Despite its quintessential ‘Indianness’, there is a general understanding that, in an early form, Sanskrit came to India from abroad in the second millennium BCE, with the migration of Indo-Europeans, and then it developed further and flourished magnificently in India. It is also interesting to note that the greatest grammarian in Sanskrit (indeed possibly in any language), namely Pāṇini, who systematized and transformed Sanskrit grammar and phonetics around the fourth century BCE, was of Afghan origin (he describes his village on the banks of the river Kabul). These foreign connections have
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