My guest this month is Amba Kulkarni from the Department of Sanskrit at the University of Hyderabad, who has also been associated with IIT Kanpur and the National Sanskrit University. Professor Kulkarni is best known for her work linking traditional Indian linguistic theory (starting with Pāṇini and focussing on aspects such as Śabdabodha and Kāraka theory as studied especially within the Navya-Nyāya/'Neo-Logical' school of philosophy) and AI theories of Knowledge Representation to effe...

My guest this month is Robert Zydenbos, who is Professor of Modern Indology at the LMU Munich. (Full disclosure: we thus are colleagues!) His first point of contact with Indian languages and philosophies was through Collier's Encyclopaedia. It introduced him to such ideas as rebirth, a concept found in various traditions (see e.g. here, here or here) His first degree was in Indian Studies at the University of Utrecht, at an institute that developed into a centre of Tantric Studies and that h...

My guest this month is Professor Saroja Bhate, former Professor of Sanskrit and Head of the Department of Sanskrit and Prakrit Languages at Pune University, who has published prolifically on Vyākaraṇa. Her first contact with Sanskrit was through the recitation of stotras. She was educated at Pune University and at Ṭiḷaka Mahārāṣṭra Vidyāpīṭha, and among her teachers were Pundit Vāmanaśāstrī Bhāgavata, T. G. Mainkar and S. D. Joshi. Among the texts she read during her studies are the Rāmāyaṇ...

My guest this month is Patrick McCartney. His written work, on Sanskrit-speaking villages, Sanskrit in the Indian census, the popular use and the politics of Yoga (and many other topics), is very conveniently linked to here. His Yogascapes project has its own website. The Himāl article on Spoken Sanskrit he mentions is linked to here. His videos, including his 'A Day in our Ashram' and the videos on his search for the Sanskrit-speaking villages, are available on his YouTube channel. You can...

My guest this month is Mr Prakrit, Andrew Ollett, who teaches at the University of Chicago Perhaps his most well-known publication is the book 'Language of the Snakes', which you can download for free here. Among his teachers were Eleanor Dickey, Gary Tubb and Sheldon Pollock (whose book 'The Language of the Gods in the World of Men' Andrew mentions) He talks about his work comparing the language of Theocritus with that of Prakrit poetry, about the work of Mātṛceṭa and Aśvaghoṣa...

My guest this month is Wendy Doniger. Read more about her and her many wonderful books here and here. She was educated at Radcliffe, the only part of Harvard then to admit women, and at Oxford. She has taught at SOAS, but has spent most of her career at the University of Chicago's Divinity School, on the Committee on Social Thought, and in South Asian Languages and Civilizations. Among her teachers, she lists Daniel Ingalls at Harvard, Robert Zaehner at Oxford, and in India, Ali Akbar Khan, f...

My guest this month is the scholar, translator and author Arshia Sattar. You can find her books here and here, and some of her many articles in may places (such as with Open, the Times of India, Scroll, Mint, and Words Without Borders. Much of her work has been focussing on the Rāmāyaṇa and also the Kathāsaritsāgara. Among her teachers were A.K. Ramanujan, Alf Hiltebeitel and Wendy Doniger. She also mentions Martha Selby, as well as Phil Lutgendorf and his work on t...

My guest this month is Ananya Vajpeyi (read more about her and her main publications here). Her current academic home is the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) in Delhi. As you will hear, I did not have a lot of work this time: Ananya only required minimal prompting to tell me the story of her life so far, which spans several countries in three continents and many fascinating encounters in and around academia. Ananya’s many teachers include Arindam Chakrabarti, Madhu Kh...

My guest this month is Anand Venkatkrishnan, Find some of his work here, here and here, and other interviews with him here and here. Among the teachers he mentions are Sarasvati Mohan, Paul Harrison and Linda Hess If you are interested in any of the texts mentioned in this episode, perhaps the following links will offer good starting points for the Mahāyāna Sūtras and especially the Rāṣṭrapālaparipṛcchāsūtra, the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, Śiśupālavadha, Mālatīmādhava, Naiṣadhīyacarita and Mṛc...

My guest this week is Madhav Deshpande. Read more about him here and here. Take a look here for a list of many of his publications and here for his Sanskrit textbook, In talking about his early life, he mentions the stotras of Śaṅkara, and the upanayana and sandhya cermonies. (And yes, I know I managed to bungle those pronunciations a bit in the podcast! ) Among the many places of education in Pune, there are Deccan College and Fergusson College (see also here), which have b...