About KarmaVaani

What this is

KarmaVaani is a place to read the Hindu scriptures in full, look up a temple or a festival or a term you half-remember, and talk with other people about what any of it means. It is a library and a community sharing one roof.

Everything in the library is free to read, and you do not need an account to read it. An account is for the community side — writing, asking, answering, saving.

We are not a religious authority. Nobody here rules on what correct practice is. The texts are presented as they stand, with their translators named, and the conversation around them belongs to the people having it.

What is on the site

The three scriptures are complete — not selections, not summaries.

Alongside them:

• A temple atlas of 3,490 temples, mapped by coordinates across India, searchable by deity, tradition, region, and city. Forty of them are hand-written entries with fuller descriptions, images, and circuit notes; the rest carry name, location, deity, and tradition.
• 10 deity pages — Shiva, Vishnu, Krishna, Rama, Durga, Lakshmi, Saraswati, Ganesha, Hanuman, Kali — each linked to the temples that honour them.
• 12 festival guides, covering the deity, the traditions, and the regional variations, with the approximate month rather than a computed date.
• A 36-term glossary for the Sanskrit that recurs across the rest of the site.
• 12 long-form editorial essays, plus every essay the community has published.
• Four guided meditations, each anchored to a specific Gita verse. One of them — "The Witness Within" — is reserved for supporters.
• A shloka of the day, and a reading streak if you are signed in and want one.

How search works

Site-wide search covers 29,709 indexed documents: every Gita verse, every Ramayana verse, every Mahabharata section, every temple, deity, festival and glossary term, the 12 editorial essays, and the site's chapter and book pages. That index is a set of static files your browser downloads and queries locally, so those keystrokes stay on your device.

Community writing is searched a different way. Essays, discussions and questions are matched live on the server, which means that part of your query does reach us and travels in the address of the results page. The Privacy Policy sets out what that means.

The AI companions

There are four scripture companions: one each for the Gita, the Ramayana, and the Mahabharata, and one that answers across all three.

They work by retrieval. Your question pulls up the passages most relevant to it, and the companion answers from those passages and cites them — chapter and verse for the Gita, kanda and verse for the Ramayana, parva and section for the Mahabharata. Each one is scoped hard to its own text: ask the Ramayana companion about the Gita and it will politely decline and point you back.

Three honest limits. They can be wrong, and the citation is there so you can check. They are told never to invent a verse or a reference, but no instruction makes that impossible. And they are not a substitute for medical, legal, or mental-health advice; for anything serious, please talk to a qualified person.

Your question does not stay on this site — it is sent to an outside model provider to be answered, along with the recent history of the conversation. The Privacy Policy explains exactly how much travels and where.

How we handle scripture and translation

The Sanskrit is the original text, in the public domain. The English is somebody's translation, and we name whose:

• Bhagavad Gita — English translation by Swami Sivananda.
• Valmiki Ramayana — English derived from the public-domain translations of Ralph T. H. Griffith and H. P. Shastri.
• Mahabharata — Kisari Mohan Ganguli's complete English translation, 1883–1896, public domain.

Two consequences worth stating plainly. First, these are nineteenth- and twentieth-century translations with the habits of their eras. They are here because they are complete, faithful enough to be useful, and free for anyone to reproduce — not because they are the last word. Where the English feels dated or a choice looks contestable, the Sanskrit is on the same page for the Gita and the Ramayana so you can weigh it yourself.

Second, the Mahabharata is English only. Ganguli translated from Sanskrit but the Devanagari is not in our dataset, so those pages carry the translation alone. We would rather say so than let the omission pass unmentioned.

We do not paraphrase scripture, and we do not silently smooth a translator's wording. The verse text you read is the translator's, unaltered. Editorial voice belongs in the essays, not in the scripture pages.

The number of verses varies between recensions and editions — this is normal, and different manuscript traditions genuinely differ. The counts above describe the specific editions we carry, and the reader is built so that the chapter and verse numbering it displays always matches the source it came from.

Who this is for

Someone who wants to read the Gita straight through rather than in quotations. Someone who grew up with the Ramayana in the house and has never read Valmiki. Someone planning a temple visit who wants to know which tradition the shrine belongs to. Someone who teaches this material and needs a citable text. Someone raising children between two cultures. Someone who is simply curious and does not want to be sold anything or told what to believe.

The interface reads in English and Hindi. Tamil and Telugu are offered in the language menu but are not yet translated — choosing them currently falls back to English. If that matters to you, see the contribution note below.

How to contribute

Reading needs nothing. Everything else starts with a free account.

• Write an essay. Community essays publish immediately, under your name, in the editor at /write. There is no queue and no gatekeeping before publication. Moderation happens after the fact — but essays have no in-page report control yet, so flag one by emailing editor@karmavaani.in with the URL and we will review it by hand.
• Start a discussion or ask a question. Discussions are open to everyone. Anyone can post a question in Q&A, but only verified experts can post answers — an intentional constraint, so a question about scripture does not collect ten confident guesses. Verification is done by hand today; there is no application process, so write to us if you would like to be considered.
• Add to the temple atlas. Signed-in visitors can review a temple and submit upcoming events — pujas, festivals, observances. Like essays, these appear straight away and are moderated afterwards.
• Report anything that does not belong. Discussion threads and replies, temple reviews and temple events carry a report control. Essays, comments, questions and answers do not have one yet — for those, email us the URL. Either way it reaches a moderation queue that is actioned by hand.
• Help with Tamil or Telugu. Both are wired into the interface and waiting for translations. This is the single most useful thing a bilingual reader can offer right now.
• Send a correction. A mistranslation, a temple in the wrong district, a festival attributed to the wrong tradition, a broken verse reference — write to editor@karmavaani.in. Corrections are welcome and are not treated as complaints.

Corrections, questions, and contact

The address for anything editorial — corrections, contribution offers, permissions, or a question this page did not answer — is editor@karmavaani.in. Typical response time: [RESPONSE TIME COMMITMENT].

KarmaVaani is published by [LEGAL ENTITY NAME]. It has been online since [YEAR FOUNDED]. The people who run it are [EDITORIAL TEAM NAMES AND ROLES].

About your data

Reading is anonymous. If you create an account, we store what you give us — your email address, your display name and username, and whatever you choose to add to your profile — plus what you make: your essays, comments, questions, bookmarks, reviews, follows, and notification preferences. Your posts and profile are public by design, and so is your follow list. Your email address is not displayed anywhere on the site; what we retain, and who can currently reach it, is set out honestly in the Privacy Policy.

You can edit or delete your own writing at any time, and email notifications can be turned off in your settings. For the full account of what is retained and for how long, see the Privacy Policy.

We have not been audited or certified against any privacy framework, and we do not claim to be. What is written here describes how the site is actually built, including the parts that are not finished.

The fine print

Privacy Policy · Terms of Use · Refund Policy · Contact

This page is a draft. It has not been reviewed by a lawyer.