Tag: Sanskrit

Sanskrit….The Language of Indian Sanskriti `वसुधैव-कुटुम्बकम्`

Centre of Excellence for Indian Knowledge Systems (CoE-IKS) of IIT Kharagpur celebrated the ‘Sanskrit Week’

 

सुखार्थिनः कुतो विद्या नास्ति विद्यार्थिनः सुखम्।
सुखार्थी वा त्यजेद्विद्यां विद्यार्थी वा त्यजेत्सुखम्॥

 

There is no knowledge for the seekers of comfort, and no comfort for the seekers of knowledge.
A seeker of comfort should give up knowledge, and a seeker of knowledge should give up comfort.​

 

Swami Vivekananda said, “Because the very sound of  Sanskrit words gives a prestige and a power and a strength to the race.”

Centre of Excellence for Indian Knowledge Systems (CoE-IKS) of IIT Kharagpur celebrated Sanskrit Week from 9th August to 15th August 2022 with an array of programs. The CoE-IKS took this initiative to create an awareness about the vast knowledge tradition that the language of Sanskrit beholds for the Modern India. On the first day Prof. V. R. Desai, Dean of Faculty of Engineering and Architecture, inaugurated the series of programs  and spoke about the relevance of Sanskrit in present times, its importance in developing ourselves socioeconomically, scientifically, and technologically in every field while preserving the great heritage. Prof. Khanindra Pathak, Dean of Infrastructure, graced the occasion and suggested some future steps in order to know the tradition of Vaada and Samvada, a method of finding the truth through dialogues. Shri Rajeev Rawat, Senior Officer, Rajabhasha Vibhag also emphasized identifying the root cause of problems and taking firm steps to solve them. Mr. Krishna Kumar, a Research Scholar of IKS brought divinity to the program by reciting stotras. Kumari Pranamya Bhat and Kumari Hridya added a mystical charm to the occasion by singing Sanskrit songs.

The second day saw a programme which was organized in the Brahmagupta Hall (V3) in Vikramashila building of IITKGP. More than 80 students  participated in this awareness program where Dr. Dipesh Katira, Assistant Professor of the Centre of IKS, explained the purpose and importance of the Sanskrit week.  As we know, Krishna Tirtha is credited with the discovery of 16 mathematical formulae that were part of the Parishishta which is an appendix of the Atharva Veda. Tirtha’s simple formulae make intricate mathematical calculations possible. Dr. Mahesh K, Assistant Professor of the Centre of IKS, gave a glimpse of Mathematical study in Sanskrit.

Prof. Joy Sen, the Chairperson of IKS addressed the students on the topic of Sanskrit and Indian Culture on the third day. He laid a special emphasis on civilizational ethos which is the democratic spirit, including respect for rule of law and pluralistic ethos that is ingrained in Indians and also carried by the Indian diaspora who contribute to the economic well-being and social harmony of their country. More than 400 students were in the awe of exploring a different level of dimension through the lenses of this forgotten language, held in Aryabhata Hall (V1), Vikramashila building. The programm communed with an introduction by Dr. Mahesh on the importance of Sanskrit as a vehicle of Sanatana Culture.

On the fourth day, two programs were held. In the morning session which was held in Brahmagupta Hall (V1),  Dr. Dipesh introduced digital tools for learning Sanskrit to the students. Dr. Jayashri was the convener of the program. The students enthusiastically participated in the discussion. In the evening, Prof. Shankh Pratim Bhattacharya, Associate Professor in Dept. of Architecture and Regional Planning spoke about Sanskrit and Nirman Vidya, where he explained how Indian architects were capable of dealing with intricacies in the building with various artistic structures. Students from Kendriya Vidyalaya, Shreyas and Arunabha Manna and others from the KGP fraternity participated and presented Gita Shlokas. Shri S C Das and Shri Haripad, Sanskrit Teachers from Kendriya Vidyalaya graced the programme with their presence.  Sri S C Das spoke about the eternal values that can be imbibed by learning Sanskrit.  Krishna Kumar, Research Scholar, CoEIKS was the host for the program.

On the fifth day, Dr. Jayashri spoke about the comprehension theories of language, as discussed by Indian grammarians. Prof. V. R. Desai spoke about ‘Vrksha Nakshatra’ which was held in Prof. S N Bose Auditorium of the institute.

Prof. Somesh Kumar, Department of Mathematics spoke on Samskrita and Ganita on the sixth day. He presented the contributions of Indian mathematicians such as Aryabhata, the first great astronomers of the classical age of India who discovered the astronomical and mathematical theories written in 499 AD and Bhaskaracarya, the leading mathematician of the 12th century, who wrote the first work with full and systematic use of the decimal number system etc., which mesmerized the audience. Mr. Shreyas from Kendriya Vidyalaya presented a Subhashita on the importance of Vidya and explained its meaning. Dr. Richa Chopra, Assistant Professor, CoEIKS spoke about the role of Sanskrit in keeping good mental health and boosting morale. The program commenced in the presence of  Prof. V. R. Desai and Prof. B N Singh, Professor, Aeronautical Engineering.

