Pāṇini and traditional Indian grammar

Any student of Sanskrit soon comes across the name of Pāṇini and concepts drawn from the Indian grammatical tradition.

Here I document the process of learning more about this tradition.

To get started on this topic, one could do far worse than begin with Vikram Chandra's eloquent piece about Pāṇini: he writes as a knowledgeable non-specialist and in a readable and scholarly way that is acutely informed by Chandra's twin obsessions: writing and coding.

Why Pāṇini?

The study of Sanskrit has long been divided between "traditional" and "philological" approaches.

The traditional methods of learning Sanskrit are of some antiquity (and some texts and aspects of the tradition are really quite ancient), and this tradition is still found in a living form in modern India.

Philological methods are of more recent origin, especially as manifested in nineteenth century German and Anglophone scholarship. This philology was often grounded in the colonial appropriation of materials of linguistic, literary or historical interest at the expense (and often the explicit rejection) of the accompanying philosophical and religious contexts in which these materials are embedded in their indigenous existence.

There is often a profound gap between the two approaches.

The story of William Jones' time in India shows the anthropological tension between the 'emic' and the 'etic' at work. On the one side stood the pandits, an integral source for Jones' "discovery" of Sanskrit and the dharmaśāstra; and on the other side loomed the weight of Jones' classically and biblically grounded education.

The degree to which the indigenous sources of knowledge have been treated as necessary but unfortunate is exemplified in the work of William Whitney, but can be illustrated in many places (For example, Whitney's "The Study of Hindu Grammar and the Study of Sanskrit", reproduced in Staal 1972, pp. 142-154; see also Staal 1972, pp. 70-101 for Ramkrishna Gopal Bhandarkar's earlier writings on the question of 'European' and 'Indian' perspectives.). Whitney emphatically rejects what he regards as the distortingly prescriptivist Indian tradition in the domain of linguistics and grammar ('the native grammarians', 'the Hindu grammarians') in the midst of Whitney's own trenchant battles within the newly emerging domain of linguistic science (See Goldsmith and Laks 2019, pp. 100-107).

In the midst of all this is Pāṇini.

Pāṇini is simultaneously the oldest surviving component of the Indian grammatical tradition and the Indian grammatical text most often cited as an explicit inspiration for a number of key figures in the history of modern linguistics, including Bopp, de Saussure, Bloomfield and Jakobson.

" The descriptive grammar of Sanskrit, which Pāṇini brought to its highest perfection, is one of the greatest monuments of human intelligence and (what concerns us more) an indispensable model for the description of languages. The only achievement in our field which can take rank with it is the historical linguistics of the nineteenth century, and this, indeed, owed its origin largely to Europe's acquaintance with the Indian grammar."

--- Bloomfield 1929, p. 268 (see also Goldsmith and Laks 2019, pp. 336-337)

References

References have their own note that contains at least the publication details. E.g. the reference for Vikram Chandra's article above can be found here: Chandra 2019.

All bibliographic references are collated under /tags/bibliography.

Colophon

For readability, Sanskrit quoted inline is represented in a romanised form. Devanāgarī is reserved for block quotation of texts.

ॐ शन्तिः शन्तिः शन्तिः

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