VERGAP · Verse, Grammar, Pedagogy: The Gaṇapāṭhavivṛti, a Ninth-Century Kashmiri Teaching Text on Pāṇini’s Lists

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Project objective

VERGAP investigates a unique Sanskrit text from ninth-century Kashmir, the Gaṇapāṭhavivṛti, which versifies and interprets Pāṇini’s Gaṇapāṭha, the lexical lists underlying the Aṣṭādhyāyī, one of the most influential grammars of antiquity. By turning highly technical material into poetry, the text made complex knowledge easier to memorise and teach, offering a rare stand-alone witness to how linguistic theory was transmitted in early South Asia. VERGAP will prepare the first critical edition of this work from surviving manuscripts, enriched with annotations on grammar, lexicon, metre, and style, and will analyse its pedagogical strategies alongside computationally aided case studies of its vocabulary across dated corpora. Combining philology, manuscript studies, literary analysis, and digital humanities, the project will explore the intersection of linguistics, education, and cultural history, and will test how innovation in grammatical lists relates to actual usage. All research will be conducted in an open digital environment (Saktumiva), with transparent methods, continuous updates, and outputs archived for reuse, while training and corpus-based analysis will be supported by the INTELLEXUS project. By uniting traditional philology with computational approaches, VERGAP will provide new tools for scholars, strengthen the study of South Asia’s manuscript heritage, and highlight the long history of poetic strategies in teaching technical knowledge. Through open access editions, international outreach, and public communication, it will demonstrate the relevance of Sanskrit grammar to broader questions of knowledge organisation, memory, and pedagogy, and will reinforce Europe’s role as a leader in innovative and interdisciplinary humanities research.

Original text from CORDIS.

Participants

• UNIVERSITY OF HAMBURG · HamburgCoordinatorGermany

Links

• View on CORDIS
• DOI: 10.3030/101283632