India is staking its claim in the global AI race with the development of the country’s first native Sanskrit Large Language Model (LLM), an artificial intelligence tool trained specifically to understand and generate Sanskrit text. The effort is rooted in a landmark collaboration between the 118‑year‑old Madras Sanskrit College in Mylapore, Chennai, and technical innovators from IIT Madras, combining deep human scholarship with machine learning expertise.
Sanskrit, often described as one of the world’s oldest and most structurally rich languages, presents unique challenges for AI due to its complex grammar, Sandhi (word‑joining rules), and extensive literary tradition. To build a model that truly understands these nuances, project leads are digitizing and processing more than 110,000 rare Sanskrit manuscripts, including handwritten texts from campus archives and the Kuppuswami Sastri Research Institute.
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This initiative goes beyond basic translation or Optical Character Recognition (OCR). The intent is to teach artificial intelligence the intricate syntax and logic of Sanskrit, equipping it to parse complex philosophical, grammatical, and literary constructs, something general large language models often struggle with. Academic and technical teams plan to integrate linguistic structures specific to Sanskrit, enabling more accurate interpretation and generation of text rooted in the language’s traditional frameworks.
Experts involved in the project stress that human validation is central to quality: Sanskrit scholars are reviewing and verifying digitized text to ensure that the training data reflects authentic, high‑quality language usage. This collaboration between classical scholars and modern data scientists underscores a broader trend in AI research emphasizing cultural context and linguistic integrity rather than purely statistical modeling.
The project is expected to take several years to mature, with pilot applications possibly accessible to researchers and the public within a couple of years. Beyond academic circles, such a model could revolutionize how ancient texts are studied, interpreted, and taught, making India’s civilizational knowledge computationally accessible globally for the first time.
This Sanskrit LLM effort aligns with broader national initiatives to promote indigenous-language technology and reduce reliance on foreign AI platforms, furthering India’s goal of building homegrown, culturally grounded artificial intelligence solutions.
