It took me a while, but Dhwani is finally live. It’s a directory I built to collect links to Indian public domain works. I wasn’t sure anyone would care, but here’s why I made it anyway.
In doing all the random things I do on the internet, at some point I came across the concept of the public domain. I don’t have a clear recollection of the exact moment, and I don’t think I really appreciated what the public domain actually meant right away. But in the last four to five years, as I read more than I wrote, and as I progressively got a little less stupid in life (which is more or less a function of age and not really the improvement of my mental faculties), I had a long, drawn-out aha moment.
As I read more books, I slowly started to appreciate that some of the greatest books ever written are free of copyright. They’re in the public domain. And it’s very weird, right? Shakespeare, Tolstoy, the Bhagavad Gita, Einstein’s papers. Freely available for other people to access. It felt strange, but in a wonderful way.
Of course, this has always been the case. It becomes less aha-worthy if you think about the fact that modern copyright is only about 300 years old, and for most of human history before that, there was really no such thing. But anyway, it took me a while for my feeble and underdeveloped brain to appreciate the beauty and value of public domain works.
The fact that humanity’s accumulated knowledge and creativity are more or less free of copyright (for other people to remix, translate, adapt, and create new things from) is not an easy concept for somebody with very feeble mental capabilities to appreciate. But once I did, my entire worldview changed a little when it came to how I think about reading, writing, and creativity.
The Discovery
I started reading beyond the airport bestsellers and the books that only deserve to be read in bathroom stalls with your brain shut off. Through the infinite rabbit-hole portal that is Google, I discovered that some of the books I wanted to read were available for free on sites like Project Gutenberg. I could just download them on my phone or e-reader.
My feeble brain couldn’t comprehend that.
As I started thinking more about the public domain, a thought struck me: India has thousands of years of civilization behind it. Not just history—actual civilizational output. Mathematics, astronomy, medicine, philosophy, literature, and religious thought that influenced half the world. Millennia of accumulated knowledge. All of it is sitting in the public domain.
But why is it not easily available, just like books are on Project Gutenberg? Why is there no Project Gutenberg equivalent for India?
This started bothering me. The more I thought about it, my first impulse was, “What would it take to build it?” And I immediately realized that my skills, apart from drinking and appreciating filter coffee (and musing about it philosophically like René Descartes), were limited. The only other useful skills I had were using the SUM function in Microsoft Excel and the accurate use of the water pressure gun to get the job done—like a sniper in the commode.
It remained an afterthought. Since I had no technical skills to speak of, building it was out of the question. I didn’t really know what it would take, technologically speaking, to build something of that magnitude. So the thought just rattled at the back of my feeble brain as I continued musing on the metaphysical and ontological implications of a good cup of filter coffee.
The unwelcome guest
Then suddenly, in November 2022, ChatGPT arrived—like your dad barging into an unlocked bathroom. Embarrassing and unwelcome. It was pretty dumb for the first year or so. But then it became ridiculously good, to the point where collective humanity is now the bitch of this thing. And if you harbor even a faint delusion that you have some quality it can’t imitate, you’re toast.
But anyway, these AI tools progressively got better. Soon we had tools like Claude Code and Codex, where you could just treat them like slaves and tell them what to build using plain English. Like magic, they would build whatever simple piece of software you wanted: apps, websites, you name it. Even as I’m sending this post, I’m using this thing to transcribe my notes and turn them into a blog. I’m not really typing; I’m just using voice typing. It’s kind of crazy if you think about it.
These things were so good that the only programming language you needed to know was plain English. And suddenly, the thought of building a Project Gutenberg for India came back to the forefront of my mind.
I still didn’t really know the technical complexity of building a full-fledged digital library, and it became obvious that replicating Project Gutenberg was beyond the reach of a person like me. Then somehow, I had a thought: okay, if extracting text from all the historical and literary works of India wasn’t possible, why not at least create a simple directory? Something that aggregates links to all Indian works in the public domain that are already on sites like Gutenberg and Archive.org.
And then, I went to my immediate overlord, Claude Code, and said, ‘Why don’t you build me a website for this?’ And then I kind of had another aha moment: pretty much every historical and literary work has already been digitized and uploaded to Archive.org. Lakhs of works. The sheer manual effort involved in this is mind-boggling. Various people, including government agencies and individuals, had done all the hard work of digitizing important, civilization-defining texts and uploading them.
I was not only mind-blown but also profoundly grateful for all those who had spent countless hours doing this work.
So my job became a little easier because all I had to do was find the links and organize them properly. Initially, I did it manually. Right now, as I’m sending this blog post out, I’ve listed close to 500 works on the site. For the first couple hundred, I manually Googled every work, verified its public domain status, collected all the reference links from Wikipedia, Open Library, Wikisource, etc., and uploaded them to the site.
But soon I figured, why not ask my overlords (Claude Code and Codex) to help me? And then the process became much faster. I would just tell them: go to Archive, find Indian public domain works, pull the URLs, add the reference links, and upload them. It still takes time because these tools run into limits, but it’s far easier now.
That’s the backstory of this site.
Why Dhwani?
As for the name, I had various options, but for some reason, the word “Dhwani” stuck in my head. In Kannada, “Dhwani (ಧ್ವನಿ)” means “sound” or “voice.” And what I’m trying to do here is collect links to the works of all the greatest voices across time.
That’s how this humble site came to be.
Why do this?
I don’t know. The simplest answer is: this should exist.
My hope is that even if 10–15 people find it useful and discover one book they’d like to read, it’ll be worth the time and effort it took to build this site.
My bigger hope is that in the future, I’ll have the resources to make these works easily readable by turning them into text and creating readable editions similar to Project Gutenberg. Right now, I don’t have the technical or financial resources to pull something like that off. Extracting text from thousands of files, ensuring accuracy, fixing issues, and making them accessible online requires skills and money I don’t have. But I haven’t given up on that idea. As technology gets better, I sincerely hope it becomes easier for individuals like me to do this, because these works represent our history.
And if our history is neglected and consigned to the digital wayside, the future will be nothing but a shittier remake of the past.
I don’t live under the delusion that even if all these books were easily readable online, hundreds or thousands would read them. I know the apathy toward our cultural artifacts is nauseating. But one can only hope that if I manage to extract and make even some of these works accessible, they’ll serve as raw material for writers and scholars working on different things.
That’s the hope.
It’s not about making money. How many people even give a shit about such things? But if it becomes useful to someone, that’s good enough for me. Well worth the effort. I’ll slowly keep adding new works as I find them, and hopefully this becomes something people can actually use.