Sanskrit Studies
Links and Information

Swaveda.com, a forum of Indian Studies, contains various categories Articles, Books, eTexts, Images, Art, Economics, Government, Health, Literature, Philosophy, Religion, and Science along with the current news related to India. The eTexts include translation of Chanakya/Kautilya's Arthashastra, Dharma sutras, all four Vedas, and various upanishads (almost all collected from other sites). The literature section is separated in prose, poetry, and drama parts with emphasis on Sanskrit dramatists. A simple search for Sanskrit leads to many links.

Vedamu.org - Learn Sankrit

The Indian Language Technologies has a major project for the Devanagari OCR (Optical Character Recognition) development. It is part of the Center of Excellence in Document Analysis and Recognition (CEDAR), at the State University of New York at Buffalo. The project is sponsored by National Science Foundation (NSF), US and the Indian Statistical Institute, Calcutta, India. A sample truthing tool is available for download with different samples of OCR. The output is generated in Itrans based text file. The effort is led by Dr. Venugopal Govindaraju.

The Center for Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC), India has also developed, among many excellent commercial products, an OCR called Chitrankan. The software is applicable currently to Devanagari with embedded English text and has potential for extension to other Indian languages.

The BharatiyaBhasha multilingual dictionary consisting of nearly 5000 common words in 14 different languages is available for download. There are quite a few tools developed at Technology Development for Indian Languages.

A "Hindi Vishva Kosh," a Hindi pictorial encyclopaedia is available at http://www.erdcifast.net/vishwa/vishwa/homepage.asp. It is sponsored by Government of India. (The connection is slow.)

At the site of the Association of Lingvo Lexicographers - http://www.lingvoda.ru/dictionaries/ there is a free Sanskrit-English Dictionary of Monier-Williams in unicode format for the commercial Lingvo 8.0 and Lingvo 9.0 (multilingual edition).

GirvanaBharati: The Sanskrit Literature in your Language, Sanskrit, Marathi, gujarati, Hindi, and English. The site has excellent professional presentation. Registration is Free and is a "must see" site.

The Sanskrit Net coordinated by Rashtriya Sanskrit Vidyapeeth or National Sanskrit University, Tirupati, has by-far may be the greatest collection of Sanskrit documents seen on the internet. (Will require to download fonts.) The university and the project are sponsored by Ministry of Human Resources Development, Government of India, Sanskrit year celebration committee, Central Sanskrit Board, University Grants Commission (see Acknowledgements.) We wish that scholars as well as students will make use of the avaiable texts. (The link is slow or down at many times.)

Kalidasa Samskrita Kendram in Chennai presents "Teaching Sanskrit Through Web" series of lessons. The center offers diploma courses in Sanskrit. The founder V.C. Govindarajan has also initiated a Kalidasa group on yahoo where the lessons are first posted and discussed. The Kendram site also holds "Articles on History of Sanskrit Literature."

Sree Shankaracharya Institute for Sanskrit - Post-Graduate studiesLocated in Kalady, Kerala - birthplace of Adi Shankaracharya