini so great, and of course this applies not just to Indians with a little Sanskrit from school, but also all Indo-Europeanists and students of Linguistics in general. So that will be my effort in the following days and weeks… starting from a position of almost complete ignorance, to see how much effort is required to make sense of these mutterings and incantations! I hope fellow-Sanskritists will bear with me if I blunder badly, and I do hope fellow-learners will help out along the way…watch this space!

(Just a thought...I've not used any special symbols for the sounds in the Sanskrit words at this stage. Panini is apparently a bread, but here it's pronounced with the tongue curled up against the roof of the mouth, i.e. in a retroflex manner...usually denoted by a dot under the letter!)