An IIT-Bombay alumnus has launched a free website dedicated to making ancient Sanskrit literature accessible to modern readers through innovative computational tools.
Antariksh Bothale, a software engineer from Jodhpur, Rajasthan, has created SanskritSahitya.org, a comprehensive platform designed to provide easy access to Sanskrit literary texts.
The website combines Bothale’s expertise in Natural Language Processing (NLP) with his passion for Sanskrit literature.
“My overarching vision for the website is to make it the best experience for reading and analyzing Sanskrit literature, to leverage advancements in computational methods to aid the study and teaching for both casual readers and experts,” Bothale said.
Currently working at Google, California on the Smart Home Assistant product, Bothale holds an impressive academic background with a degree from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay and a Master’s in Computational Linguistics from the University of Washington, Seattle.
SanskritSahitya.org offers a range of features designed to enhance the reading experience, including structured navigation based on traditional Sanskrit text divisions (sarga, adhyaaya, kaanda, shloka), metrical tagging, commentaries, translations, and morphological analysis.
The website also provides cross-references to other relevant content, such as Paninian Sutras and dictionaries.
For teachers and researchers, the site includes a powerful search tool that works with both Devanagari and Romanized queries, making it easy to locate specific shlokas based on partial text. Additionally, the platform features a glossary of Sanskrit meters with detailed explanations and audio demonstrations of how to sing them.
Future enhancements planned for the website include more sophisticated search capabilities, English summaries for all shlokas, a comprehensive word index across all texts, support for rendering Sanskrit text in various Indian scripts, and a feature to bookmark favorite shlokas.
The website currently hosts popular texts such as the Ramayana, Mahabharata, Bhagavad Gita, various Mahakavyas, and poems by Kalidasa and other classical poets.
An offline access option is also available, allowing users to download the entire database for use without an internet connection.
For scholars interested in analyzing the data in bulk, Bothale has made the complete dataset accessible through the site’s GitHub repository at github[.]com/sanskritsahitya-com/data.
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