sanskrit on S Anand

Donations for Sanskrit College

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 07:39:18 +0000

The following article appeared in The Times of India earlier this month.

The institute is struggling for funds. Please contribute, if you could, by calling +91 44 24985320 or via PayPal.

Sanskrit centre struggles to stay alive

The Kuppuswami Sastri Research Institute attached to the Sanskrit College in Mylapore is in doldrums because of lack of government patronage.
The Institute, one of the three involved in Sanskrit research in the country, has been surviving on private donations. With not enough resources, the management is unable to pay the faculty the benefits of the sixth pay commission.
Institute director V Kameswari said the Union government stopped its financial support in 1995, after which it has been solely dependent on donations. "The institute has a trove of rare palm leaf manuscripts and books not just about Sanskrit literature but also on architecture, fine arts, geography, history and astronomy in Sanskrit," says Kameswari.
The two other such institutes are the R G Bandarkar Sanskrit Institute in Pune and the Ganganath Jha Sanskrit Institute in Allahabad. "We have requested a onetime grant from the Union planning commission and also annual assistance from the Rashtriya Sanskrit Sansthan, but are yet to get any support," says K S Balasubramanian, deputy director of the institute. The plan panel had given grants to the Mumbai Asiatic Society and Kolkata-based Asiatic Society.
The institute was getting about 10 lakh till 1995 but due to a misunderstanding between the government-appointed members of the governing committee and the management, the aid was stopped. Today, there are 24 scholars at the institute, most of them women doing their PhDs. "Scholars from across the country and world visit the institute. We send out publications to many foreign universities and they in turn send their publications which are preserved here," says Kameswari.
The institute was started as a private non-profit organisation in 1944 in memory of Kuppuswami Sastri, a renowned Sanskrit scholar. It has a library with books on astronomy, architecture, fine arts, mathematics, Vedas, Puranas, Upanishads and various branches of science.
"A private entrepreneur made a donation with which we have air-conditioned the library. The palm-leaf manuscripts in the library are 600 to 1,000 years old. Many of them are in Grantha script. We also have books on Jainism that speak about solving mathematical equations and explain geographical concepts," says Kameswari, who is worried about keeping the ancient language alive.

Comments

Abhijeet 27 Apr 2012 1:42 pm: Recently there are talks about declaring Marathi language as a classical language. During the discussions on tv i got to know that govt of india provides Rs. 500 crore per year for a classical language. As far as i know, Sanskrit is already a classical language. Wonder why there are lack of funds! That said, anyways i am also eager to contribute.

Sanskrit transliterator

Mon, 28 Aug 2006 12:00:00 +0000

I’ve built a simple Sanskrit transliterator. You can type in words in English and it will spell them out in Sanskrit. You can copy-paste the Tamil above into Microsoft Word, etc.

Browse through my Javascript to see how it works. Feel free to reuse.

Comments

ND 28 Aug 2006 12:00 pm: Real good and absolutely quick!
Saurabh 28 Aug 2006 12:00 pm: Good work, wonder how many use Sanskrit these days though! One more thing, specific to Mac users, is that Indic support is still not mature for Firefox. Safari, the inbuilt browser does a decent job though. There was an extra “S” that was appearing after each letter in Safari.
Madhu 28 Aug 2006 12:00 pm: Awesome, again what ur doing at Infy consulting, u shud be developing products at google:)
KK 28 Aug 2006 12:00 pm: It is really awesome
vikram 28 Aug 2006 12:00 pm: i cannot see any translation in firefox 1.5.0.12 version
Animesh 28 Aug 2006 12:00 pm: Good tool, but the transliteration scheme should be replaced by more standard one.
Ashwin (you know me!!) 28 Aug 2006 12:00 pm: nice one buddy!!although how would you deal with ambiguities like “om” ?
Anand 28 Aug 2006 12:00 pm: Hmm, I wonder…can you please check if the small ‘‘i’’ maatra works fine? I gave the word ‘‘janani’’ and the ‘‘i’’ gave me the maatra AFTER the second ‘’na’’, while it should be BEFORE. The big ‘‘ii’’/‘‘I’’ works fine. Also words like ‘‘chithram’’ etc - basically wherever there is a small ‘‘i’’!
Rama Krishna 28 Aug 2006 12:00 pm: Really Good. Keep up the good work
mohana 28 Aug 2006 12:00 pm: try this
swami neelkanth 28 Aug 2006 12:00 pm: thanks

Sanskrit texts and bhajans

Wed, 25 Jul 2001 12:00:00 +0000

Sanskrit texts and bhajans are available as audio.