Geek Sublime

by Vikram Chandra

  The West discovered the Ashtadhyayi during the great flowering of Orientalist research and translation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Ferdinand de Saussure, “the father of structural linguistics,” was a professor of Sanskrit and influenced by Panini and his successor, Bhartrihari; Saussure’s notion of the linguistic “sign” is heavily reminiscent of Bhartrihari’s theory of sphota (explosion, bursting), which tries to account for the production of meaning from linguistic units.15 Leonard Bloomfield—the renowned scholar of structural linguistics whose work determined the direction linguistic science would take through the twentieth century, particularly in America—studied Sanskrit as a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin and later in Germany. As an assistant professor at the University of Illinois, he taught elementary Sanskrit even as he began his own research, “using Paninian methods … and studying Panini.”16 In his own writing, Bloomfield was unstinting in his praise of Panini’s grammar: it was “a linguistic achievement beyond any it [i.e., European scholarship] had known”; it was “one of the greatest monuments of human intelligence” and “an indispensable model for the description of language.”17 He summarized the impact of Panini’s work on modern linguistics as follows:

  Around the beginning of the nineteenth century the Sanskrit grammar of the ancient Hindus became known to European scholars. Hindu grammar described the Sanskrit language completely and in scientific terms, without prepossessions or philosophical intrusions. It was from this model that Western scholars learned, in the course of a few decades, to describe a language in terms of its own structure.18

  Paul Kiparsky tells us:

  Western grammatical theory has been influenced by [Panini’s work] at every stage of its development for the last two centuries. The early nineteenth-century comparativists learned from it the principles of morphological analysis. Bloomfield modelled both his classic Algonquian grammars and the logical-positivist axiomatization of his Postulates on it.19

  Further:

  Theoretical linguists of all persuasions are … impressed by its remarkable conciseness, and by the rigorous consistency with which it deploys its semi-formalized metalanguage, a grammatically and lexically regimented form of Sanskrit … Generative linguists for their part have marveled especially at its ingenious technical devices, and at intricate system of conventions governing rule application and rule interaction that it presupposes, which seem to uncannily anticipate ideas of modern linguistic theory (if only because many of them were originally borrowed from Panini in the first place).20

  Modern linguistic theory, in its turn, became the seedbed for high-level computer languages. To ease the pain of programming in low-level languages like machine code and assembly, computer scientists were driven to create artificial, formal languages. The efforts of linguists toward understanding language in formal and generative terms led to the work of John Backus, the IBM language designer whose team created FORTRAN, the first widely used high-level programming language. Backus proposed using “metalinguistic formulae” to describe the working of a programming language in 1959. This method was further simplified by Peter Naur, and the resulting “Backus—Naur Form” remains the primary method of describing and generating formal computer languages. Backus apparently came up with his ideas knowing nothing of Panini, at least directly, but, as the Sanskritist Murray Emeneau put it, “Most of the specific features that are taken … to distinguish an ‘American’ school of linguistics from others are Bloomfieldian, and … many are Paninean.”21 In 1967 a programmer named Peter Zilahy Ingerman wrote to the Communications of the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) to argue that “since it is traditional in professional circles to give credit where credit is due, and since there is clear evidence that Panini was the earlier independent inventor of the notation, may I suggest the name ‘Panini-Backus Form’ as being a more desirable one?”22

  Panini’s analysis and innovations may therefore be seen as the foundation of all high-level programming languages. But the Ashtadhyayi also had an indelible effect on Sanskrit, the language he was describing: it gave this spoken tongue the stability of formal languages—like programming languages—in which a set of rules precisely constrains the symbols, syntax and usages. Natural languages have the tendency to change over time, but Sanskrit has remained astonishingly unchanged in the two and a half millennia since Panini. There have been strong trends toward certain usages, such as the use of compound words, but in general “the stress on refinement and correctness, the overwhelming anxiety to live up to a felt Paninian ideal, kept the language formal for everyone, and channelled creativity towards involution, elaboration, and increasing precision.”23

