Was Writing Known before Panini?

Unknown · Hellenic and Hellenistic Papers Series · 18 pages

First published in The Theosophist, Vol. V, No. 1 (49), October 1883, pages 18–21, and reprinted in Blavatsky Collected Writings V pages 294–310. The frontispiece is Letter O by Ilia Krughoff. Boris de Zirkoff's prefatory note records that the authorship is uncertain: the article can hardly be pronounced definitely Blavatsky's in style or wording, yet in many places approaches her manner; some students attribute it to T. Subba Row, others to Mohini Mohun Chatterji, and others suppose that whoever wrote it, the material was added to and gone over by Blavatsky herself.

The writer states the commission plainly — to put together facts supporting the view that the art of writing was known in India before the time of the grammarian Pānini. The opposing position is Max Müller's, maintained since 1856 and carrying the approbation of other Western scholars: that the entire absence of any mention of writing, reading, paper or pen in the Vedas or throughout the Brāhmana period, and the near-complete silence through the Sūtra period, leads to the supposition that even then, though the art of writing was beginning to be known, the whole literature of India was preserved by oral tradition alone. The article's first move is to attack the cost of that assumption rather than the evidence for it: that to support the theory the mnemonic faculty of the ancestors must be expanded to a phenomenal degree, stretched like the bull's hide of Queen Dido to enclose whatever ground the argument requires. From there it assembles the positive evidence — references and inferences from the texts themselves, and from Pānini's own grammar — for the conclusion the title asks after.

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