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Most of Pāṇini’s sûtras are no more than a few lines long. As well as documenting phonemic forms and syntactic relations, they also extend to underlying semantic relations such as “agent,” “goal,” and “location.”⁷⁰ They are remarkably dense, as technical texts tend to be, where the power and elegance of writing is in part in its systems of abbreviation and cross-reference, its formal consistency and its economy of expression. With all its glosses and accretions over subsequent centuries, plus parallel translation into English, the edition we have used runs to 1,681 pages.

Here is a paraphrase of Sûtra 49, Chapter 1, Book 5. When referring to the causal relationship between giving food to the Brahmans (ascetics or priests) “for the sake of” securing entry to “the next world,” the giver acquires grace “by substitution,” where the grace that the Brahman has acquired by his austerity is transferred by the act of giving to the food giver. “The gift of food produces effect in the next world,” but only when the ritual is undertaken correctly, formally expressed in Sanskrit.⁷¹

We have here several parallel transpositions; the transpositions in Sanskrit which can express a relation to the next life or not; the formalized forms of words in Sanskrit transposing for patterns of ritual action; the ritual actions of the giver of food transposing for the austerity of the ascetic; and the gift transposing for the knowledge that would provide access to the next world. In our terminology, this is a multimodal grammar that involves formalized speech, symbolic objects, and embodied ritual action. Pāṇini’s meta-formalization in writing re-formalizes the linguistic and cultural formalizations.

Scholars have long noted the enormous intellectual achievements of Pāṇini’s grammar, in some respects not rivaled until modern times.⁷² The founder of modern structuralist linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure,^§MS3d wrote his doctorate on Sanskrit, and this remained his primary area of expertise and teaching for the rest of his life as professor at the Universities of Paris and Geneva.⁷³ Only after his death was the Course in General Linguistics (1916) published from lecture notes taken by his students. The layers of abstraction and interpretative power of Pāṇini’s grammar, surely, lie behind Saussure’s achievement two millennia later, whose academic work began with his studies of Sanskrit.

Leonard Bloomfield^§MS1.2.2a introduced structuralist ideas to the United States. He too was a student of Sanskrit, exploring excruciatingly fine points of possible inconsistency between Pāṇini’s sûtras.⁷⁴ Bloomfield’s Introduction to the Study of Language was published in 1914 while he was a professor at the University of Illinois, where he taught from 1910 to 1921. He revised this and published a new edition in 1933, simply called Language, serving as an introduction to modern, structuralist approaches to linguistics. “The grammar of Pāṇini,” he says in the opening pages of Language, “is one of the greatest monuments of human intelligence.”⁷⁵

Then, half a century later, another dominating figure in the development of the discipline of linguistics, Noam Chomsky,^§MS3.1.2f writes in the first paragraph of his 1964 Aspects of a Theory of Syntax, “The idea that a language is based on a system of rules determining the interpretation of its infinitely many sentences is by no means novel … Pāṇini’s grammar can be interpreted as a fragment of such a ‘generative grammar,’ in essentially the contemporary sense of this term.”⁷⁶

To these testimonials we would add that the system of meanings Pāṇini described was also by extension multimodal, codifying rules of meaningful action, as well as their expressions in text and speech.

“Language,” explains Bloomfield, “plays a great part in our life. Perhaps because of its familiarity, we rarely observe it, taking it rather for granted, as we do breathing and walking.”⁷⁷ Why then, did Pāṇini, and his predecessors in the Vedic tradition, set out on the massive project of systematic codification of Sanskrit, which in turn was the medium for the codification of the lessons of social and spiritual life in the Vedas? And why Sanskrit, by then a language no longer spoken in everyday life? Bloomfield again: “Long after it had ceased to be spoken as anyone’s native language, it remained (as classical Latin remained in Europe) the artificial medium for all writing on learned or religious topics.”⁷⁸

The word “Veda” is derived from the Sanskrit word for “knowledge.” The four major Vedas consist of spiritual wisdoms, religious benedictions, chants, instructions for ritual practices, and insights into mathematics, science, and philosophy. Thought to have been created between 1500 and 500 BCE, the Vedas have come to us as written texts, though they are full of metrical mnemonics to assist recitation and singing. This also indicates that their origins lie deep in an earlier world of orality.

Writing first comes to India in about 2200 BCE with the as-yet undeciphered, ideographic Harrapan script. But this writing system appears to have died out before the adaption to Sanskrit of a form of the Semitic alphabet brought to India by Aramaic merchants from the Middle East in about 600 BCE. The Vedas were the written texts of the Brahman ruling class, also to be memorized and chanted from memory.⁷⁹ This is the context in which Pāṇini wrote his grammar, documenting the formal, written text of Sanskrit and prescribing its correct forms of pronunciation and recitation from memory.

Pāṇini’s Sanskrit was the preserve of the members of an elite who ascribed to themselves the exclusive right to know and practice the arcane textual, spoken, and ritual code of the Vedas. The Vedas had been divinely ordained, and the Brahmans were the mediators of the divine. The Sanskrit of the Vedas and the practices described therein enforced a separation of a liturgical discourse and philosophical knowledge from the everyday experience of the peasant masses.^§MS3.3d To the masses, the Vedas and their interlocutors held out the promise of rewards such as going to heaven, attaining power, or controlling the labor of others.⁸⁰ This was, to use Bernard Cohn’s words, a “theater of power managed by … priests and ritual preceptors.”⁸¹

So, to return to our Sûtra 5.1.49, the person who works to grow food gains grace by giving food to a higher-caste person who does not do such profane work. Redistribution of the fruits of labor from the lower-caste farmer to the Brahman is a matter of obligation, expressed multimodally in sacred text and ritual exchange. In unequal societies, this is typical of many such obligations whereby the poor are charged or taxed in one way or another by the rich. This is one of the ways in which inequality was made tolerable, such was the power of the separation of meaning forms, and the institutionalization of functional inequality in the caste system. Both the Vedas and Pāṇini’s grammar were embedded in this system of inequality. If the Vedas mediated between Gods and Brahmans, and Brahmans and the masses, Pāṇini’s text was a mediation on the mediations.

