Indic — The Indologist

The Indologist — Veda to sastra, the Sanskrit library and its instruments.

The Sanskrit, Prakrit and Pali lane: GRETIL and SARIT, the DCS treebank, Monier-Williams, the Vedic UD treebank, and SuttaCentral’s canon.

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The shelves

A source wears every desk it serves — these eight answer this desk. Holdings are read live from the catalog and dated; a shelf with nothing synced yet says so.

Source	Holds	License	Status	Holdings (as of 19 September 2026)
`ud`	treebank	nc	wired · manual	76 docs / 325,533 passages
`gretil`	texts	nc	wired · manual	780 docs / 703,068 passages
`mw`	dictionary	nc	wired · manual	193,890 entries
`suttacentral`	texts	open	wired · manual	12,348 docs / 697,687 passages
`sarit`	texts	attribution	wired · manual	78 docs / 345,601 passages
`dacon`	texts	attribution	wired · manual	4 docs / 977 passages
`dcs`	treebank	attribution	wired · manual	15,741 docs / 753,093 passages
`nabu-data`	feature module	attribution	wired · manual	nothing held yet

Languages on this desk (live doc-or-entry counts as of 19 September 2026): san 209,634 · pli 7,288 · eng 4,766 · san-Latn 817 · lzh 276 · san-Deva 32 · pra 22 · lat 11 · grc 9 · orv 9 … and 21 more (nabu axis indic lists all).

The desk’s instruments

The Sanskrit, Prakrit and Pali lane: GRETIL (780 editions — epic, purāṇa, kāvya, śāstra, the Ṛgveda with Vedic accents), SARIT, the DCS treebank (IAST), the Vedic UD treebank, and SuttaCentral’s canon.
Dictionary: Monier-Williams (mw) — 193,890 entries, SLP1 transcoded to IAST; its citations resolve into GRETIL at verse grain and its Greek/Latin/Gothic cognate notes feed nabu etym.

Working the indic desk

The generic axis surfaces — every desk answers to these, in working order (enable once, sync, then query):

nabu enable indic               # first time: put this desk's shelves in this box's profile
nabu sync indic                 # fetch/refresh the desk's enabled members
nabu list --axis indic          # the shelf census, this desk only
nabu axis indic                 # the desk card: members, holdings, gold coverage
nabu search WORD --axis indic   # a query scoped to this desk's shelves

This desk’s own surfaces:

nabu define amsa                      # Monier-Williams, with GRETIL-resolved citations
nabu search धर्मन् --lang san         # the cross-script fold — Devanagari finds the IAST dharman
nabu show urn:nabu:gretil:sa_rAmAyaNa --display translit  # the Rāmāyaṇa in IAST (Devanagari shelves render to IAST; IAST passes through)
nabu search --lemma deva --lang san --morph case=loc --axis indic  # DCS gold morphology — deva, locative attestations only
nabu vocab urn:nabu:dcs:143:1067      # distinctive vocabulary of a Rāmāyaṇa book (DCS gold lemmas)

Ask your model

With the MCP server connected, this desk answers conversational research questions. Each example ran live against this library:

“dharma across the Sanskrit corpus, by lemma.” → nabu_search (lemma: dharma, lang: san) — DCS hits with inflected surface forms (dharmeṇa, dharmaś) and the lexicon gloss beside each — upaniṣads first, ranked by relevance.

Terminal setup

Devanagari (san): nabu strips Vedic accents when present (IAST is left untouched); --display translit renders to IAST via Nabu::Deva. A conjunct-capable Devanagari fallback is needed — the macOS system default suffices. IAST diacritics (ā, ṁ, ṭ) render uniformly under Noto Sans Mono in the non-ASCII slot.

The full guidance, per script, is on the display page.

One of the twenty-five research desks; the flat shelf map is The Library and the reasoning is docs/axes.md.