  So one of the problems of working with Sanskrit texts is that internal linguistic usages give you very little evidence, if any, of provenance and dating. If you had a pandit in contemporary Varanasi write a letter in Sanskrit and time-machined it back 2,000 years, his ancestors would be able to read it with perfect ease. In Sanskrit, therefore, the usual distinction between normal and formal language is collapsed, and the original derivation of the language’s name from the root samskrta, “constructed, finished, well or completely formed,” carries precise denotative value. It is only later that “Sanskrit” comes to suggest refined speech, to refer to the language of the shishta, the educated, the superior, the polite.

  Then, as now, Indians spoke more than one language in daily use. Sanskrit was the eternal language of the cosmopolis, of the marga, the path; the Prakrits were the “natural, normal, ordinary” regional languages, the languages of desha, of place. Because Prakrits were subject to change, the stricter grammarians regarded them as apabhramsa, “degenerate languages” that had sloughed off from the eternal Sanskrit through careless usage. People spoke both Sanskrit and Prakrits, and they were not—as elsewhere in the world—speaking two registers of the same language. They existed in a condition that is better described as “hyperglossia” than “diglossia”: “What we encounter is not an internal split (di-) in registers and norms, typically between literary and colloquial usage,” Sheldon Pollock tells us, “but a relationship of extreme superposition (hyper-) between two languages that local actors knew to be entirely different.”24

  The Kamasutra, a Sanskrit text addressed to urban sophisticates, advises that “by having one’s conversations in the assemblies neither too much in Sanskrit nor too much in the local language a person should become highly esteemed in the world.”25 Too much eternal language and you revealed yourself as a total marga snob; too much Prakrit, on the other hand, marked you as a desi bumpkin. Sanskrit drama reproduced these social dynamics as a convention: the upper-class males—kings, ministers, educated Brahmins—spoke Sanskrit; everyone else spoke Prakrit: merchants and bankers, women (with the exception of courtesans), and of course the lower classes.

  Sanskrit—once the language of liturgy—was officially available only to the “twice-born” of the caste system, to its top three tiers of Brahmins, Kshatriyas (warriors), and Vaishyas (traders). Sudras—the manual laborers, the people who provided services—were forbidden to learn or speak Sanskrit, as were those who fell outside the caste system altogether, such as tribal peoples. Thus those who spoke against the Brahminical system—the Buddha, for instance—often used Prakrit languages because Sanskrit was marked as the language of the elite.

  Whatever its social value, Sanskrit’s stability and emphasis on precision meant that it was regarded as an ideal language for the sciences and philosophy. Since it was believed to be an eternal language, the fifty phonemes of Sanskrit, the matrka, were regarded as the root vibrations from which the universe had emerged, and were sometimes worshipped as the “little mothers.”26 Sanskrit phonemes and words therefore had an elemental, essential link to reality that other languages lacked. This view was challenged by Buddhist thinkers who argued that “the signifier is related to the signified as a matter of pure convention,” but the notion that the truth could only be spoken in Sanskrit, and grammatically correc
t Sanskrit at that, was immensely persuasive.27 Two monks were said to have argued that the Buddha’s words should be translated into Vedic Sanskrit, since people were corrupting them by repeating them in local dialects. The Buddha himself rebuked them, “Deluded men! This will not lead to the conversion of the unconverted,” and he commanded all monks, “You are not to put the Buddha’s words into [Vedic-Sanskrit] verse. To do this would be to commit an infraction. I authorize you, monks, to learn the Buddha’s words each in his own dialect.”28 This injunction was obeyed, and Pali, “a new and parallel sacred language,” was created by Buddhists, and yet, by the second century CE, “a vast Buddhist canon in Sanskrit” had been created.29 The rebels against Vedic authority—the Buddhists, the Jains, the Tantrics—had to speak in Sanskrit after all.

