Dr Rajpopat asked me to share his response to the review of his thesis by Sri Neelesh Bodas that I shared on this forum in the message below in this thread.

Sharing the pdf file.

On Sat, Dec 24, 2022 at 9:48 AM Nagaraj Paturi <nagarajpaturi@gmail.com> wrote:
The same review was made into a video , shared with the following message :

Many people reached out to me personally asking to prepare a video giving the summary of my view. Therefore I have uploaded a 30 min video now - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i59Gvv1Oj9o

I sincerely urge all the interested members of this group to watch at least the first 10 minutes of the video where I summarize my view. 

Thanks and Pranaam!
Neelesh

On Sat, Dec 24, 2022 at 9:46 AM Nagaraj Paturi <nagarajpaturi@gmail.com> wrote:
The following review was shared on BVP list :

  नमस्ते !

On the onset, I would like to specifically thank all those Sanskrit lovers (novices as well as scholars), who reached out to me asking for my views on this topic.  I also thank this scholarly BVP group for allowing me to post my views. 

Coming to the topic, I have gone through the entire thesis of Dr. Rishi Rajpopat , except for the Appendix. I have captured my detailed critical assessment of this thesis in this document.  The document is open for comments to everyone. 

The summary is as follows - 

1) I believe that Dr. Rishi's new interpretation of the पर word, which is only relevant for the DOI cases, has some potential for further research. However, it needs to be molded a lot, and also needs more exhaustive testing, before we can call it "sound". I have enumerated a few cases in my document where his DOI as well as SOI does not work.  In fact, Dr. Rishi's treatment of SOI is appears ad-hoc at places. He also mentions that it is not based on Panini's system directly. I believe it needs to be replaced by something more concrete.

2) In many examples, Dr. Rishi has also stated his understanding of the tradition.  Unfortunately, Dr. Rishi's understanding of the tradition is pretty weak at places. I have elaborated this with numerous examples. Of course, none of these are directly going to change his discovery, but it would have been much better if Dr. Rishi would have spent some more time in learning and understanding the tradition, before proposing something outside its framework.

3) Dr. Rishi has interpreted some sutras in his own way.  Some of these are flawed interpretations, and I have shown them with examples. 

Anyway, irrespective of all this feedback, it cannot be denied that the thesis enumerates some brilliant techniques, and is worthy of further investigation. While the discovery has its own lacunas / shortcomings / loopholes,  the way in which the whole topic of बाध्यबाधकभाव has been approached in this thesis definitely opens up new doors for further research in Paninian grammar.  

For the record -  I neither support, nor believe, nor encourage statements like “2500 year old puzzle solved” or “Katyanana chose wrong interpretation” and so on. This is not a competition between modern academia and our divine tradition. Instead, we must bring the two together to take the shastra to newer heights. FWIW, the the claim that "Cambridge student solved 250 year old mystery" is fake, baseless and only shows the immaturity of the people involved therein. I sincerely wish Dr. Rishi was more careful with his words in his media interactions, and was extra-cautious while talking about the tradition, which is deeply respected by millions of Sanskrit lovers, including myself. 

Finally, a disclaimer. I am just a passionate student of Sanskrit grammar, with no formal training. I am far from being called a scholar. Therefore please excuse me if there are any gaps in my analysis.  More than anything else, I have been looking at this opportunity purely as an intellectual exercise for me,  and I must admit that my understanding of some of the prakriyas became much stronger after reading this thesis, for which I wholeheartedly thank Dr. Rishi Rajpopat.

Once again here is the link my analysis -  https://bit.ly/neelesh-critique-on-in-panini-we-trust

Regards
Neelesh Bodas

PS: On a lighter note, in the last few days, I have manually worked out so many prakriyas in the DOI / SOI system that I feel like I have started forgetting how I'd do prakriyas in the usual traditional way !!


On Sat, Dec 24, 2022 at 2:58 AM Peter Scharf via INDOLOGY <indology@list.indology.info> wrote:
Dear Madhav, Sharon, and other colleagues,
I believe that rather than responding to social media, public news announcements, and wild claims made therein, the most responsible way to respond to the claims that Dr. Rajpopat made in his dissertation is to read the dissertation and write a comprehensive review of it.  I have done so in the first PDF attached to this email.  I include there a bibliography of work that I and a few others have done on rule selection and conflict resolution as well as formalization of the Aṣṭādhyāyī.  I attach PDFs of several of these papers to this email as well.
While the wild claims and inordinate attention that Rajpopat’s work has drawn in the past couple of weeks may be irritating to many, it has also drawn attention to the fascinating issues involved in understanding Pāṇini’s linguistic treatise and its tradition.  We would like to invite those who are interested in learning about the Pāṇinian tradition to join Dr. Tanuja Ajotikar’s course, “Introduction to the Pāṇinian tradition” taught online through The Sanskrit Library.  A description of the course can be found on The Sanskrit Library website (sanskritlibrary dot org) under “Courses” and from there under “Continuing education courses”.  Dr. Ajotikar also teaches a course “Readings in the सिद्धान्तकौमुदी described under “University equivalent courses”.  These courses will be offered again beginning 21 January.
Yours sincerely,
******************************
Peter M. Scharf, President
The Sanskrit Library
******************************
Peter Scharf


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--
Nagaraj Paturi
 
Hyderabad, Telangana, INDIA.


Senior Director, IndicA
BoS, MIT School of Vedic Sciences, Pune, Maharashtra
BoS Kavikulaguru Kalidasa Sanskrit University, Ramtek, Maharashtra
BoS Veda Vijnana Gurukula, Bengaluru.
Member, Advisory Council, Veda Vijnana Shodha Samsthanam, Bengaluru
BoS Rashtram School of Public Leadership
Editor-in-Chief, International Journal of Studies in Public Leadership
Former Senior Professor of Cultural Studies, 
FLAME School of Communication and FLAME School of  Liberal Education, 
Hyderabad, Telangana, INDIA.
 
 
 


--
Nagaraj Paturi
 
Hyderabad, Telangana, INDIA.


Senior Director, IndicA
BoS, MIT School of Vedic Sciences, Pune, Maharashtra
BoS Kavikulaguru Kalidasa Sanskrit University, Ramtek, Maharashtra
BoS Veda Vijnana Gurukula, Bengaluru.
Member, Advisory Council, Veda Vijnana Shodha Samsthanam, Bengaluru
BoS Rashtram School of Public Leadership
Editor-in-Chief, International Journal of Studies in Public Leadership
Former Senior Professor of Cultural Studies, 
FLAME School of Communication and FLAME School of  Liberal Education, 
Hyderabad, Telangana, INDIA.
 
 
 


--
Nagaraj Paturi
 
Hyderabad, Telangana, INDIA.


Senior Director, IndicA
BoS, MIT School of Vedic Sciences, Pune, Maharashtra
BoS Kavikulaguru Kalidasa Sanskrit University, Ramtek, Maharashtra
BoS Veda Vijnana Gurukula, Bengaluru.
Member, Advisory Council, Veda Vijnana Shodha Samsthanam, Bengaluru
BoS Rashtram School of Public Leadership
Editor-in-Chief, International Journal of Studies in Public Leadership
Former Senior Professor of Cultural Studies, 
FLAME School of Communication and FLAME School of  Liberal Education, 
Hyderabad, Telangana, INDIA.