A Comparative Reading of Paninian Grammatical Tradition and Modern Science of Speech

The modern history of Western linguistics began with comparative philology and coincided with the colonisation of the East for a long time.The colonisation as a process not only involved an interplay of power, dominance and state, it was also a conquest of knowledge. Colonies such as India had a vast rubric of ancient knowledge and especially excelled in linguistics and philology. This paper is an attempt to showcase how the roots of various phonetic and phonological theories that defined and dominated modern linguistics were linked to the ancient Indian grammatical tradition. Scholars from Pāṇinian School of Grammar, such as Pāṇini, Kātyāyana, Patañjali, and Bhartṛhari, have explained a range of speech phenomena to which modern phonetics and phonology correspond significantly. This paper analyses the common grounds between prominent schools of Western phonology and their Indian counterparts and thus highlights a significant theoretical overlap between the knowledge offered by the Western linguistic schools and what was explained several centuries back by prominent Indian grammarians. From the linking of sounds to the psychological reality of a phoneme, the vast canvas of the Indian linguistic tradition could be verifiably seen as a precursor to the most of the structural turn in the twentieth century. Finally, the paper attempts to show the precedence of various recent concepts and theories, such as ‘distinctive feature theory’ or ‘generative grammar’ in the texts like Aṣṭādhyāyī and Vākyapdīya.