Ignore meta key when inputting unicode on OSX

I’m a newbie running emacs 26.3 (9.0) on OSX in the graphical mode (i.e. not in the terminal) and am writing a document with Devanagari (sanskrit text).

Some of the letters in the inbuilt devanagari keyboard can only be input with a combination of the meta key and another letter. For e.g. META i prints इ

However, emacs interprets the META + <somekey> and claims that it is an invalid command. Is there a way to disable the meta-key feature of emacs, even temporarily, so as to input the characters that I want? If this isn’t possible, how can I input characters that require the META key?