‘समीक्षा’ (Samiksha-1) National Seminar On Sanskrit-Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS) and  Information and Communication Tools (ICT)

Cryptography is art of converting text from one form to another, which changes the original meaning. The first stage of encryption converts plain text to unknown format or cipher text. The second stage is decryption or conversion of encrypted format to original text.

In Substitution cryptography letters of plain text are substituted with other letters . This method is further categorised into two types – monographic substitution where a single letter is replaced an polygraphic method where groups of letters are used to change the meaning of original message In transposition cryptography, rearrangement of letters changes the meaning of original text.

In ancient India, cryptography was used in Indian mythological text like hymns and lyrics for hiding text. Some of the methods used include the KaTaPaYaDi Sankhya paddhati. This method of encryption was used in Sanskrit texts as a hashing technique.
Firstly, they used methodologies to check the correct usage and pronunciation of the verses, where every variation from the correct mantra or shloka would result in an incorrect rendition of the pi number(or any other system which they would have encoded). Secondly, they used concepts like above to perform encryption and decryption so that the message would reach the intended receiver and no one would be able to catch the real meaning of the message.

The purpose of this topic is to bring forward the familiar concept that, not only were our ancestors religious, but all the concepts around religion and their overall lifestyle were highly scientific and analytical in nature. Encryption was already in use and is so complex at places that most of the ancient texts are still considered unsolvable by our neo-modern intellectuals. Since ages, this country has in place what people claim to have invented or solved only lately.

One of the exalted scientist-seers of ancient India, Sage Panini was the pioneer pertaining to speech technology in India many millenniums ago. He was the first person to systematize and properly delineate the features of the human speech box as well as its different areas that were instrumental in the generation of human speech. He also gave insights into different aspect of speech recognition and speech synthesis.

Apart from this, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) in Sanskrit is interesting, owing to the various linguistic peculiarities present in the language. The Sanskrit language is lexically productive, undergoes euphonic assimilation of phones at the word boundaries and exhibits variations in spelling conventions and in pronunciations. Different acoustic and language model units perform various roles in the ASR systems. Syllable level unit selection and graphemic representations are some of the techniques that impact the word error rates. Insights from Sanskrit ASR systems can help in building better performing ASR systems for other Indic languages.

The socio-cultural value of Sanskrit retains high significance in the modern Indian milieu and accessibility to Sanskrit resources is of utmost importance in India as well as in the world for the knowledge discourse in general. A stand-alone Grapheme-to-Phoneme (G2P) converter for Sanskrit speech synthesis is an important tool in this regard.

Apart from the above-mentioned themes there are several other subsidiary themes associated with the current topic wherein Sanskrit-IKS can contribute. There shall be a separate session for this discussing various aspects pertaining to these allied areas also.