Devarshi Kala Nath Shastry was born on 15 July 1936. He is a Sanskrit scholar honoured by the President of India in 1988. He is an Indologist and a prolific writer of Sanskrit, Hindi and English, and a well-known linguist, who has contributed to the campaign of evolving technical terminology in Indian languages and ensuring a respectable status to Hindi, the official language of his state and the Indian union.