The seventh and the concluding day of the Sanskrit Week was celebrated with a wonderful cultural evening with Sanskrit and Music which was held in Prof. S. N. Bose auditorium in the presence of the IIT KGP fraternity comprising of authorities, professors, students of the institute, school children and campus residents. Prof. V. R. Desai presented the Nirvana Shatkam of Adi Shankaracharya with its holistic approach in the modern contemporary while the participants discussed about the future course of action in preserving the language and culture. Students of Kendriya Vidyalaya Sreyas, Gauri Shukla, Rudra, Arunabha Manna and Pranamya Bhat captivated the audience by exhibiting their talents in Sanskrit. Prof. Joy Sen created a divine atmosphere by presenting beautiful Bhajans. The closing ceremony was overwhelmed by the presence of Prof. B N Singh, Prof. Somesh Kumar, Dr.Rajeev Rawat, Shri S C Das and Shri Haripad.

On the closing ceremony of the Sanskrit Week, Prof Joy Sen, Chairman, CoE-IKS remarked ,”Sanskrit, the most ‘perfected’ of language system, the Mother of all languages in the world, and a network of language syntax at the highest apex of the Indo-European language systems, awaits full revival and complete repositioning for complete recovery of Indian Knowledge Systems as it is certified as the most advanced language code with over 48 vowels-consonants, 8 cases and being most perfected in Natural Language Processing (NLP) system of computational sciences.”

Inputs from : Dr. Dipesh Vinod Katira, Assistant Professor, CoE-IKS, IIT Kharagpur
Email : dipesh@iks.iitkgp.ac.in

Edited by:- Poulami Mondal, Digital & Creative Media Executive (Creative Writer)
Email: poulami.mondal@iitkgp.ac.in, media@iitkgp.ac.in, Ph. No.: +91-3222-282007

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Making Sanskrit Accessible through AI-based Text Processing

Researchers at IIT Kharagpur are making Sanskrit accessible with their Artificial Intelligence-based system for processing Sanskrit texts

There has been a renewed interest in Sanskrit since the announcement of NEP 2020. Various academic institutions both at school education as well as higher education are adopting various approaches for improving the reach of the language through training programs, research and outreach initiatives. While various digital resources have improved the accessibility and use of world languages and even regional languages, Sanskrit presents unique challenges in automated computational processing. In addition to the sheer volume and diversity, both stylistic and chronological, found in these texts, the linguistic peculiarities expressed by the language, pose several challenges in making these works accessible to the world.  

Research group led by Dr. Pawan Goyal have developed a digital infrastructure for the efficient processing of Sanskrit texts, by effectively combining state-of-the-art machine learning techniques and traditional linguistic knowledge from Sanskrit. The proposed framework is based on Energy-based models and it enables the encoding of relevant linguistic information as constraints.

“Processing of Sanskrit texts poses several challenges owing to the high lexical productivity of the words, free word order in poetry, euphonic assimilation of sounds at the word boundaries and phonemic orthography followed in writing. Keeping these in mind, we proposed a generic graph-based framework that takes advantage of the free word order nature of the language. Further, we make use of linguistic insights from the traditional Sanskrit grammar for learning the feature function and applying the relevant constraints.” explained Dr. Goyal.

 

He further adds,  “Our proposed framework substantially reduces the training data requirements to as low as 10%, as compared to that of the neural state-of-the-art models. In all the Sanskrit-related tasks discussed in the work, we either achieve state-of-the-art results or ours is the only data-driven solution for those tasks.”

This work is accepted for publication in the Computational Linguistics journal published by the MIT Press. This work has been carried by research scholar Dr. Amrith Krishna [Tweet @krishnamrith12], currently, a postdoc at the University of Cambridge, supervised by Dr. Pawan Goyal. The paper currently addresses the tasks of word segmentation (संधि विच्छेद), morphological parsing (पद विश्लेषण), dependency parsing (कारक विश्लेषण) and poetry to prose conversion of Sanskrit text (अन्वय). The team is now actively collaborating with several external research groups to extend the application of the proposed system for automatic speech recognition and question-answering in Sanskrit.

The classical language has a rich literary tradition spanning more than 2 millennia that encapsulates the cultural ethos of this civilizational nation. Works in Sanskrit, numbering more than 30 million extant manuscripts, include extensive epics, subtle and intricate philosophical, mathematical, and scientific treatises, and rich literary, poetic, and dramatic texts. The proposed AI-based system, used in conjunction with interactive tools such as the Sanskrit Heritage reader, can aid the users in the easier analysis of these manuscripts with word-by-word analysis and translation, the relation between words, poetry to prose conversion, search and question answering, etc.

Graphic by Suman Sutradhar

For more information contact Prof. Pawan Goyal at pawang@cse.iitkgp.ac.in or Dr. Amrith Krishna [Face: amrith.krishna, Tweet @krishnamrith12]

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