The 7th International Sanskrit Computational Linguistics Symposium at SRI, Auroville
An Interview with Martin Gluckman, Founder of The Sanskrit Research Institute in Auroville, India
In February 2024, AVI USA supported Martin and the Sanskrit Research Institute, SRI, in hosting the 7th International Sanskrit Computational Linguistics Symposium. We reconnected with Martin to hear more about his story as well as his impressions of the event.
Enjoy the short film below and scroll down to read about Martin’s history, how the Institute came into existence, and his thoughts about Sanskrit’s relevance in the modern world.
Film direction by Alessandra Silver
Martin Gluckman, Founder of the Sanskrit Research Institute, SRI, answers our questions.
AVI USA: Tell us about yourself. How did your Sanskrit journey start? Was there a person or event that triggered your fascination with the blueprint of South Asian spritual knowledge?
Martin: I always loved languages, I studied Latin and Xhosa at school along with Afrikaans (Dutch) and of course English. From the age of 13 I started to study computer languages like Basic, Pascal and Machine Code. Later in my life I learnt to converse in German, Spanish. French, Portuguese, Hebrew, Nepali and Japanese. I spent a lot of my youth travelling the world visiting 65 countries, this was a very suitable initiation for coming to live in Auroville, a place of the world coming together in deepest harmony.
My interest in Sanskrit specifically came after studying Ayurveda (my father was a physician who had inspired me to love medicine) and wanting to go deeper into my studies of this subject I encountered Sanskrit. I started to study it seriously with a wonderful fellow Aurovillian called Agni who taught me the basics, I then progressed to study with another Aurovillian teacher, Chandrima who gave me my first trainer wheels. Then after some months of regular study I realised, I need to get myself onto the launchpad so I can enter orbit. I then enrolled in an undergraduate university level program with Professor McComas Taylor who became my teacher. After completing the undergraduate courses, I continued to do post graduate studies and more and more I combined my computer science abilities with Sanskrit and started to produce more and more research and learning tools for the language.
AVI USA: What made you decide to settle in Auroville, why was this your chosen place to stay and continue the study of Sanskrit?
Martin: After seeing a lot of the earth (65 countries and counting). I decided to visit India in 2003 for the first time shortly after the passing of my beloved father.
It was love at first sight and I truly felt I had arrived in the “holy land”. India is like no other place on earth.
Whilst studying traditional temple architecture in South India with V. Ganapathi Sthapathi I had found books in Chennai on Auroville and heard a lecture of Vladimir Yatsenko at the Theosophical Society in Adyar who spoke of Auroville. Shortly thereafter like many before me, I set foot in Auroville. Like all people seeking to live a deeper life dedicated to humanity, once you have arrived in Auroville, there really is nowhere else to go. The transformations and awakenings that happen from the conducive environment of Auroville allowed Sanskrit to flourish in my life and from this flourishing sprouted the work we’ve been doing for more than a decade now, as SRI.
AVI USA: Tell us about briefly about the origins the ISCLS
Martin: The ISCLS was started in 2007 in Paris by the French and Indian computer scientists Gérard Huet and Amba Kulkarni. A variant on the Auroville founding story which was also founded by a French and an Indian.
It was intended to bring together researchers working with Sanskrit, computer science and linguistics. Sanskrit has always had a very developed field of computational linguistics and these gatherings have contributed greatly to furthering this field. They have taken place in France, the USA and at various eminent universities in India. I thought it would be perfectly fitting to bring such an illustrious gathering of brilliant minds to Auroville, and we did it in February this year, in the birthday month of Auroville.
AVI USA: How is it that it was hosted at SRI in Auroville? What stands out about the participants this year?
Martin: In 2019 at the IIT Kharagpur (a famous institution with notable alumni like Sundar Picha the leader of Google) just before the world shutdown for a few years I proposed we do the next ISCLS in Auroville.I knew that Auroville was ready to host such a distinguished event and I knew that we had the most incredible team at SRI that could “pull it off” along with all the allied teams from Auroville we partnered with to make the magic happen (Unity Pavilion, Visitors Centre, Auroville Radio, InLight Films, PCG, SAIIER). The idea was well received, already many of the scholars were familiar with Auroville and Pondicherry as the later is one of the great centres of Sanskrit works with many of the most notable international institutions like the EFEO, The French Institute of Pondicherry, Sri Aurobindo Society being present, not to mention that Sanskrit is a core language and theme of Auroville’s being.
We had participants from around 13 countries with a large number of Russians attending which was utterly wonderful to see. We offered scholarships for Indian students who required them so there were no barriers to attend for those serious about this field. We accommodate them in the beautiful Tamil Heritage Pavilion.
AVI USA: What stood out for you about the participants? Young old, unusual backgrounds?
Everyone was moved by the setting of Auroville and its broader context and what has been achieved in nearly 60 years. Truthfully there is no place on earth like Auroville and they all experienced this through the people, the spirit, the architecture, the food, the atmosphere. We had all generations spanning from one young gifted Russian teenager attending to some of the senior professorial septuagenarians.
AVI USA: What were some highlights of the symposium? Discoveries, interpretations, innovations in the study and application of Sanskrit.
We were very fortunate to conduct a panel on AI and Sanskrit with the leading minds in this field. Auroville was always meant to be a place in the future and this felt very wonderful to see the latest technologies being discussed here. The incredible team of volunteers from SRI who did everything from decorating to supervising the regular wonderful organic farm grown meals to registering and guiding people and everything else reminded me that Auroville runs on the fuel of human love.
AVI USA: How do you see Sanskrit as relevant to the modern psyche? It seems like ISCLS is starting to use technology to understand the deeper implications of Sanskrit can you tell us about that?
Martin: All languages are beautiful and have unique qualities, and humans are the only species to have this ability to transmit our knowledge inter-generationally. Sanskrit has a few very special qualities notably: It has the largest store of written knowledge in any language that existed before the invention of the printing press (1440). Sheldon Pollock has put the number between 7-30 million manuscripts. It is such a vast field that people have worked their whole lives digitising Sanskrit manuscripts and still there are mountains to be done, it is far from complete. Many of the digital tools and projects we and others are working on are concerning this data of the vast mountains of manuscripts that exist in Sanskrit.
Another unique quality of Sanskrit is that the grammar was frozen 500BC by Pāṇini so once you’ve studied Sanskrit you can read texts from 1500 years ago and understand them.
One more unique quality is the phonology (how the language is pronounced) is known which is very rare for antiquated languages. The reason it is known is there were manuscripts that explained exactly what parts of the anatomy to engage and how when creating the Sanskrit sounds.
Lastly, Sanskrit has an incredibly vast amount of very useful knowledge stored in its literature. This led Sri Aurobindo to say once: “The great mass of Sanskrit literature is a literature of human life”.
AVI USA: In a nutshell, what is next for you and SRI?
We’re currently engaged in our magnum opus project called Sanskrit Archive, we are making a single place that anyone out there can see a map of the entire Sanskrit universe. We’ve been working on this for the last 4 years, soon we will reveal it for the delectation of all.