The Aindra (of Indra) school of Sanskrit grammar is one of the eleven schools of Sanskrit grammar mentioned in Pāṇini's '' Ashtadhyayi''. It is named after Indra as a reference to

Lord Indra Indra (; ) is the Hindu god of weather, considered the king of the Devas and Svarga in Hinduism. He is associated with the sky, lightning, weather, thunder, storms, rains, river flows, and war. volumes/ref> Indra is the most frequen ...

, the king of deities in

Hindu mythology Hindu mythology refers to the collection of myths associated with Hinduism, derived from various Hindu texts and traditions. These myths are found in sacred texts such as the Vedas, the Itihasas (the ''Mahabharata'' and the ''Ramayan ...

Arthur Coke Burnell Arthur Coke Burnell (11 July 184012 October 1882) was an England, English civil servant who served in the Madras Presidency who was also a scholar in Sanskrit and Dravidian languages, Dravidian languages. He catalogued the Sanskrit manuscripts i ...

, a renowned orientologist, in his 1875 book, ''"On the Aindra school of Sanskrit grammars",'' describes this school. Burnell believed that most non-Pāṇinian systems of Sanskrit grammar were traceable to this school of grammar, believed to be the oldest and reputed to be founded by Indra himself.

Aindra, Katantra schools and the Tolkappiyam

Burnell's search for the Aindra school took him to Southern India where he came across the

Tamil Tamil may refer to: People, culture and language * Tamils, an ethno-linguistic group native to India, Sri Lanka, and some other parts of Asia **Sri Lankan Tamils, Tamil people native to Sri Lanka ** Myanmar or Burmese Tamils, Tamil people of Ind ...

grammatical work '' Tolkappiyam''. A preface of this work, written during the twelfth century CE by Ilampuranar describes the work as ''aindiram nirainda Tolkappiyam''^{ncorrect quote/sup>('comprising Aindra'). Burnell posits that this is an allusion to the pre-Pāṇinian Aindra school of grammar.

While his demonstration of the influence of Sanskrit on the Tolkappiyam has met with some approval, his attribution and approximation of all non Pāṇinian schools of Sanskrit grammar with the Aindra school has met with resistance.Takanobu Takahashi

is a Japanese Indologist, who is currently associate professor of Indian literature at International Buddhist University at Osaka, Japan. He is the second translator of the Kural into Japanese.
Biography
Takanobu Takahashi was born in 195 ...
, ''Tamil Love Poetry and Poetics'' (1995) Brill Academic Publishers pp 26 Some scholars have also taken a less committal line on the question of Sanskrit influence itself.''"...it has been identified that Tolkappiyam and other Sanskrit grammar works share some charactersitics, but also show significant dissimilarities..."'' - Rajam, V. S. (1981), A comparative study of two ancient Indian grammatical traditions: The Tamil Tolkappiyam compared with the Sanskrit Rk-pratisakhya, ''Taittiriya-pratisakhya, Apisali siksa, and the Astadhyayi'' (Ph.D. thesis, University of Pennsylvania: 1981)

See also

* Schools of Sanskrit grammar
* Pāṇini

(; , ) was a Sanskrit grammarian, logician, philologist, and revered scholar in ancient India during the mid-1st millennium BCE, dated variously by most scholars between the 6th–5th and 4th century BCE.

The historical facts of his life ar ...

* Tolkappiyam
* Vyakarana
* Sanskrit grammar

The grammar of the Sanskrit language has a complex verbal system, rich nominal declension, and extensive use of compound nouns. It was studied and codified by Sanskrit grammarians from the later Vedic period (roughly 8th century BCE), culminatin ...

* Katantra

Notes

{{reflist , 2

References

* Trautmann, Thomas R. 2006. Languages and nations: the Dravidian proof in colonial Madras. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 52–54.
* Burnell, Arthur Coke. 1875. On the Aindra school of Sanscrit Grammarians: their place in the Sanscrit and subordinate literatures.

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