Opportunities

Center for Languages and Lifeworlds
Chanakya University, Bengaluru

Call for Ph.D. Applications

Center for Languages and Lifeworlds (CLL) is established under the Convergence Research Center of Excellence (CoE) scheme from Anusandhan National Research Foundation (ANRF) in 2026. The Center is envisaged to build conceptual research in Indian languages to enable them as languages of knowledge and reflection.

Modern India speaks in two conceptual registers: One is inherited from its ways of going about in the world as embodied in its traditions, the other is borrowed from its colonial past embodied in its institutional and civic sensibilities. Often, the former gets translated in the latter idiom, by which the disjunction between the two widens asymmetrically and articulations on the inherited ways of people gets distorted. Apart from the concern about losing these inherited ways, it is important to understand different ways of going about embodied in different traditions and cultures as different knowledge dispositions.

An important intangible cultural heritage is our life with concepts. Such a concept-world can become distorted and inaccessible due to various historical reasons. Concept loss is every bit like livelihood loss, language loss, or biodiversity loss. However, very little attention is paid to this resource which is the very basis for a flourishing and self-sustaining cultural life, consisting of a rich matrix of actions which requires us to reconstruct concepts that constitute Indian cultural knowledge shaped over generations. This creates an opportunity for a conceptual enquiry which can resuscitate lost concepts and make them available for reflection.

The core research of the center is mining the concepts in the Indian languages that have civilizational significance by reconstructing their predicate networks so that they are available for reflection within various domains such as teaching-learning, mental-health diagnosis, policy design, culture research and so on. The center is also developing data-sets and annotated corpora in different Indian languages to build new tools for conceptual research by using Machine Learning and AI.

Ph.D. Candidature Details:

Location: Chanakya University, Near Bangalore International Airport, Devanahalli

Type: Full-time only

Fellowship: Will be provided for all candidates under the ANRF grant matching with JRF & SRF

Key Criteria of Eligibility:

• Completed Masters with (minimum 60%) in Humanities, Anthropology, Literary Studies, Linguistics,
  Cultural Studies, Indology, Philosophy or related disciplines.
• Proficiency in any of these Indian languages is mandatory: Sanskrit, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu,
  Malayalam, Hindi, Bengali, Assamese, Odia and Marathi.
• Expected language proficiency in the above-mentioned Indian languages must be to the level of reading
  the pre-modern texts and conducting deep research on the concepts embedded in there.
• Skills in Computational Linguistics, Annotation and familiarity with NLP tools are much appreciated.
• Preference will be given to those who have cleared NET/JRF in addition to other eligibility criteria.
• Preference will be given to those who have done a thesis at the master’s level demonstrating linguistic
  and conceptual analysis skills.