(November 30, 2025) Awarded by India’s multinational tech powerhouse Infosys, the Infosys Prize rewards world-class research connected to India with a gold medal and USD 100,000. Among this year’s awardees is American Sanskrit scholar and University of Chicago Associate Professor Andrew Ollett. He has been honoured for his illuminating work on Prakrit, one of India’s foundational classical languages.
India has always been a country rich in languages, each carrying its own cultural weight. However, there have been very few contemporary scholars outside the country who have traced these layers with the insight and imaginative depth of Prof. Andrew Ollett, the 2025 laureate of the Infosys Prize in Humanities and Social Sciences. The American Sanskrit scholar and Associate Professor in the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations at The University of Chicago has brought new insights into Prakrit, an Indo-Aryan language that evolved alongside Sanskrit and became central to classical Indian literature. His work has increased the understanding of Prakrit, rekindled debates about the philosophy of language in India, and opened new frontiers in the study of multilingual literary cultures.
The citation announcing his award highlights both the scale and the originality of his contribution. The Infosys Prize website highlighted that Ollett has been honored “for his outstanding work as a philologist, linguist, and intellectual historian of India and the leading scholar of the Prakrit languages in this generation,” calling his book Language of the Snakes “a magisterial analysis of the cultural roles of Prakrit in tandem with Sanskrit and the Indian vernaculars over the last two thousand years.”
Prakrit: The forgotten foundation of India’s classical literature
Prakrit is a group of Middle Indo-Aryan languages that flourished alongside Sanskrit, shaping poetry, drama, and storytelling across ancient India. Far from being a derivative tongue, it carried its own literary prestige, powering courtly romances, philosophical debates, and the imaginative worlds of early South Asian writers. As one of the subcontinent’s earliest classical languages, Prakrit offers a vital window into how India thought, created, and communicated for nearly two millennia.
A journey across languages
Andrew Ollett’s path to language studies began with classical Greek and Latin. That early immersion in ancient texts sharpened his philological instincts, but the linguistic world of the South Asia offered him a wider, more intricate terrain. As he moved into Sanskrit and the languages of India’s classical and medieval periods, he found in them a new intellectual home that intertwined traditions and competing philosophies.
His doctoral studies at Columbia University culminated in 2016. A highly selective appointment at the Harvard Society of Fellows followed, giving him a rare space to think, write, and refine his ideas across disciplinary boundaries. In 2019, he joined the University of Chicago as Associate Professor in the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations, where he continues to work on texts in Sanskrit, Prakrit, Apabhramsha, Kannada, and even Chinese.
On his University of Chicago biography page, he captures the core of his intellectual project mentioning, “I study the literary and intellectual traditions of South Asia… My research has focused on the ‘question of language’: the availability and choice of certain languages for certain purposes, and the role of language in cultural production and change.”
Infosys Prize: Celebrating world-class research connected to India
Established in 2009 by the Indian multinational technology company Infosys and members of its board, the Infosys Science Foundation is a not-for-profit trust dedicated to advancing and celebrating world-class research connected to India. Its flagship initiative, the annual Infosys Prize honours exceptional contributions across six disciplines: Economics, Engineering & Computer Science, Humanities & Social Sciences, Life Sciences, Mathematical Sciences, and Physical Sciences. Each laureate is chosen by an eminent international jury and receives a citation along with a prize of a gold medal and $100,000.
Bringing Prakrit in the spotlight
Much of Ollett’s impact can be traced to his groundbreaking book, Language of the Snakes (University of California Press, 2017). Before this work, Prakrit was often treated as a supporting actor in the grand narrative of Sanskrit. Ollett placed it at the center of the stage, showing how Prakrit’s literary life intersected with regional vernaculars, shaped courtly aesthetics, and carried philosophical commitments that differed from those expressed in Sanskrit.
Ollett’s framing of “language order” shifting hierarchy, prestige, and functions of languages in a multilingual society has since become a conceptual touchstone for scholars of literary and cultural history. His subsequent works continue this deep engagement with India’s multilingual traditions. In 2021, his edition and translation of the Prakrit novella Lilavai found a place in the Murty Classical Library of India, established through a $5.2 million gift from Rohan Murty, the son of Infosys co-founder N. R. Narayana Murthy while The Mirror of Ornaments, a Prakrit treatise on poetics, was published in 2025 by Unior Press.
Bringing classical philosophy of language and Sanskrit to the global conversation
The Infosys Prize Website noted that Ollett’s scholarship “has also made central contributions to linguistics by lucidly presenting the rich theories of Indian philosophers of language writing in Sanskrit.”
Ollett is currently exploring ideas of relational meaning, information structure, and the interpretive weight carried by what Indian thinkers framed as the interplay between given and new information. Another ongoing monograph, devoted to theories of memory, examines concepts such as trace, retention, decay, and the cognitive frameworks through which classical thinkers approached questions of selfhood and attention.
Reviving the early Kannada world
Andrew Ollett’s work does not remain confined to literary theory or historical linguistics. It also revitalizes the earliest textual traditions of regional languages. His collaboration with Sarah Pierce Taylor on an edition and translation of Kavirājamārgaṁ, the foundational Kannada manual on poetics from the 870s, promises to reshape how early Kannada culture is taught and understood. Supported by an NEH grant, the project seeks to make accessible one of India’s earliest vernacular treatises on literary production.
He is also partnering with Naresh Keerthi to edit and translate two plays by the eighth-century poet Māyurāja. Through this work on Kannada and Prakrit literature, Ollett is expanding the canon available to scholars and demonstrating the intellectual richness of the regional languages that flourished alongside Sanskrit.
NESAR and the building of scholarly communities
Andrew Ollett’s influence is far beyond writing and translations. He is the co-founder and editor of NESAR—New Explorations in South Asia Research, an open-access journal dedicated to innovative scholarship. NESAR has become a platform for younger scholars and interdisciplinary voices, reflecting Ollett’s conviction that the study of South Asia thrives when different methods and perspectives collide. The Infosys Prize Website recognized this aspect of his work as well, noting how his “interdisciplinary interests have influenced colleagues from other humanistic disciplines.”
Teaching as an extension of scholarship
At the University of Chicago, Andrew Ollett teaches courses that span languages, genres, and centuries. Whether he is leading a seminar on South Asian theatre, guiding students through the first millennium of classical literature, or teaching advanced readings in Sanskrit, Prakrit, and Pali, his classes intermingle linguistic precision with intellectual curiosity.
His syllabus consistently returns to a central idea that literature is inseparable from the cultural and philosophical worlds that shape it. It is also based on the thought that memory, textuality, context, and multilingualism are the frameworks through which societies express identity, argue about meaning, and imagine new possibilities.
A scholar for the present and the future
The concluding lines of the Infosys Prize citation capture this expansiveness. It highlights that Ollett’s research is “of relevance to scholars of ideas in any human civilization,” pointing to the “overlapping or parallel concepts and also the striking divergences among Indian philosophers of language and modern linguists and cognitive scientists.”
That resonance across fields is what makes Andrew Ollet’s contributions so vital. By closely studying ancient voices of the Prakrit poets, Sanskrit philosophers, and Kannada theorists, he is helping today’s scholars rethink how language shapes consciousness, community, and culture. In a multilingual, rapidly shifting world, few contributions could be more timely.
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