  It was perhaps the multitude of viewpoints and ideologies attempting to speak to each other and against each other in Sanskrit that intensified its grammarians’ search for even more exactness. Beginning in the fourth century BCE and culminating in the eighteenth century, an effort was made to create a shastric or scientific Sanskrit that could “formulate logical relations with scientific precision.”30 In this specialized, condensed Sanskrit, the sentence “Caitra goes to the village” would be rephrased as “There is an activity which leads to a connection-activity which has as Agent no one other than Caitra, specified by singularity, [which] is taking place in the present and which has as Object something not different from ‘village,’”

  The sentence “Out of friendship, Maitra cooks rice for Devadatta in a pot, over a fire” would be broken down into:

  (1) An Agent represented by the person Maitra;

  (2) An Object by the “rice”

  (3) An Instrument by the “fire”

  (4) A Recipient by the person Devadatta

  (5) A Point of Departure (which includes the causal relationship) by the “friendship” (which is between Maitra and Devadatta);

  (6) The Locality by the “pot”31

  The shastric version of the original sentence would therefore be something like:

  There is an activity conducive to a softening which is a change residing in something not different from rice, and which takes place in the present, and resides in an agent not different from Maitra, who is specified by singularity and has a Recipient not different from Devadatta, an Instrument not different from … 32

  and so on.

  So the shastric thinkers tried to create a low-level version of Sanskrit, a counterpart to assembly code. In fact, Rick Briggs, a NASA specialist in artificial intelligence, points out that this decomposition of natural language is very similar to what computer programmers do when they attempt to represent knowledge in semantic nets, which use “triples” to embody logical relations: “cause, event, friendship; friendship, object1, Devadatta; friendship, object2, Maitra; cause, result, cook; cook, agent, Maitra …” and so on. Briggs writes:

  It is interesting to speculate as to why the Indians found it worthwhile to pursue studies into unambiguous coding of natural language into semantic elements. It is tempting to think of them as computer scientists without the hardware, but a possible explanation is that a search for clear, unambiguous understanding is inherent in the human being.33

  The extraordinarily logical nature of Sanskrit, the fact that “we are lakṣaṇaikacakṣuṣka, solely guided by rules,” that “correctness is guaranteed by the correct application of rules,” that you can generate a grammatically correct word or phrase you need by applying these rules—all this leads to a strong similarity between it and modern programming languages. The Ashtadhyayi itself is replete with features that resemble modern programming constructs: recursion; multiple inheritance (a rule based on other rules acquires all the properties of the parent rules); context-sensitive and context-free rules; conflict resolution for rules; string transformations; ordered operations; a metalanguage; and so on.34 Programmers who know Sanskrit sometimes claim that it would make the perfect programming language, endlessly rigorous and endlessly flexible.35

  The inheritors of the Paninian tradition were deeply concerned with the relationship between language, meaning, and function: How is meaning transferred? How is it understood? Does language impel action? These questions became particularly urgent when these theorists were confronted by belletrist poetry written in the unchanging formal language of science and scripture. Over the centuries, Sanskrit developed a flourishing culture of kavya—poetry—and so the philosophers of language had to engage with beauty. Their investigations took them inescapably toward considerations of aesthetics: How was beauty produced in language? How does beauty affect or influence the reader, the viewer? Like programmers with their discussions of the “eloquence” of code, the classical Indian theorists tried to think about the effects that flowed from formal-language texts and went beyond the purely functional.

