Abstract The word ordering in a Sanskrit verse is often not aligned with its corresponding prose order. Conversion of the verse to its corresponding prose helps in better comprehension of the construction. Owing to the resource constraints, we formulate this task as a word ordering (linearisation) task. In doing so, we completely ignore the word arrangement at the verse side. kavya guru ¯ , the approach we propose, essentially consists of a pipeline of two pretraining steps followed by a seq2seq model. The first pretraining step learns task specific token embeddings from pretrained embeddings. In the next step, we generate multiple hypotheses for possible word arrangements of the input (Wang et al., 2018). We then use them as inputs to a neural seq2seq model for the final prediction. We empirically show that the hypotheses generated by our pretraining step result in predictions that consistently outperform predictions based on the original order in the verse. Overall, kavya guru ¯ outperforms current state of the art models in linearisation for the poetry to prose conversion task in Sanskrit