Many might have heard of the grammarian Pāṇini. His name is legendary in Sanskrit scholarship and many Western linguists too have celebrated his intellectual achievements over the last two centuries or so. Fewer are probably familiar with the indigenous field of which Pāṇini is considered to be the champion, namely vyākaraṇa (usually translated as “grammar”). Briefly put, this is a discipline that, given a set of semantic considerations and various lists of “building blocks” (verbal roots, pronominal suffixes, etc.), prescribes how to form correct Sanskrit words through the application of derivative rules.
Indian Grammars: Philology and History collects the proceedings of the vyākaraṇa section of the 12th World Sanskrit Conference (Helsinki, 13–18 July 2003). It contains thirteen articles, each of which offers a well-considered and well-presented contribution to the field. The editors group them into four sections:
(1) Metalanguage. Maria Piera Candotti and Tiziana Pontillo (pp. 61–82) deal with the morphological bearing of some speech-sounds used as metalinguistic markers. Thus, they offer a further contribution to the interpretation of Pāṇini's rule 1.1.56, which was the object of their scrutiny in earlier publications. Peter M. Scharf (pp. 181–214) proposes some fresh considerations about a long-standing issue concerning the technical use of the ablative and genitive cases in both vyākaraṇa and nirukta (this is one of the “sister” disciplines of vyākaraṇa, usually translated as “semantic analysis”). Ram Karan Sharma (pp. 215–23) offers a description, accompanied by numerous examples, of the use of the terms asiddha and asiddhavat in vyākaraṇa as tools preventing the application of certain rules in specific derivational contexts. Forming a sub-category within the metalinguistic area, Sharon Ben-Dor (pp. 19–60) and Shankarji Jha (pp. 155–68) both engage with the relations occurring between specific metarules, called paribhāṣās, and their counterparts in everyday life. The former also deals at length with the applicability of two of these metarules.
(2) Derivation. S.L.P. Anjaneya Sarma (pp. 1–17) further elaborates his analysis of Pāṇini's rule 2.3.67, about which he has previously published, focusing in particular on a specific set of pronominal affixes to be added after causative verbal stems. Madhav M. Deshpande (pp. 101–9) shows the system-internal reasons for which Pāṇini does not consider all nouns as derived from verbal roots, a representational option that is considered to be valid by some Sanskrit grammarians, as explicitly reported by Nirukta (the foundational text of the homonymous discipline). With many examples taken both from Sanskrit and Pali, Toru Yagi (pp. 225–46) investigates a rarely attested use of the causative suffix as it is prescribed by grammatical treatises. Boris Zakharyin (pp. 247–60) investigates the role played by speech-sounds in the Pāṇiniyan derivational system, touching upon issues related to the age-old question of whether vyākaraṇa actually distinguishes between phonetics and phonology.
(3) Syntax. Vladimir P. Ivanov (pp. 147–54) offers a close reading of a specific passage of Bhartṛhari's Vākyapadīya that deals with what he defines as “syntactic, semantic and pragmatic” approaches to the definition of utterance. C. Rajendran (pp. 169–79) enters the domain of alaṅkāra (“poetics”, lit. “ornament”) and offers a lucid analysis of Mahimabhaṭṭa's understanding of the semantic implication of compounded vs. non-compounded syntactic constructions (a topic not covered by hard-core vyākaraṇa).
(4) History. George Cardona (pp. 83–100) casts some light on the obscure identity of Kṛṣṇa, an author quoted several times by the vyākaraṇa scholar Nāgeśa, whom he identifies with Śeṣanārāyaṇa, Kṛṣṇa's son. Amrit Gomperts (pp. 111–46) presents a very informative report about the extant textual sources that bear witness to the arrival of vyākaraṇa in Java. He mainly focuses on an Old Javanese account of vyākaraṇa-related terminology, on four short Sanskrit texts, and on an Old Javanese adaptation of the Sanskrit Sārasvataprakriyā.
The paratextual apparatus of the volume clearly calls for a wide readership. The title elegantly summarizes the complexity of vyākaraṇa through the plural “grammars”, and adds two evocative terms: “philology” and “history”, on whose definition it can be agreed that every scholar has a (very) personal opinion. In addition, both preface and dust-jacket flap blurb briefly state the importance of vyākaraṇa in the field of Sanskrit studies: “Vyākaraṇa holds an uncontested place of honor in Indology, and Pāṇini's grammar in particular is a basic source of argumentation not only among Pāṇinīyas but also for students of Indian literature and śāstras […]” (p. v).
In contrast to this inviting presentation, the nature of the volume compels many contributors to manage without a detailed introduction and, possibly expecting too much from the grammatical background of their readers, to jump into the more technical aspects of the topic under consideration. However, when it comes to vyākaraṇa, technicalities abound and their level of complexity can rapidly skyrocket to a rather rarefied altitude. Furthermore, the volume also contains an article written entirely in Sanskrit (that of S.L.P. Anjaneya Sarma). This is a double-edged editorial choice. On the one hand, it has the advantage of including an example of what is the contemporary outcome of the traditional Sanskritic scholarship, which, although weakened, is still alive in South Asia. On the other, it surely demands extra effort from Sanskritists trained outside the tradition and certainly daunts scholars who might be interested in the topic but have no training in Sanskrit.
These, as well as other editorial choices (many Sanskrit quotations are left untranslated and devanāgarī script is often not transliterated), elude in particular the understanding of a potential and, in my opinion, highly desirable reader of the volume: the linguistic historiographer. As it is considered desirable for non-Western traditions to be seriously taken into consideration by those studying the history of linguistic ideas, it is necessary to make them accessible. The danger is otherwise of cloaking them in a veil of exoticism. Also, there are so few occasions on which a volume on solely vyākaraṇa-related topics goes to press that it would be worth taking the chance to attract as much scholarly attention as possible to a topic that deserves it in full measure.
