Bengaluru: Rishi Atul Rajpopat, a Ph.D. scholar at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at St. John’s College, Cambridge, has done wonders. He has corrected the grammar mistake found in ancient Sanskrit texts written in Panini, years old. Actually, in Panini’s book Ashtadhyayi, there is a rule to make new words from the original words. But, using this rule, there was often a problem in forming a new word. There was confusion among many scholars regarding this.
Rishi Atul Rajpopat has argued in his dissertation that this metarule of word formation was misunderstood. By this rule, Panini meant that the reader should choose the rule which would be appropriate to frame a sentence.
Many scholars opposed Panini’s rule
Scholars like Jayaditya and Vaman had opposed this rule of Panini to create new words, but this discovery of Rishi Atul Rajpopat has proved everyone wrong. According to a report in The Print, Rishi Atul Rajpopat said, ‘I started working on my thesis, after many months I came to know that Katyayan had also made a similar guess. However, he also used alternative interpretations. There has been a tradition in Sanskrit that a scholar used to prepare his articles by looking at the works of previous experts, hence the confusion about the formation of the word kept increasing.
Rajpopat said that after trying to solve this problem of Grammar for 9 months, nothing was achieved. Then I closed the books for a month and just enjoyed the summer. Swimming, cycling, cooking, prayer, and meditation worked. Then one day I turned back the pages of the books and again a pattern started appearing. After this, I completed my dissertation.
