Sanskrit Grammar and Grammatical Thought: Collected Essays on Language, History, and Society brings together selected essays by Madhav M. Deshpande that illuminate the Sanskrit grammatical tradition in its linguistic, intellectual, historical, and social dimensions. Drawing on his extensive scholarship in Pāṇinian grammar, historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, and the intellectual history of Sanskrit, the volume examines how grammatical analysis developed in relation to changing patterns of language use, inherited textual and scholarly traditions, and the wider multilingual world of South Asia.The essays explore a range of interconnected questions concerning grammatical rule and linguistic usage, linguistic change and variation, the interpretation and transmission of grammatical knowledge, and the cultural authority associated with Sanskrit. They show that the Sanskrit grammatical tradition cannot be understood solely as a formal system of linguistic analysis. It was also a continuously interpreted and historically situated intellectual tradition, shaped by debate, pedagogy, textual transmission, social practice, and changing understandings of correct and legitimate speech.By bringing technical questions of grammar into conversation with the historical and social life of Sanskrit and related languages, the volume reveals the complex ways in which grammatical thought responded to linguistic variation, historical change, and the multilingual environment in which Sanskrit functioned. It also demonstrates how grammatical categories and norms participated in larger questions concerning language, learning, identity, tradition, and intellectual authority.A substantial new introduction will draw together the principal concerns of the essays and situate them within the larger trajectory of Deshpande’s scholarship. The resulting volume offers both a sustained engagement with Sanskrit grammar and grammatical thought and a broader reflection on the relationships among language, history, society, linguistic practice, and the transmission of intellectual traditions.
Madhav M. Deshpande
Madhav M. Deshpande is Professor Emeritus of South Asian Literature and Linguistics at the University of Michigan, where he taught for several decades in Asian Languages and Cultures and Linguistics. He is also a Senior Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and Adjunct Professor at the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore. The University of Michigan lists his principal fields as the Sanskrit grammatical tradition, historical linguistics, Sanskrit phonetics, Indo-Aryan linguistics, and the sociolinguistics of Sanskrit and Prakrit.
Trained in both traditional and modern Sanskrit scholarship in Pune, he received his doctorate in Oriental Studies from the University of Pennsylvania in 1972 and joined the University of Michigan the same year. Over the course of a distinguished scholarly career, his research has ranged across Pāṇinian grammar, the historical and sociolinguistic development of Indo-Aryan languages, Sanskrit intellectual traditions, and the religious and philosophical traditions of India.
He is the author or editor of numerous books and more than 150 research papers. Among his best-known works are Sociolinguistic Attitudes in India: A Historical Reconstruction; The Meaning of Nouns: Semantic Theory in Classical and Medieval India; Critical Studies in Indian Grammarians I: The Theory of Homogeneity; and Samskrta-Subodhini: A Sanskrit Primer. His scholarship is distinguished by its close engagement with the Indian grammatical tradition alongside historical linguistics and sociolinguistic analysis.
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