Research

What is it to follow an ādhyātmika tradition? An enquiry into the nature of participation in ādhyātmika traditions by taking Vīraśaiva-Liṅgāyata sampradāya as an example

Existing scholarship on ādhyātmika traditions has largely been shaped by a religious studies framework that privileges beliefs and doctrinal positions as the primary explanantia for understanding these traditions. Recent post-colonial and cultural studies scholarship has decisively challenged this approach, demonstrating that Indian traditions cannot be adequately understood through the lens of religion. However, this critical insight has created a new cognitive gap: while we know how to distinguish between two religions, we lack the conceptual tools to characterize differences among ādhyātmika traditions without defaulting to the religious framework.

Compounding this is an epistemic shift in how the central question is framed. Asking “what is it to belong to a tradition” reduces participation to mere membership and foregrounds identity, thereby privileging propositional knowledge over action-knowledge. This misses the practical, dispositional, and skill-based dimensions of participation that are central to how these traditions actually function.

The problem, therefore, is twofold: the available frameworks are inadequate, and the question itself is being asked in a distorting way. A reframing is needed — one that centers the participant’s perspective, prioritizes “knowing how” over “knowing that,” and understands ādhyātmika traditions as lived, learnable disciplines rather than belief-systems.

Reconstruction of Participant Concepts from Pre-Modern Tamil texts to understand Inter-community interactions:

Contemporary scholarship on Indian society has often approached literary and religious texts through modern conceptual categories such as caste, hierarchy, exclusion, identity and power. While these categories have generated important insights, they frequently risk treating observer concepts as if they were the concepts through which pre-modern actors and communities themselves understood and organised their lives. This project therefore asks a different question: what were the participant concepts through which premodern Indian society rendered action, social relations, ritual practice, moral life, and human excellence intelligible to itself? Rather than beginning with modern sociological explanations, it seeks to reconstruct the conceptual grammar internal to the texts themselves. Terms such as thondu, pani, arul, anbu, murai, neri, piravi, koyil, and related concepts are approached not as cultural curiosities but as organising concepts through which communities understood their social life.

Methodologically, the project develops what may be described as a conceptual ethnography of the past. Drawing upon premodern Tamil sources such as Periyapuranam, Thevaram, and Epigraphic evidences, it seeks to recover the distinctions and concepts embedded within texts. The central concern is not simply what people did, but how their actions became meaningful within particular conceptual world. In this sense, the project asks interesting questions like in premodern lives, ritual and social life are separate domains or not ? Are these two domains mutually constitutive? By reconstructing participant concepts rather than translating them immediately into modern categories, the study aims to contribute to a deeper understanding of Indian social life.

The Greater Jambudvipa Project

The Centre for the Study of Indian Languages proposes to undertake a large-scale study of the historical lifeworlds of Asia through the heuristic of Jambudvipa. The term refers to the historically constituted lifeworld of interconnected societies stretching from South Asia through Southeast Asia to East Asia, within which diverse traditions participated in overlapping networks of concepts, institutions, practices, translations, pilgrimage, and moral imagination. It is not presented as a homogeneous civilization or a fixed geographical entity, but as an analytical heuristic for reconstructing the plurality of conceptual worlds that made this wider Asian ecumene intelligible to its participants.

The project aims at reconstructing the worlds of meaning through which communities across this region have lived, acted, remembered, worshipped, governed, learned, and related to one another. Its central concern is to track what kinds of concepts, practices, categories, and forms of life made these worlds intelligible to their own participants. Questions such as whether there existed something like a Tibetan cosmopolis, how Sanskritic, Buddhist, and vernacular worlds travelled across regions, and how shared civilisational concepts were locally reworked form the intellectual core of the project.

The project also begins from the recognition that colonial modernity and English-language translation have often flattened these lifeworlds by forcing indigenous concepts into ready-made categories such as religion, society, caste, state, law, ritual, culture, and identity. It therefore asks how different Asian societies have dealt with conceptual loss, translation, and colonial re-description, and whether there remain deeper patterns of conceptual unity across the lives of people in Jambudvipa. By studying languages, texts, rituals, institutions, pedagogies, memory traditions, and everyday practices, the Centre seeks to recover the participant concepts through which this region understood itself. Its aim is to build a new intellectual architecture for studying the Jambudvipa: not as a strategic region or historical archive alone, but as a connected field of lifeworlds.

The Chanakya Social Observatory

Cultural change in India is happening faster than institutions can observe it. The language people use when describing their families, careers, relationships, and aspirations is the most honest record of how society transforms — yet this record has never been systematically analysed at scale.

Chanakya Social Observatory deploys AI-powered Natural Language Processing to detect and map cultural change through semantic drift — tracking how keywords and phrases shift in meaning, frequency, and context across Indian society over time.

The project draws on entirely archival, non-real-time data sources: Google Books Ngram, Meta Content Library, SOMAR/ICPSR Twitter archives, YouTube, Telegram, Internet Archive, Orkut graphs, and demographic datasets from the Census of India and Pew Research. Most sources are free or low-cost, enabling rigorous analysis without a continuous data infrastructure.

The result is a living Cultural Change Index (CCI): a dashboard and quarterly report series mapping how eight core social domains — family, community, relationships, career, parenting, lifestyle, health & wellbeing, and education & knowledge — have evolved in Indian everyday language from the early 2000s to the present.

