Saussure s Reading of Panini

Abstract

We, the Indian Teachers, are lucky enough to receive Prof Anant Ch Shukla’s first ever English translation of Ferdinand de Saussure’s rich PhD dissertation On the Use of Genitive Absolute in Sanskrit, in 2018. Now we turn to the luck itself: luck and speculations disrupt karma and Karamyogis. These cannot assimilate like the umlaut of Saussure. Saussure’s other work Course in General Linguistics is a bit outdated and luckily (?) already made available in French/English but not in Sanskrit. Sasthi canādare (with and without the participle ca): The being of this rule, of the Sixth in Aṣṭādhyāyī, is disgrace in absolute. In this disgrace/complexities (a weird binary though!) dangers and imminent handicapabilities are already given not only for those who studied Sanskrit grammar or the metarule(s) proposed by Panini (? 350 BC) at the secondary levels (in early 1990s) and cannot understand French and Hindi but also for those colleagues who understand French and Hindi but cannot understand Sanskrit. In our classrooms of theory, Prof Shukla’s act of English translation (in 2018) appears more meaningful than “Resurrection” (although we were expecting it to appear first in Sanskrit). This Resurrection of the contents, in English, brings forth the same threat which was initially brought to us by the first and subsequent translators, their interpretation of interpretations, their handless manga-like cartoons, their oversimplified sketches on white paper in classroom and so on of Saussure’s notes. Reading/writing anything on Saussure (Structuralism) and Derrida (post-Structuralism) without understanding the depths of Sanskrit grammar and linguistics is impossible. There are also links which suggest the chain of Socrates, Alexander and Sanskrit literature (which Socrates possessed through Alexander) (Mishra, 2015, p. 83). Still in Platonic sense we can assume that the translation of Shukla is thrice removed from the real (Thought>Saussure/French>English) than the thrice or five times (if there is such proposition in syllogism, other than the postmodern logic) distant from the reality of the corpus-based study of Sanskrit absolutes by Saussure himself (Thought>Saussure>Students/Colleagues> French> English). Then is this act of translating, into English, by an author from India, really Resurrection? Or is it Cannibalism as Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi ‘creatively’ claim in their “Introduction” to Post-Colonial Translation? I will also touch on Harish Trivedi’s efforts in reading Dr Jaidev’s The Culture of Pastiche and his inability (an error, an error of pastiche itself, an oversight, the Divya-sight turned into oversight, the oversight turned into blindness and so on) to quote Jaidev’s monologue from where uproots the seed of fearsome cannibalism in translation in 1993 (in The Culture of Pastiche) and then the reverse directionality of same seed in 1996 (in Trivedi’s book): bhaksyaṁi --- the textual gesture of cannibalism of the seed, of the ‘self-righteousness,’ of the sight, of the text, of the pastiche of pastiche itself. I will consider the first translation of Saussure in English by Prof Shukla as the primary source for this paper. I will also try to re-read the grammatical rules in the contemporary English grammar such as the use of prepositional genitive vis-à-vis Sanskrit (in particular the grammatical rules of Aṣṭādhyāyī) and argue as to why there is a need to simplify its use. And finally some authors who disappeared like the ǝ (schwa).