What are the IPA equivalents for the special characters used to transscribe indian words?

Question

When I try to read an article related to India (in particular indo-aryan languages) certain special characters emerge which I do not know how to pronounciate. For instance: Aṣṭādhyāyī of Pāṇini contains ṣ,ṭ,ṇ - but there are more. I have tried to look them up in the IPA-list, but no such characters exist there.

• Is this a standardized transscription-system?
• Is it possible to allocate those special characters to IPA-characters?

Answer 1

In the Wikipedia article on Sanskrit you can find all those special characters together with their IPA counterparts. By the way, these special characters are parts of the IAST, the International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration.