How this library is made
What follows is the work a reader never sees. Which edition a story was taken from, who checked it against that edition, and what happened on the occasions we got it wrong. A library earns trust by showing its method.
The size of it
There are 3,028 pages here at present: 2,340 in Hindi and 688 in English, gathered into 58 collections. There are 2,716 paintings.
Where the texts come from
Every collection names its source edition at the foot of the page. The Ramcharitmanas, Tulsidas’s sixteenth century retelling of the Rama story in Awadhi, comes from the Gita Press edition, and Hanuman Prasad Poddar’s commentary sits behind the narration. Gurbani, the scripture of the Sikh tradition, is taken from the angs of the Guru Granth Sahib, matched line by line against the canonical numbering, because in that tradition the page and line of a verse are part of its identity. The Upanishads were built directly from the mula, the root text itself, read on its own terms with no single commentator’s digest standing in between. Where two manuscript readings disagree, both are recorded, along with which one we followed and why.
How a page gets made
The source is read first, page by page, in the edition named. It is then divided into episodes. Only then is it written as a story, so that a reader is carried along by it, while the events, the names, the numbers and the order of things stay exactly as the source has them. At the end the page goes through its checks. A page that fails a check is not published.
What gets checked
Every Gurbani page is compared against the canonical lines before it goes up, so that nothing is dropped and, more importantly, nothing is added that was never scripture. Quotations on the Upanishad pages are matched against the root text. A separate check exists for nasalisation alone, because the opening word of the Isha, “ishavasyam idam”, written with the Vedic nasal sign and written with the ordinary anusvara dot are not the same text, and in a Vedic line that distinction is not decorative. Where an English page has its voice reworked, a check compares the versions and fails if a proper name has vanished or a number has moved.
Where we have been wrong
There have been real errors. Several pauris of the Sukhmani Sahib were once printed wrongly, and a closing line had been attached to it that was not Gurbani at all. The Japji Sahib was printed incomplete for a time. Both were repaired, and not quietly. Everything corrected is recorded, with its date, in the corrections log; the Hindi log, which also records every Gurbani line set right, now runs past twenty two thousand words. The most trustworthy list a library keeps is the list of what it had wrong.
How the paintings are made
The visual tradition behind them is the oil painting of Raja Ravi Varma, the nineteenth century artist who gave Indian sacred figures their familiar modern faces. The images here are made with present day tools, in a locked style, for this library alone. Each one is then checked against the passage it belongs to: who is standing there, what they are wearing, what they are holding, which moment of the story this is. Any painting that does not match is made again. There are more of them on the paintings page.
What is still missing
A great deal. The Adi Granth is presented in Devanagari transliteration, without the Gurmukhi original beside it. The Ramcharitmanas has no English edition. Several Puranas are partial and some have not been started. There is no recorded audio anywhere. This list is not getting shorter, because the further the work goes the clearer it becomes what else ought to exist.
If you find something wrong, look at the corrections log and then write to us. Whatever gets fixed will be recorded there too.