If there was something in the collective memory related to these palaces, modern structures that one normally came across in the cities did not betray it. The hallmarks of the public architecture of contemporary India are dreariness and ugliness. The Development Authorities of the various cities have used wretched designs, which, repeated thousand-fold without the slightest imagination, have turned housing projects into slums. Worse than mere eye-sores, they will assault the spirit for generations to come.

I found proof that there exists a thread connecting the past of the paintings to our own times in -- of all the places -- America. This was in a trip to Barsana Dham in Austin, a place of which I had heard much good things for years, but somehow never managed to visit. The estate has a palace, a medieval haveli, with beautiful gardens and dancing peacocks and peahens with chicks in tow -- a recreation of the Barsana Dham of Vraja, the mythical meeting place of Krishna and Radha. Behind the palace-temple is a pond, a small replica of the Govardhan Hill, and further in the background is a large hill, from the top of which one can see the wide expanse of the Austin valley.

On inquiry at the office, I was told that this conception was not an original and similar palace temples exist in India. But they are in smaller towns, off the beaten path, which I don't get an opportunity to tread in my hurried trips.

Barsana Dham has great conference and residence facilities, and I was there to speak to a national meeting of the Hindu Students Council of America. The organizers had put together several great sessions on contemporary issues ranging from movies, current affairs, art, dance and improvised theater. I also heard two brilliant lectures: one by Professor Sen Pathak of M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston on genetics, and another by Prabhakari Devi, the resident American Swamini, on the hidden Dharma of people's lives.

Other highpoints of the conference were the hikes to the top of the hill, a very, very wild Holi with a fire-engine spraying the participants, and garba and bhangra dance performances late at night in the open columned arena next to the pond. In the night lights, the place looked like a shining city upon a hill.

The Chemist and the Grammarian

Solid state electronics, which has revolutionized modern life, arises from the unique properties of silicon and germanium in that their electrical properties change dramatically when substituted atoms are introduced in their crystal lattices. Another widely used solid state material is gallium, which is used in light emitting diodes and other devices.

It is an amusing sidelight of history of chemistry that the original names of gallium and germanium were Eka-aluminum and Eka-silicon, where eka, Sanskrit for one, was used by Mendeleev, the famed formulator of the Periodic Table of elements, as representing beyond. He predicted the existence of these elements in a paper in 1869, and it was the identification of these elements in 1875 and 1886 that made him famous, and led to the general acceptance of his Periodic Table.

There are a couple of theories about why Mendeleev, a Russian from St. Petersburg, used a Sanskrit prefix. According to Professor Paul Kiparsky of Stanford University, Mendeleev was a friend and colleague of the Sanskritist Bohtlingk, who was preparing the second edition of his book on Panini at about this time, and Mendeleev wished to honour Panini with his nomenclature. Noting that there are striking similarities between the Periodic Table and the introductory Shiva Sutras in Panini's grammar, Kiparsky says:

[T]he analogies between the two systems are striking. Just as Panini found that the phonological patterning of sounds in the language is a function of their articulatory properties, so Mendeleev found that the chemical properties of elements are a function of their atomic weights. Like Panini, Mendeleev arrived at his discovery through a search for the "grammar" of the elements (using what he called the principle of isomorphism, and looking for general formulas to generate the possible chemical compounds). Just as Panini arranged the sounds in order of increasing phonetic complexity (e.g. with the simple stops k, p... preceding the other stops, and representing all of them in expressions like kU, pU) so Mendeleev arranged the elements in order of increasing atomic weights, and called the first row (oxygen, nitrogen, carbon etc.) "typical (or representative) elements.” Just as Panini broke the phonetic parallelism of sounds when the simplicity of the system required it, e.g. putting the velar to the right of the labial in the nasal row, so Mendeleev gave priority to isomorphism over atomic weights when they conflicted, e.g. putting beryllium in the magnesium family because it patterns with it even though, by atomic weight, it seemed to belong with nitrogen and phosphorus. In both cases, the periodicities they discovered would later be explained by a theory of the internal structure of the elements.

Another possibility is that it wasn't Panini's Shiva Sutras that influenced him, but rather the two-dimensional arrangement of the Sanskrit varnamala. The tabular form of the Sanskrit letters is due to the two parameters (point of articulation and aspiration) at the basis of the sounds, and Mendeleev must have recognized that ratios/valency and atomic weight likewise defined a two-dimensional basis for the elements.

Convinced that the analogy was fundamental, Mendeleev theorized that the gaps that lay in his Table must correspond to undiscovered elements. In all, he predicted eight elements, and he used the prefixes of eka, dvi and tri (Sanskrit one, two and three) in their naming.

Mendeleev, as the discoverer of the order in chemical elements, was tipping his hat to the Sanskrit grammarians of yore who had created astonishingly sophisticated theories of language based on their discovery of the two-dimensional patterns in basic sounds.

The beauty of the Sanskrit grammar is just one small point of light in the shining hill of Sanskrit sciences. Even for us moderns, who are not vitally connected to these sciences any longer, there are amazing jewels to be mined from the hill.

External Links:
http://www.meta-synthesis.com/webbook/35_pt/pt.html : Mendeleev's predicted elements
http://www.ece.lsu.edu/kak/siva-t1.pdf : Professor Kiparsky on the Shiva Sutras