Chitrakavya

Padukaa Sahasra, a classical  piece with 1008 verses devoted to Lord SitaRama's sandals (worshipped by Bharata during Lord SitaRama's stay away from Ayodhya),was written by Sri Vedanta Desikar around 1300 AD. The Knight  tours of the shlokas are presented in Chitra-Kavya form (picture-poem in Sanskrit). This poetic form begins with one verse, and derives another meaningful one, by systematic permutations (e.g. according to a Knight's tour of a board) of the same - an amazing feat!

Our Project

The aim of our project is to build a full fledged dictionary which would store complete information required to understand the meaning of sanskrit shabdas in the context of sentences. It would be of great help to those who are not familiar with Sanskrit language yet appreciate the beauty of Sanskrit shlokas. Though many Sanskrit documents are available in the web today in e-text format, yet there is a dire need to develop software to specify clearly the meaning and syntactic structure of Sanskrit language constructs. We aim, initially to carry out parsing, i.e. semantic and syntactic analysis of noun phrases in a Sanskrit sentence. Further work, i.e. an honest attempt on verbal analysis, which at present is a very difficult task due to complexities involved, can be carried out. We will build a parser which would aid the users to understand the meaning of Padukaa Sahasra shlokas put up in our website. The software application would be a general utility which could be used for other Sanskrit documents too.