Sanchaya

Sanchaya is a Bengaluru-based nonprofit that builds open-source digital infrastructure for the Kannada language — one of India’s oldest literary traditions, with written records going back to the 9th century. Its projects span the full stack of language technology: digitisation, OCR, fonts, search, and community platforms.

Flagship projects:

• Vachana Sanchaya — a digital research platform for 12th-century Vachana literature, the radical Bhakti poetry of Basavanna, Akkamahadevi, Allama Prabhu, and others. It provides full-text search, concordance, word frequency analysis, and scholarly annotations across thousands of vachanas. This is the most advanced digital humanities project in any Indian language.

• Pustaka Sanchaya — a library of digitised out-of-copyright and CC-licensed Kannada books. The collection is built through community digitisation events (scan-a-thons) and partnerships with publishers and authors.

• Kannada Fonts — a curated collection of open-source Kannada fonts, including the Karnata F-Kittel font designed specifically for scholarly typesetting. Addresses the chronic shortage of quality Kannada typefaces.

• Author-specific portals — dedicated search and study tools for major Kannada poets: Janna Sanchaya, Ranna Sanchaya, Sarvajna Sanchaya, Daasa Sanchaya, and the Kavirajamarga Sanchaya (the earliest available Kannada text, from ~850 CE).

• Samuha Sanchaya — a community platform for collaborative transcription, translation, and annotation of Kannada texts.

• Hejje — a digital mapping project tracing the geographical references in Kannada literature.

All Sanchaya projects use free and open-source software and publish content under Creative Commons licences. The organisation is run by a small team of engineers, linguists, and literature scholars, and relies on grants and community contributions.