Rishi Rajpopat, "Panini's Perfect Rule: A Modern Solution to an Ancient Problem in Sanskrit Grammar" (Harvard UP, 2025)

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
New year, new me? Cute. But how about new year, new money? With Experian, you can actually take control of your finances. Check your FICO score, find ways to save, and get matched with credit card offers. Giving you time to power through those new year's goals, you know you're going to crush. Start the year off right. Download the Experian app. Based on FICO Score 8 model, offers an approval not guaranteed. Eligibility requirements and terms apply. Subject to credit check, which may impact your credit scores. Offers not available in all states. See experian.com for details.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:30)
We gather here tonight to bring women back to their rightful place.

**SPEAKER_4** (0:35)
The Testaments, a new Hulu original series from the executive producers of The Handmaid's Tale.

**SPEAKER_5** (0:40)
It's easier to accept a story than believe that the people around you are monsters.

**SPEAKER_4** (0:44)
The battle isn't over. Watch the new Hulu original series, The Testaments, streaming on Hulu and Hulu on Disney Plus for bundle subscribers. Terms apply.

**SPEAKER_6** (1:00)
One sweet melty bite of a Hershey's bar, and suddenly I'm right back sitting on the front porch with my grandmother on a slow summer afternoon. She doesn't say much, just breaks the bar in half and hands me a piece. I open my mouth to say whatever a nine-year-old wants to say, and she replies with a low, listen. So we sat there, listening. That was the first time I learned that quiet can feel full.

**SPEAKER_7** (1:27)
Hershey's, it's your happy place. Welcome to The New Books Network.

**Nicholas Gordon** (1:35)
Hello, I'm Nicholas Gordon, host of The Asian Review of Books podcast and in partnership with The New Books Network. In this podcast, we interview fiction and non-fiction authors working in, around and about the Asia Pacific region. Panini's Ashtadyayi is one of the most famous works in Sanskrit, a so-called linguistic machine, that through its 4,000 rules, allows some to generate words and grammar. Generations of commentators have tried to figure out exactly how to best interpret the work and explain its various contradictions and overlapping instructions. Then in 2022, Rishi Rajpopat, a PhD student at Cambridge, said he'd figured out how to unravel Panini's work to create a cohesive set of rules, and potentially wipe away centuries of commentary. The announcement made headlines and led to some grumbling among other Sanskrit professors. That work is now a book, Panini's Perfect Rule, A Modern Solution to an Ancient Problem in Sanskrit Grammar from Harvard University Press. Rishi joins us today to talk about it. Rishi is research associate professor at the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at the University of Macau. His research on Panini's grammar has been covered by the BBC, Daily Mail, Telegraph, Times of India, Hindu and other global news outlets. Rishi, thank you so much for coming on the show today to talk about your book and talking about Panini. We should probably start with who this person was and the work that he made. So let's start, who exactly was Panini and why is he so important in the understanding of the language of Sanskrit?

**Rishi Rajpopat** (3:02)
Sure. Thank you so much for having me, Nicholas, firstly. Panini lived around 500 BC, some would say 350 BC if you had to be very precise, but the exact dates when we talk about ancient India are always difficult to discuss. And he lived in what is now the Afghanistan, Pakistan region, broadly speaking, what we would call in academic terms, North, Western, South Asia. And we have very little by means of biographical information about Panini. So we have to rely mainly on his grammar to understand him. He presumably spoke Sanskrit, among other languages possibly, because he lived in a region which hosts both Iranian and Indo-Iranian speakers.
But most of the information that we have is from a Sanskrit source, which is his magnum opus, the Ashtadyayi. So the man is his work, quite literally in this case.

**Nicholas Gordon** (4:10)
So, what actually is this work? I mean, what is the Ashtadyayi? You know, I believe it's like, it's just a series of rules that I guess explain the entirety of Sanskrit grammar. But what exactly is this work?

**Rishi Rajpopat** (4:23)
Sure. So, we, for want of a better word, call the Ashtadyayi a grammar of Sanskrit. But that can be grossly misleading because when we think of a grammar, we think of a book or a document which essentially describes patterns of language, of the language in question. So, if it's French, they will teach you certain phonological rules so that you might be able to pronounce and read better. And they'll teach you the morphosyntax so that you can pick up the structure and also comprehend different texts better and so on and so forth. In Pāṇini's case, his goal was not to describe language or to produce a conventional grammar either. When we say Pāṇini wrote a grammar of Sanskrit, which is an ancient Indo-European language, what he was doing is he was trying to build a linguistic machine. And what is the idea of this machine? It's an ambitious theoretical project, but it's a great idea because it seeks to represent linguistic information or language itself in mechanical terms, in mechanistic terms.