Our edition of Pāṇini’s grammar has a dedication by its translator, “To the Hon’ble Sir John Edge, Rt.Q.C., Chief Justice of the North-Western Provinces, this work is, with his Lordship’s permission and in respectful appreciation of his Lordship’s services to the cause of administration of justice and of education in these provinces, dedicated by his Lordship’s humble servant, the translator.” Until independence in 1947, the British Imperial Civil Service in India consisted of about a thousand civil servants. The “heaven born”, they were called, and Sir John was numbered among them. Until the last years of the British Empire, they were almost exclusively Englishmen, ruling 300 million people in 250 provinces from today’s Myanmar, to Sri Lanka, to Pakistan. Like the Brahmans, they were trained at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge in the arcane ancient languages of Europe, and sometimes also Sanskrit. The parallel inequalities worked nicely for the British Empire, an imperial bureaucracy with an inaccessible and ostensibly superior knowledge, ruling colonized illiterate masses.⁸² To honor Sanskrit was a mark of the mutual respect of one intensely hierarchical edifice of social meanings for another.

While we may maintain an ever-vigilant suspicion of discourses and knowledge systems that generate inequalities, we can also acknowledge their achievements. Contemporary thinkers acknowledge Pāṇini’s achievement, manifestly not his alone because he acknowledges predecessors. The tradition he documents produced a grammar that is a structured system of knowledge representations, progressively becoming more abstract from an object language that references things in the world, to a metalanguage with metarules, paribhâsâ, or rules about rules.⁸³

Some have gone so far as to say that Pāṇini’s grammar prefigures modern computational thinking, with its density, technicality, and depths of recursiveness. Kadvany notes the “modern idea that computation can be expressed in any media you like, with software an abstraction independent of any hardware implementation … Computing languages, like structured grammars, require the tiered, hierarchical structures of symbolic forms found first in Pāṇini.”⁸⁴ These are akin to the “modern idea of algorithmic thinking as generic procedural exactness,” something that, in the context of the Vedas, applied as much to “recursive combinations of chants, marches or offerings in a larger composite ritual,” as to written text or memorized oral utterance.⁸⁵ Even more closely related, we would argue, are the markup languages, from HTML^§AS1.4.7d to XML,^§MS3.3b that drive the semantic annotation practices and mechanisms of the contemporary internet.⁸⁶

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⁶⁹ Srisa Chandra Vasu (translator), 1897, The Aṣṭādhyāyī of Pāṇini, Benares, India: Sindhu Charan Bose.

⁷⁰ Paul Kiparsky and Frits Staal, 1969 [1988]. “Syntactic and Semantic Relations in Pāṇini,” pp. 184–218 in Universals: Studies in Indian Logic and Linguistics, edited by F. Staal, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, p. 185.

⁷¹ Srisa Chandra Vasu (translator), 1897, The Aṣṭādhyāyī of Pāṇini, Benares, India: Sindhu Charan Bose, p. 1061.

⁷² Staal, Frits, 1972, A Reader on the Sanskrit Grammarians, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

⁷³ Ferdinand de Saussure, 1881 [2017], On the Use of the Genitive Absolute in Sanskrit, translated by A. Sukla, Champaign, IL: Common Ground Research Networks.

⁷⁴ Leonard Bloomfield, 1927, “On Some Rules of Pāṇini,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 47:61–70.

⁷⁵ Leonard Bloomfield, 1933, Language, New York, NY: Henry Holt and Company,p. 11.

⁷⁶ Noam Chomsky, 1964, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, p. v.

⁷⁷ Leonard Bloomfield, 1933, Language, New York, NY: Henry Holt and Company,p. 3.

⁷⁸ Ibid., pp. 11, 63.

⁷⁹ Jack Goody, 1987, The Interface between the Written and the Oral, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 113–22.

⁸⁰ Romila Thapar, 2013, The Past before Us: Historical Traditions of Early North India, Ranikhet, India: Permanent Black, pp. 87–106.

⁸¹ Bernard S. Cohn, 1996, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, p. 3.

⁸² Ibid., pp. 16–56.

⁸³ Frits Staal, 1975, “The Concept of Metalanguage and Its Indian Background,” Journal of Indian Philosophy 3(3/4):315–54; P.G. Patel, 1996, “Linguistic and Cognitive Aspects of the Orality-Literacy Complex in Ancient India,” Language and Communication 16(4):315–29.

⁸⁴ John Kadvany, 2016, “Pāṇini’s Grammar and Modern Computation,” History and Philosophy of Logic 37(4):325–46, p. 344.

⁸⁵ John Kadvany, 2007, “Positional Value and Linguistic Recursion,” Journal of Indian Philosophy 35(5/6):487–520, p. 489.

⁸⁶ More at §MS3.3a; Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, 2004, “Text-Made Text,” E-Learning1(2):198–282.

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Cope, Bill, and Mary Kalantzis. 2020. Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 50-55. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316459645

Pāṇini’s Aṣṭādhyāyī §MS0.4a