Professor, Dept. of Humanities and Social Sciences,
IIT-Bombay
Professor Malhar A. Kulkarni is one of India’s leading scholars of Pāṇinian grammar, Sanskrit linguistics, philosophy of language, and Sanskrit computational linguistics. He serves as Professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, where he is also associated with the Cell for Indian Science and Technology in Sanskrit (CISTS) and the Centre for Indian Language Technology (CFILT).
Trained rigorously in both the traditional śāstric system and the modern university tradition, Prof. Kulkarni has devoted more than two decades to the teaching and advancement of Pāṇinian grammar. His research seamlessly integrates the classical Indian grammatical tradition with contemporary linguistic theory and computational approaches to language analysis.
His principal areas of research include Sanskrit language, Pāṇinian grammar, philosophy of language, Sanskrit computational linguistics, and Natural Language Processing (NLP). Through his work at CFILT, he has contributed to pioneering initiatives such as Sanskrit WordNet, Śabdamitra, the Marathi Dependency Treebank, and the Textual History Tool, thereby bringing the insights of the Indian grammatical tradition into dialogue with modern computational linguistics and artificial intelligence.
A prolific scholar in both Sanskrit and English, Prof. Kulkarni has authored numerous research papers and books, besides composing original Sanskrit works. Among his distinctive contributions is Śabdasūtra, an original sūtra text on grammar and language, reflecting the continuing vitality of the Sanskrit grammatical tradition in contemporary scholarship.
His academic formation reflects the confluence of traditional and modern excellence. He earned Gold Medals in both his B.A. and M.A. in Sanskrit Grammar, completed his Ph.D. at the University of Pune, and received advanced traditional qualifications under illustrious teachers, including Prof. S. D. Joshi and Prof. Saroja Bhate.
Prof. Kulkarni has played an important role in national and international academic bodies, serving on the Academic Council of the Central Sanskrit University, the Academic Council of Deccan College Post-Graduate and Research Institute, and programme committees of leading conferences in computational linguistics, including the International Sanskrit Computational Linguistics Symposium (ISCLS), COLING, LREC, and EMNLP.
In recognition of his outstanding scholarship and pedagogical excellence, he has received several prestigious honours, including the Maharshi Bādarāyaṇa Vyāsa Samman conferred by the President of India and the Excellence in Teaching Award of IIT Bombay.