Vyakarana

Venue: Pisa (IT)
Time: 6th-17th September 2021

No fees are requested. Application form (deadline 20th August): https://www.unipi.it/summerschool
No prior knowledge of Pāṇini’s grammar is assumed, but a background in Sanskrit is necessary.

“Adaptive reuse,” an influential theoretical concept in the field of architecture, describes the reuse of partly reconstructed buildings for purposes different from those for which they were originally erected. In the present volume, this concept is for the first time transferred from its edificial application to a wider specter of cultural activities, namely to the composition of texts and to the creation of concepts and rituals. The volume opens with an introduction in which the editors explain their understanding of of adaptive reuse and its innovative application to cultural studies. They differentiate between simple re-use and adaptive reuse as two ideal types of re(-)use. Simple re-use is the resumption of a previous use without a strong change of purpose. An item is simply used again, because it is readily available. Adaptive reuse implies more. The reuser aims at well-definable purposes, e.g., adding prestige, credibility or authority to the newly created work. The reused elements have therefore to be recognizable. Adaptive reuse ideally involves a strong change of usage, and it is not primarily motivated economically. The twelve main chapters of the volume are divided into four thematic sections. Section 1, “Adaptive Reuse of Indian Philosophy and Other Systems of Knowledge,” consists of five case studies by Philipp Maas, Himal Trikha, Ivan Andrijanic, Yasutaka Muroya and Malhar Kulkarni dealing with the adaptive reuse of Sanskrit philosophical and grammatical texts in Sanskrit works of philosophy, grammar and poetry. In all these cases, adaptive reuse serves the creation of new forms and contents within a traditionally established framework in which the prestige of the sources of adaptive reuse reflects upon its target. In the second section, entitled “Adaptive Reuse of Tropes,” Elena Mucciarelli and Cristina Bignami analyze the motif of the chariot in Vedic, medieval and contemporary works and rituals and fruitfully employ the concept of adaptive reuse in various religious contexts. The chapters of the third section “Adaptive Reuse of Untraced and Virtual Texts” by Daniele Cuneo, Kiyokazu Okita, Elisa Freschi and Cezary Galewicz deal again with philosophical and religious texts, this time focusing on the adaptive reuse of sources that are no longer available or did never exist. It emerges from these studies that reuse of virtual texts was frequently intended to support the introduction of innovations into established traditions. In some cases, the prestige of the reusing works even reflected back on the allegedly reused source. Finally, the chapter by Sven Sellmer in the fourth section “Reuse from the Perspective of the Digital Humanities” deals with the computer-based identification of possibly reused text-passages in epic literature that otherwise would remain undetectable.

The study of language and grammar is one of the most fundamental parts of an education, and India has a long and sophisticated tradition of language and grammar teaching (vyākaraṇa) that is as old as the Indian scripts and writing themselves. Starting around the fourth century BCE with the grammatical treatises by Pāṇini and his commentators, the Indian grammarian tradition developed through several distinct schools of grammar and language study. A historical study of these traditions done on the basis of a normal literary history focused on the places and dates of textual composition yields a chronological overview, where certain major traditions are seen as remaining popular over time through a steady production of new texts, whereas other minor systems become replaced by the development of new schools. In contrast, a microhistorical study that assesses the popularity of the different traditions of grammar by examining their concrete textual representations in a particular manuscript collection reveals a local historical record of the popularity of each system within a specific educational community. The present essay provides a microhistorical study of the Digambara manuscript collection Āmer Śāstrabhaṇḍār from Āmer and Jaipur in Rajasthan dating from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. It contributes to the educational history of India by revealing an unexpected continued popularity of the late medieval Sārasvata grammar tradition in the Jaipur area long after this minor grammatical system otherwise has been thought to have gone out of vogue.

The present paper is targeted on three landmarks in the long story of the paribhāṣās’ development. Two of these landmarks descended from the earliest testimony of Vyākaraṇa meta-rules, i. e. those included in Pāṇini’s grammar (fifth–fourth century BCE), and one which has been handed down as the first independent collection of paribhāṣās and attributed to Vyāḍi. In particular a shift is highlighted between Kātyāyaṇa’s (third century BCE) integrative approach (vacana) and Patañjali’s (second century BCE) recourse to implicit paribhāṣās in the Aṣṭādhyāyī as a powerful hermeneutical tool. A shift that helps in interpreting the need for a validation and collection of implicit pāṇinian paribhāṣās as carried out by authors such as Vyāḍi.