The extraordinarily logical nature of Sanskrit, the fact that “we are lakṣaṇaikacakṣuṣka, solely guided by rules,” that “correctness is guaranteed by the correct application of rules,” that you can generate a grammatically correct word or phrase you need by applying these rules — all this leads to a strong similarity between it and modern programming languages. The Ashtadhyayi itself is replete with features that resemble modern programming constructs: recursion; multiple inheritance (a rule based on other rules acquires all the properties of the parent rules); context-sensitive and context-free rules; conflict resolution for rules; string transformations; ordered operations; a metalanguage; and so on.³⁴ Programmers who know Sanskrit sometimes claim that it would make the perfect programming language, endlessly rigorous and endlessly flexible.³⁵

The inheritors of the Paninian tradition were deeply concerned with the relationship between language, meaning, and function: How is meaning transferred? How is it understood? Does language impel action? These questions became particularly urgent when these theorists were confronted by belletrist poetry written in the unchanging formal language of science and scripture. Over the centuries, Sanskrit developed a flourishing culture of kavya—poetry — and so the philosophers of language had to engage with beauty. Their investigations took them inescapably toward considerations of aesthetics: How was beauty produced in language? How does beauty affect or influence the reader, the viewer? Like programmers with their discussions of the “eloquence” of code, the classical Indian theorists tried to think about the effects that flowed from formal-language texts and went beyond the purely functional.

Until about the mid-ninth century CE, the thinkers of the Sanskrit cosmopolis who were interested in the nature and epistemology of literary beauty concerned themselves with the formal qualities of texts; they thought of poetry as language made beautiful through the operations of certain constructions: simile, metaphor, metonymy, double entendre or puns, alliteration, sound, rhythm, and so on. These figures were alamkaras, ornaments, which beautified language in much the same way that jewelry embellished a body. Some scholars ascribed a more central role to riti or “style,” to gunas or “qualities” such as ojas, “strength” or “vigor” (achieved, for example, through the use of long compounds in prose); prasada, clarity or lucidity; samata, the uniformity of diction; sukumarata, softness or delicacy; etcetera. These qualities, the adherents of riti argued, produced beauty, which was in turn heightened by figures of speech. Whatever specific emphases the Indian aestheticians may have preferred in their writings on beauty, all of these early scholars were formalists; poetics itself was alamkara-shastra, the study of ornamentation. Their critical methods were heavily particularistic, and they therefore produced exhaustive catalogs of alamkaras and their effects, of the varieties and subvarieties of linguistic structures used by writers.

The theorist Anandavardhana (820–9 °CE) caused an upheaval among these alamkarikas with his treatise Dhvanyaloka (The light of suggestion). Until Anandavardhana, Indian philosophers of language had accepted two main modes of signification through which language conveyed meaning: abhidha, the literal or the denotative, and lakshana, the metaphorical and figurative, the connotative. Anandavardhana proposed that poetic language set yet another semantic function into play: suggestion. The stock example used to illustrate the workings of suggestion in mundane language is the simple sentence, “The sun has set.” An eleventh-century theorist wrote:

The denoted meaning of a word is one and the same for all persons bearing it; so that it is fixed and uniform; the denoted or directly expressed meaning of the words “the sun has set” never varies (is fixed), while its suggested meaning varies with the variation in such accessory conditions as the context, the character of the speaker, the character of the person spoken to, and so forth. For instance, the words “the sun has set” suggests (1) the idea that “now is the opportunity to attack the enemy” (when they are addressed by the general to the king);—(2) “that you should set forth to meet your lover” (when addressed by the confidant to the girl in love)

and so on until “(10)—‘my love has not come even today’ (when spoken by an impatient girl waiting for her beloved’s return from a journey); thus, in fact, there is no end to the number of suggested meanings.”³⁶

Anandavardhana’s assertion was that in literature, suggestion or vyanjana added layers of meaning to the text that were not apparent in the denotative or figurative content of the language; vyanjana is derived from the root vi plus anj, “to reveal, manifest”—vyanjana therefore manifests a multitude of meanings within the reader. And, Anandavardhana argued, when “sense or word, subordinating their own meaning, suggest that [suggested] meaning”—that is, when the denoted and figured meaning becomes less important than the manifested, unspoken meaning — that poetry becomes “the type of poetry which the wise call dhvani.”³⁷ Dhvani derives from dhvan, “to reverberate”; dhvani poetry therefore causes an endless resonance within the reader—“the suggested sense [flashes] forth in an instant in the minds of intelligent auditors who are averse to the literal sense and in quest of the real meaning.”³⁸ So the echoes of dhvani are available only to those who are capable, who are alert to the possibilities of poetry. Dhvani is “not understood by the mere knowledge of grammar and dictionaries. It is understood only by those who know the true nature of poetic meaning.”³⁹ Dhvani is “the soul of poetry.”⁴⁰

Anandavardhana does not claim that he is inventing anything new when he speaks of dhvani: it is “found in the works of great poets. It is that which appears as [something] separate from the well-known elements [of poetry].” The reason we call some poets “great” is because their work is resonant with dhvani, which is something that cannot be described or analyzed by listing their beautiful figures of speech or pointing at their style; dhvani is not accounted for by the then-current theories of alamkara-shastra. And yet, dhvani is what makes poetry beautiful. So Anandavardhana insists that he is just naming something that already exists, and showing us how to think about it. He shows us different kinds of dhvani in verses taken from the epics, from the renowned poets of his era, from famous poems in Sanskrit and Prakrit. For instance:

O holy monk, wander without fear.

That little dog was killed today by him—

that violent lion living in the thickets

on the banks of the Godāvarī River.⁴¹

Here the speaker is a woman, and what is being suggested is a vastu, a narrative element: the woman wants to keep the wandering monk away from a trysting place where she meets with her lover. So what we have here is vastu-dhvani, through which the poet can suggest things, facts, situations, prohibitions, injunctions. In this poem, the denotative meaning is exactly the opposite of what she really wants, what she is really doing; what the reader grasps is beyond abhidha and lakshana. Here is another famous example of vastu-dhvani:

Mother-in-law sleeps down there, and I here.

Look while day remains, O traveler.