extensively by Noam Chomsky and his school, and finally replaced by more
abstract principles.
In classical India, “the arrangement of forms and speculation on forms reveal
most clearly their content – they ultimately are the content itself.” I translate
this phrase from Charles Malamoud who adopted it from Louis Renou, the fore-
most twentieth-century scholar of ancient Indian civilization. Attention to form
is a characteristic of all science and even the Mı ̄ma ̄m.sa ̄ system of ritual philos-
ophy declares: “when a visible result is possible, it is improper to postulate an
invisible one” (Mı ̄ma ̄m.sa ̄ Paribha ̄s.a ̄).
To the modern age, the most important contribution of the Sanskrit gram-
matical tradition is its construction of linguistics as a formal science. The study
of language, the most characteristic feature of the human animal, is as formal
as that of the so-called natural sciences. The need of an artificial, formal lan-
guage shows that natural language is unable to express adequately the struc-
tures not only of the nonhuman universe but also those of human language
itself. When linguistics is an exact science, the distinction between human and
natural sciences falls to the ground and it becomes far-fetched to assert that
humans stand isolated in the universe – a postulate that has never been popular
in India.
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