Sanskrit verse recitation is governed by
Chandas, a strict prosodic framework defined by rhythmic
Laghu (light) and
Guru (heavy) syllables. Because existing Sanskrit speech datasets prioritize ASR or conversational TTS, they lack the metrical fidelity required for authentic verse synthesis. We introduce
\textbf{ShlokaDhara}, a 43-hour, multi-speaker Sanskrit speech corpus capturing diverse meters, recitation styles, and melodic variations. We specifically focus on
Text-to-Recite, a synthesis task explicitly requiring both prosodic accuracy and metrical correctness. Benchmarking state-of-the-art TTS architectures via an automated UTMOS (neural MOS) predictor demonstrates that XTTS-v2 achieves the highest perceptual quality. We further validate the XTTS-v2 generated samples using two paradigms: subjective assessments by 16 Sanskrit experts and novel empirical metrics, specifically, syllable-level
Laghu-Guru duration analysis to objectively quantify structural metrical awareness. Ultimately, this work establishes a robust dataset and evaluation benchmark for prosody-aware computational Sanskrit recitation. Generated Samples: https://shlokadhara.vercel.app/