Epic Sanskrit Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

A fresh and original translation from Sanskrit of the dashrajnya hymn (hymn 7.18 of Rig Veda) describing this defining battle between Aryan king Sudas and his Aryan as well as non-Aryan foes. The decisive battle led to the uprooting of... more

One could scarcely draw together two larger topics than the Mahābhārata (Mbh) and dharma. The former, a tale of a fratricidal and internecine battle interspersed with theme-expanding stories, moral tales, fables, and didactic tracts,... more

One could scarcely draw together two larger topics than the Mahābhārata (Mbh) and dharma. The former, a tale of a fratricidal and internecine battle interspersed with theme-expanding stories, moral tales, fables, and didactic tracts, claims to be 100,000 stanzas long; the text constituted in the Critical Edition in the mid 20th century by a team of scholars comes to some 75,000. The Mbh has arguably been the most influential and significant cultural product to emerge from South Asia in the last two millennia. The word dharma, on the other hand, has, since perhaps the 5th century BCE (or a little later), been the preeminent term of ideological expression in South Asian thought, and lent itself to the collective name for one of South Asia's most enduring genres, dharmaśāstra. The word is, as has often been noted, of central importance to the Mbh; indeed, in many respects, the Mbh both marks a significant moment in the semantic development of dharma (Hiltebeitel 2011: 20-29) and demonstrates its emergence as a term encoding cultural and ideological legitimacy.

This hymn pertains to the river crossing event of the Rigveda. A massive and continuous flood stopped the Bharatas in their tracks. Their guide Vishwamitra then organised a sacrifice and composed this hymn to mollify the rivers' fury.... more

The Elephant is an animal found only in India and Africa. If this animal were to be mentioned in the Rigveda, it would be a clear proof that the Events described in the Rigveda took place in India. However, this translation shows that the... more

The Elephant is an animal found only in India and Africa. If this animal were to be mentioned in the Rigveda, it would be a clear proof that the Events described in the Rigveda took place in India. However, this translation shows that the words from the Rigveda commonly understood to denote the elephant, actually refer to another animal. This animal is not found in India.

In Rig veda, Indra is treated much like a celebrity sportsperson of today. This original translation from Sanskrit, of Hymn 3.45 of Rigveda, just as my other translations, demonstrates how lucid and lively the hymns of Rigveda are, in... more

The Sanskrit system of reciprocal pronouns includes three lexical units that can be employed as reciprocal pronouns, meaning “each other, one another”: anyonya-, paraspara- and the much rarer itaretara-. All these three forms are based on... more

The Sanskrit system of reciprocal pronouns includes three lexical units that can be employed as reciprocal pronouns, meaning “each other, one another”: anyonya-, paraspara- and the much rarer itaretara-. All these three forms are based on the iteration of pronominal adjectives meaning “other, another, different” (para- has also the meaning “alien, far, farther, distant”) and can therefore be called polyptotic. The paper investigates the intricate functional relationships between these three forms.

A fresh translation of hymn 8.6.

An original translation from Sanskrit.

The paper is devoted to the labile verbs in the Middle Indo-Aryan languages. To begin with, the general causes of the diachronic development of lability are taken into consideration. The main such cause is suggested to be the casual... more

The paper is devoted to the labile verbs in the Middle Indo-Aryan languages. To begin with, the general causes of the diachronic development of lability are taken into consideration. The main such cause is suggested to be the casual diachronic deletion of the valency changing morphemes. In this respect, the valency changing verbal morphology of late Sanskrit, along with its out- come at the Middle Indian stage, is taken into consideration. All of the possible sources of ambiguity are identified. Subsequently, it is shown how these ambigu- ities effectively brought about the creation of labile patterns, which are indeed attested in our sources in MIA languages (namely, literary and epigraphic Prakrits, Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit and Pāli). At the end, some indirect traces of labile verbs in MIA languages are hypothesized through the analysis of the writings of the Pāṇinian grammarians.

Citation matching is the problem of finding which citation occurs in a given textual corpus. Most existing citation matching work is done on scientific literature. The goal of this paper is to present methods for performing citation... more

Citation matching is the problem of finding which citation occurs in a given textual corpus. Most existing citation matching work is done on scientific literature. The goal of this paper is to present methods for performing citation matching on Sanskrit texts. Exact matching and approximate matching are the two methods for performing citation matching. The exact matching method checks for exact occurrence of the citation with respect to the textual corpus. Approximate matching is a fuzzy string-matching method which computes a similarity score between an individual line of the textual corpus and the citation. The Smith-Waterman-Gotoh algorithm for local alignment, which is generally used in bioinformatics, is used here for calculating the similarity score. This similarity score is a measure of the closeness between the text and the citation. The exact- and approximate-matching methods are evaluated and compared. The methods presented can be easily applied to corpora in other Indic languages like Kannada, Tamil, etc. The approximate-matching method can in particular be used in the compilation of critical editions and plagiarism detection in a literary work.