  Until about the mid-ninth century CE, the thinkers of the Sanskrit cosmopolis who were interested in the nature and epistemology of literary beauty concerned themselves with the formal qualities of texts; they thought of poetry as language made beautiful through the operations of certain constructions: simile, metaphor, metonymy, double entendre or puns, alliteration, sound, rhythm, and so on. These figures were alamkaras, ornaments, which beautified language in much the same way that jewelry embellished a body. Some scholars ascribed a more central role to riti or “style,” to gunas or “qualities” such as ojas, “strength” or “vigor” (achieved, for example, through the use of long compounds in prose); prasada, clarity or lucidity; samata, the uniformity of diction; sukumarata, softness or delicacy; etcetera. These qualities, the adherents of riti argued, produced beauty, which was in turn heightened by figures of speech. Whatever specific emphases the Indian aestheticians may have preferred in their writings on beauty, all of these early scholars were formalists; poetics itself was alamkara-shastra, the study of ornamentation. Their critical methods were heavily particularistic, and they therefore produced exhaustive catalogs of alamkaras and their effects, of the varieties and subvarieties of linguistic structures used by writers.

  The theorist Anandavardhana (820–90 CE) caused an upheaval among these alamkarikas with his treatise Dhvanyaloka (The light of suggestion). Until Anandavardhana, Indian philosophers of language had accepted two main modes of signification through which language conveyed meaning: abhidha, the literal or the denotative, and lakshana, the metaphorical and figurative, the connotative. Anandavardhana proposed that poetic language set yet another semantic function into play: suggestion. The stock example used to illustrate the workings of suggestion in mundane language is the simple sentence, “The sun has set.” An eleventh-century theorist wrote:

  The denoted meaning of a word is one and the same for all persons bearing it; so that it is fixed and uniform; the denoted or directly expressed meaning of the words “the sun has set” never varies (is fixed), while its suggested meaning varies with the variation in such accessory conditions as the context, the character of the speaker, the character of the person spoken to, and so forth. For instance, the words “the sun has set” suggests (1) the idea that “now is the opportunity to attack the enemy” (when they are addressed by the general to the king);—(2) “that you should set forth to meet your lover” (when addressed by the confidant to the girl in love)

  and so on until “(10)—‘my love has not come even today’ (when spoken by an impatient girl waiting for her beloved’s return from a journey); thus, in fact, there is no end to the number of suggested meanings.”36

  Anandavardhana’s assertion was that in literature, suggestion or vyanjana added layers of meaning to the text that were not apparent in the denotative or figurative content of the language; vyanjana is derived from the root vi plus anj, “to reveal, manifest”—vyanjana therefore manifests a multitude of meanings within the reader. And, Anandavardhana argued, when “sense or word, subordinating their own meaning, suggest that [suggested] meaning”—that is, when the denoted and figured meaning become
s less important than the manifested, unspoken meaning—that poetry becomes “the type of poetry which the wise call dhvani.”37 Dhvani derives from dhvan, “to reverberate”; dhvani poetry therefore causes an endless resonance within the reader—“the suggested sense [flashes] forth in an instant in the minds of intelligent auditors who are averse to the literal sense and in quest of the real meaning.”38 So the echoes of dhvani are available only to those who are capable, who are alert to the possibilities of poetry. Dhvani is “not understood by the mere knowledge of grammar and dictionaries. It is understood only by those who know the true nature of poetic meaning.”39 Dhvani is “the soul of poetry.”40

  Anandavardhana does not claim that he is inventing anything new when he speaks of dhvani: it is “found in the works of great poets. It is that which appears as [something] separate from the well-known elements [of poetry].” The reason we call some poets “great” is because their work is resonant with dhvani, which is something that cannot be described or analyzed by listing their beautiful figures of speech or pointing at their style; dhvani is not accounted for by the then-current theories of alamkara-shastra. And yet, dhvani is what makes poetry beautiful. So Anandavardhana insists that he is just naming something that already exists, and showing us how to think about it. He shows us different kinds of dhvani in verses taken from the epics, from the renowned poets of his era, from famous poems in Sanskrit and Prakrit. For instance:

  O holy monk, wander without fear.

  That little dog was killed today by him—

  that violent lion living in the thickets

  on the banks of the Godāvarī River.41