Pāṇini, the “Glitch,” and a Note From an Old Cambridge Friend

I received a message from a publicist this week. The name caught my eye because I knew the scholar from Cambridge years ago. The subject of the email was simple: a new book on Pāṇini and the old claim that something in his system “doesn’t work.”

For two and a half millennia, scholars have argued that Pāṇini’s grammar, the first true computational system for language, contains a flaw. His treatise gives a compact system for generating correct Sanskrit forms. But in cases where two rules seem to apply at the same time, most readers assumed the system breaks. Textbooks describe this as a “conflict problem.” Generations of commentators tried to patch it with exceptions, hierarchies, or interpretive workarounds.

The new book, Pāṇini’s Perfect Rule (December 2025), argues that the flaw was never there. The author, Rishi Rajpopat, claims the system already contains a rule for solving the conflict. According to him, Pāṇini didn’t leave a hole; modern readers simply looked in the wrong place. If his reading is right, the entire architecture of the grammar becomes visible as a single machine; elegant, compact, and self-consistent.

There are two parts to this story.

First, the technical claim: Rajpopat proposes a modern, cleaner interpretation of how rules are applied. He says the conflict is resolved by the grammar itself, not by external patches. If correct, this restores the system’s internal logic and closes a long-running debate.

Second, the personal angle: he solved the puzzle as a PhD student at Cambridge, coming from economics and mathematics, not from traditional Sanskrit scholarship. His approach, reading the text with fresh eyes, without inherited habits, led him to the solution.

The book also describes the reaction inside the field. Some accept the new reading as an overdue correction; others resist it on methodological grounds. There is, by all accounts, real disagreement.

The publicist asked whether BP would be interested in interviewing him. Given that we’ve covered Indian linguistics before, and given that this discovery sits at the intersection of language, logic, and early computational thought, it merits exploration. I’m scheduling a conversation with him. Questions for him welcome in the comments.