Is Sanskrit truly a dead language — or has India just been trained to think so? Dr. Arathi V.B., Prof. Gauri Mahulikar, and Prof. Amba Kulkarni dismantle the myth in this riveting panel from the Indraprastha Cultural Festival.

Prof. Gauri opens by tracing Sanskrit as the irreplaceable carrier of Bharatiya Sanskriti — from the Rig Veda to the UNESCO-registered Bhagavad Gita — arguing that without Sanskrit, no Indian culture is possible. Dr. Arathi delivers the evening’s most striking revelation: Macaulay himself, she explains, discovered that Sanskrit was the mother root of India’s unbreakable Dharmic identity and designed the 1835 English Education Act specifically to displace it. She illustrates how Western translations of the Ramayana and Rig Veda contain fundamental errors, not from malice alone but from cultural alienation — and why every Indian language, including those that claim independence from Sanskrit, draws its entire grammar from it.

Prof. Amba Kulkarni, an IIT Kanpur computer engineer, explains how Panini’s 2,600-year-old Ashtadhyayi is in essence a computational grammar — one she encoded into the Samsadhani platform, now used by Sanskrit learners worldwide. The session closes with a consensus: English translation is a bucket of ocean water — useful, but never the ocean itself.

About The Speakers:
Dr. Arathi V B is the Founder & Head of Vibhu Academy. She is also a scholar and teacher of Sanskrit and kavyas shastras and Behavioural & Softskills Trainer.

Prof. Gauri Mahulikar was the Gurudev Tagore Chair of Comparative Literature Professor, former Head of Department of Sanskrit at the Mumbai University and the former Dean and Officiating Vice Chancellor of Chinmaya vishwavidyapeeth. She holds a Doctorate in Sanskrit on ‘Vedic Elements in Puranic Mantras and Rituals’. An author, who has published 8 books and more than 150 research articles in English, Hindi, Marathi,and Sanskrit, Dr. Mahulikar has mentored several doctoral students. She was instrumental in launching courses in Manuscriptology, Bhakti Literature and Mysticism in the Sanskrit Department, University of Mumbai

Prof. Amba Kulkarni is one of the leading names in the field of Sanskrit Computational Linguistics. She has contributed towards the building of Anusaarakas (language accessors) among English and Indian languages. She is the founder head of the Department of Sanskrit Studies, University of Hyderabad established in 2006. In 2015, she was awarded a “Vishishta Sanskrit Sevavrati Samman” by the Rashtriya Sanskrit Sansthan, New Delhi for her contribution to the studies and research on Sanskrit-based knowledge system.

H.S. Sudarshan is a researcher and co-founder of the Manuscripts & Inscriptions Digitisation Foundation (MIDF) who collaborates with Sangam Talks. His work focuses on preserving India’s ancient heritage, digital archiving, and reclaiming civilizational history