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The Infosys Prize 2025 in Humanities and Social Sciences was recently awarded to Professor Andrew Ollett, who teaches at the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago, USA. Professor Ollett is a leading scholar of Prakrit, and his book Languages of the Snakes (University of Chicago Press, 2017), which emerged out of his PhD dissertation, presents what he calls “a biography of Prakrit,” the life-story of the language and its function in the cultures of the subcontinent over the past couple of thousand years. It also intervenes in discussions about its relation to Sanskrit and the vernacular languages.

Ollett has coined the term “language order” to understand the specific cultural conceptualisation and working of languages in the pre-modern world. These, among other fundamental ideas about understanding the philosophies of language generally and in South Asia, are the subject of this conversation with Scroll. Excerpts:

Thank you so much, Professor Ollett, for being here with Scroll. And many congratulations on the Infosys Prize.
Thank you.

I wanted to begin by asking a question of value, as it were. We are going to get into the importance of Prakrit for historical knowledge, anyway. Is there any significance, you think, of studying Prakrit to the way in which we...

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