Reconstructing Categories of Indian Educational Thought

This project aims to reconstruct how Indian languages talk about thinking, reflecting, attending, and judging well. Working with Kannada, Sanskrit, and English, we look closely at words like manas, buddhi, and indriya, and at the distinctions each language carries that the other can’t hold. The aim is a clearer, fairer account of how a culture reasons – and what that means for education.

These words are not loose figures of speech. They carry fine distinctions worked out over centuries of daily use, and the English terms we reach for as translations – mind, intellect, the senses – rarely hold the same lines. So we begin by gathering how people actually speak: everyday Kannada that stays close to older usage, early twentieth-century writing shaped more by Sanskrit than by English, and a matching body of English texts. From these we pull out the words used for cognitive activity and trace the web of meaning that connects them – what implies what, what stands opposed to what.

Drawing on the Samkhyakarika and the Yogasutra, we map the scheme of distinctions the Indian tradition carries and set it beside the English one to see where they diverge. The point is recovery. These traditions still shape how we think and learn, yet they sit unused as knowledge. Rebuilding this vocabulary gives education something solid to work with – a real account of how a culture reasons, not a vague appeal to cultural value.

Project DISHA – Digital Infrastructure for Studies of Healthy Ageing

This project addresses a major gap in Alzheimer’s and dementia research: contemporary speech- and narrative-based AI models for cognitive decline are overwhelmingly developed in English and rarely account for the conceptual and cultural structure of Indian languages. Existing approaches measure idea density, semantic organization, and linguistic decline, yet overlook how ageing speakers draw upon culturally embedded concepts, classical literary repertoires, and multilingual shifts between dense indigenous formulations and simplified modern or anglophone descriptions. The project proposes a multilingual (Kannada & Sanskrit) AI framework for Indian populations that evaluates speech, narrative, and judgment through measures of conceptual density, semantic coherence, cultural predication, appropriateness of description, and reality-alignment. By building clinically anchored, annotated corpora across Indian languages, the study will test whether richer conceptual-linguistic expression is associated with healthier cognitive ageing and lower impairment. Expected outcomes include culturally grounded dementia markers, improved screening for Indian-language populations, and new evidence linking conceptual richness, language use, and cognitive resilience in later life.

This project aims to build a multilingual AI-based cognitive health platform for early screening of memory loss, mild cognitive impairment (MCI), and dementia in Indian populations through ordinary speech and conversation. The AI-enabled platform in future can be used by doctors, neurologists, psychiatrists, geriatric clinics, caregivers, public health workers and hospitals to identify early warning signs of cognitive decline before severe symptoms become visible.

Grammar of Perception

Indian aestheticians have dwelled deeply on the different forms of figuration, or ornamental speech. Alamkara Shastra is a self-standing discipline in Indian poetics which identifies, classifies, and evaluates the different figurative forms (or alamkaras) in poetry. The sheer number of figures, sub-figures, allowances and disallowances baffle the contemporary reader. No gifted poet can be expected to compose verse keeping these rhetorical scruples in mind. This calls for a re-examination of the function of the discipline itself.

What if we looked at alamkara shastra from a new lens, seeing it as a ‘grammar of perception’? At a rudimentary level, perception is an activity of seeing something as something else. An object is seen as an instance of a type, contrasted with objects of another kind, or differentiated from another. A grammar of perception would provide basic rules for the well-formedness of perceptions. The things determining well-formedness would include the appropriateness of the relata and proportionality in the scale of relationships.

Digital Kannada Master Dictionary (ಗಣಕೀಕೃತ ಕನ್ನಡ ಮಹಾನಿಘಂಟು)

The Digital Kannada Master Dictionary is not just an alphabetical dictionary of Kannada words. It is a comprehensive digital dictionary project that not only provides the meaning, secondary meanings, nuanced meanings, and synonyms for a given word, but also provides suitable examples through sentences showing how the same word’s meaning varies across different contexts.

There is no shortage of printed dictionaries in Kannada. However, while there are digital dictionaries and portals like “Alar, Rala, Bharatavani, Padakanaja, and Chaturasya Dictionary”, they cannot be considered fully “Born Digital Kannada Master Dictionaries”. Furthermore, they are unable to provide adequate answers to the various types of questions a user might have. The primary objective is to rectify the shortcomings of existing resources from a user’s perspective and design a complete, alphabetical, and exhaustive master dictionary.

This proposal aims to create a digital lexicon containing clear information on the following: How many pure, native Kannada words exist in the language we use today? Which are they? What is their etymology? What are the criteria for identifying them? Are they derived from Sanskrit, Prakrit, Persian, Urdu, Hindi, English, or any other regional language? Or are they words born natively within the linguistic ecosystem of Kannada?

There is an abundance of Tatsama words in our daily use of Kannada, and for many of these there are no Tadbhava forms that assimilate naturally into the native character of Kannada. This undertaking also aims at creating one or two complementary Tadbhava forms for every Tatsama word, making a novel effort to increase the vocabulary of the Kannada language.

Logical form Translations of Indian Knowledge Texts

An interesting way in which translations fail is because things and relationships between things identified in one language are not the same as in another. This cannot be remedied by improving the semantic or syntactic ingenuity of our translation practice. Instead we need to discover the appropriate schemes to re-describe things and their relationships. In other words, we need to discover their appropriate logical- form. For instance, “Yajna” as sacrifice may be inadequate in a certain context. It may actually be “action” itself. “Karma” as action is inadequate in certain other contexts. It may be better translated as the kind of thing it is:- “formation”. Developing this style into a general strategy, we attempt to translate Indian knowledge texts in a way that they are rendered suitable for contemporary conversations, that is, not as philological heritage but as analytical tools.