As India prepares for the upcoming AI Impact Summit, the national conversation around artificial intelligence is maturing. The focus is shifting from questions of scale and adoption to deeper considerations of trust, ethics, transparency, and local relevance. This moment presents an important opportunity: to reflect not only on what AI systems can do, but on how they are designed, whose realities they represent, and which cultural assumptions they carry forward.

It is within this context that Bhaskar Labs was conceived.

An initiative focused on the intersection of Indian culture, language, and artificial intelligence, the purpose of Bhaskar Labs is to create a space where technologists, artists, researchers, and cultural practitioners can work together to explore how AI systems can be designed with an Indic point of view, grounded in India’s linguistic diversity, cultural complexity, and social context.

Why Culture Matters in AI Design

AI systems are shaped by the data they are trained on and the assumptions embedded in their design. When these systems are built without sufficient attention to cultural and regional context, they risk reproducing narrow worldviews or flattening complex social realities. For a country as diverse as India, this is not a marginal concern.

Indic languages, oral traditions, regional art forms, and local knowledge systems present both challenges and opportunities for AI. They demand approaches that go beyond translation or token representation, and instead engage with meaning, context, and lived experience. Bhaskar Labs is intended to support this kind of work: slow, deliberate, and grounded in collaboration across disciplines.

Bhaskar Labs as a Culture-Tech Space

Bhaskar Labs will function as a place to experiment with culture-led approaches to technology. This includes hosting immersive cultural and artistic experiences, supporting research and prototyping in culture-tech, and enabling dialogue between creative practitioners and AI researchers. The emphasis is on building systems and experiences that respect cultural specificity while remaining technically rigorous.

Rather than centralising narratives, Bhaskar Labs aims to foreground regional and local perspectives, recognising that India’s cultural future, like its technological future, is plural. This approach aligns with a broader understanding that meaningful innovation often emerges from the margins, not just from dominant centres of power or production.

India’s Place in the Global AI Landscape

India’s role in global AI should not be defined solely by scale, cost efficiency, or downstream implementation. There is an opportunity to contribute something more distinctive: approaches to AI that are shaped by democratic access, linguistic plurality, and deep cultural histories.

As global attention turns toward responsible AI and context-aware systems, initiatives like Bhaskar Labs represent an important layer of the ecosystem. They help ensure that conversations about AI include cultural agency and that Indian perspectives are embedded early in design choices rather than retrofitted later.

The timing matters. With international focus converging on AI governance, impact, and long-term consequences, this is a moment to invest in foundational thinking and infrastructure that reflects India’s realities and aspirations.

Bhaskar Labs is one such effort that is quietly focused on building capacity at the intersection of culture and technology, and contributing to a more grounded, context-aware future for AI emerging from India.