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 35 answer this desk. Holdings are read live from the catalog and dated; a shelf with nothing synced yet says so.

Languages on this desk (live doc-or-entry counts as of 7 November 2026): san 511,752 · pli 97,454 · pan 75,061 · tel 23,875 · tam-Latn 18,583 · tam 14,610 · mal 11,505 · tel-Latn 5,103 · eng 4,794 · kan-Latn 3,850 … and 32 more (nabu axis indic lists all).

Carried in by multilingual packs (ud — whole-source members whose other languages ride along, as of 7 November 2026): lat 11 · grc 9 · orv 9 · ota 5 · cop 3 … and 18 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 desk 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 30 research desks; the flat shelf map is The Library and the reasoning is docs/axes.md.