Thread by @TnagarTornado

Here, Vikram Chandra (of Sacred Games fame) writes a really interesting piece about the Sanskrit grammarian Panini, who created rules that produced a language with (literally) infinite words. Unimaginable genius.

blog.granthika.co/panini/

The Maheshwara-sutra, a small part of his rules, is in itself one of humankind’s greatest intellectual achievements. His rules are astonishing for their brevity and clarity. And it is the power of Paninian grammar that has kept Sanskrit in that same form for over two millennia.

But there are issues hiding here that any piece about Panini ought to address.

Panini’s code is what makes Sanskrit “samskrtam”. As Vikram Chandra correctly puts it, “saṃskṛta is the neuter form of saṃskṛtam, from sam, “together,” and kṛ, “to do, make,” and therefore the language has been “put together, well-formed, highly wrought, perfected.”

What he omits, though is that Sanskrit is understood in contrast with “Prakrit” - derivative of “prakrita” or “natural, original”. This was the spoken language of much of North and Central India.

This contrast is important because prakrit (along with Pali) was the common language of the people. Sanskrit prided itself (and continues to do so) on this careful construction and its syntactic intellectuality.

This superiority was used to exclude and oppress those that were believed to not be capable of it.

I would argue that Sanskrit was a language created by upper castes for the purpose of excluding those who were denied access to it.

Paninian grammar, as Vikram Chandra’s piece so brilliantly brings out, is inaccessible to those who don’t know how to read it.

The upper castes did two things — (a) they put the Paninian language on a pedestal, made it the language of the rulers and the Gods, made it the language of ritual so central to their lives; and (b) denied access to the tools required to understand Panini.

The evidence that Sanskrit was used as a tool of exclusion is all over Sanskrit prose and drama — only Brahmin and Kshatriya men speak Sanskrit. The rest — lower castes and women — only speak in Prakrit. Caste superiority and patriarchy plays itself out via linguistics.

Panini is to Sanskrit grammar what Riefenstahl is to the Third Reich - he formalised a language used for caste oppression, she documented Hitler's language of hate. Both of them did it better than anyone else had ever done before or after them.

Riefenstahl claimed she knew nothing of the Holocaust. We are two millennia too late to ask Panini about what he thought of the caste system.

But to study either of them without at least making a mention of the politics of their art is unfortunate.