Archive first
Stories are scholarly objects with versions, people, provenance, rights and relationships.
03 / The project
A multilingual archive built through relations.
SHABD India is research infrastructure: a structured corpus for preserving, translating, contextualising, narrating and circulating underrepresented Indian-language literature.
Our first corpus begins with one selected short story from each of India’s twenty-two scheduled languages. Each story is progressively translated into the other twenty-one languages—creating 462 translations and 484 textual versions at completion.
Selection with context
A source story is not “content”; its significance, edition and rights pathway must be understood.
Translation as record
Credits, review status, notes and changes belong to each translation version.
Build in public
Gaps and uncertainties remain visible rather than being disguised as completeness.
Access across scripts
Typography, navigation, search and reading interfaces must respect multilingual use.
Stewardship over extraction
Communities and rights holders shape how materials may be presented and reused.
Roadmap
From prototype to durable infrastructure.
- NowCorpus and record model
Establish the language network, the Heengwala scholarly-object prototype and rights-aware metadata.
- NextSelection and editorial workflow
Document source-story criteria, authority records, translation review and contribution agreements.
- ThenPublishing infrastructure
Migrate verified texts, add audio, persistent identifiers, exports and multilingual search.