  We release S\={a}mayik, a dataset of around 53,000 parallel English-Sanskrit
sentences, written in contemporary prose. Sanskrit is a classical language
still in sustenance and has a rich documented heritage. However, due to the
limited availability of digitized content, it still remains a low-resource
language. Existing Sanskrit corpora, whether monolingual or bilingual, have
predominantly focused on poetry and offer limited coverage of contemporary
written materials. S\={a}mayik is curated from a diverse range of domains,
including language instruction material, textual teaching pedagogy, and online
tutorials, among others. It stands out as a unique resource that specifically
caters to the contemporary usage of Sanskrit, with a primary emphasis on prose
writing. Translation models trained on our dataset demonstrate statistically
significant improvements when translating out-of-domain contemporary corpora,
outperforming models trained on older classical-era poetry datasets. Finally,
we also release benchmark models by adapting four multilingual pre-trained
models, three of them have not been previously exposed to Sanskrit for
translating between English and Sanskrit while one of them is multi-lingual
pre-trained translation model including English and Sanskrit. The dataset and
source code is present at https://github.com/ayushbits/saamayik.
