About

SARIT

SARIT (Search and Retrieval of Indic Texts) is a collection of electronic texts of Indian literature, mainly in Sanskrit and related languages, encoded according to the Guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). Its aim is to give Indologists reliable machine-readable texts together with digital tools for philological research. The project took its inspiration from the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae and the Perseus Project, and its name is the Sanskrit word for “river”, recalling the literary image of many streams flowing together into a larger ocean. From the start, particular care was given to the TEI header of each text, so that every e-text can be traced back to the printed edition it derives from and carries a record of its revisions, which makes it citable in scholarly work.

SARIT was founded by Dominik Wujastyk, who ran it alone for several years with technical assistance from Richard Mahoney. Early funding came from Dominik Wujastyk himself and from the British Association for South Asian Studies. In 2013 Birgit Kellner and Sheldon Pollock joined him, and the project was then supported by the NEH/DFG Bilateral Digital Humanities Programme. The first versions of the site used a modified form of PhiloLogic, developed at the University of Chicago; from 2013 the texts were searched and displayed with the open-source XML database eXist-db, in work carried out by Jens Østergaard Petersen at the Heidelberg Research Architecture of the Cluster of Excellence “Asia and Europe in a Global Context” (University of Heidelberg), in collaboration with eXist Solutions GmbH. Others who contributed to its development include Patrick McAllister, Andrew Ollett, Liudmila Olalde, Claudius Teodorescu and Dheepa Sundaram.

The original interface to the SARIT collection, which was developed in “Project SARIT: Enriching Digital Text Collections in Indology” (Bilateral Digital Humanities Programme DFG/NEH), 2013–2017, has been archived here: https://github.com/sarit/sarit-existdb#sarits-exist-db-web-application.

GRETIL

GRETIL, the Göttingen Register of Electronic Texts in Indian Languages, was started in 2001 by Reinhold Grünendahl at the Göttingen State and University Library (SUB Göttingen). It began as a register of e-texts that were otherwise scattered across private websites, mailing lists and personal computers, and grew into one of the largest freely available collections of Sanskrit texts, together with texts in Pali, Prakrit, Old and Middle Indo-Aryan, Tamil and other languages. Most of its files were typed or scanned by individual scholars and input projects and then contributed to the collection, so their sources and quality vary, and each file names its contributor and the edition it was taken from. For many years GRETIL offered its texts as plain-text and HTML files; the TEI versions searched on this site are in the GRETIL-corpustei/ folder of the repository that was created by Maximilian Mehner and colleagues as part of a major restructuring of the repository from 2016 (see https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17971727) .