About Dhwani

The Origin Story

Most of my projects have their origin stories, but Dhwani came from a steady accumulation of things that make me happy—mainly, a growing obsession with forgotten literary treasures. I'm Bhuvan, by the way, and this is how I ended up building a directory of those treasures.

As I started reading more, one book led to another, and I discovered there's an insanely brilliant, rich collection of Indian literary works in the public domain. These weren't just old books—these were civilizational treasures, largely ignored and forgotten.

That's when I discovered Project Gutenberg and was struck by the beautiful absurdity of it all. The fact that people would dedicate time, effort, and money to digitizing works and making them freely available to anyone, anywhere, seemed almost unreasonable. At first, I probably didn't have the maturity to understand why anyone would care so deeply about preserving works in the so-called public domain.

But as I read more, as my ignorance shrank, the civilizational value became crystal clear. This is our history. And if we don't preserve our past, the future will be nothing but a shitty remake of it.

The Problem

Then I started thinking: Why isn't there a Project Gutenberg for India?

India is one of the oldest civilizations in the world. The literary and philosophical treasures we have to offer are limitless. The fact that so much of Indian culture has been appropriated by the West only underscores how much we have to give. Yet when you look at India today, there's a profound sense of cultural apathy among the educated class. Nobody seems to give a shit about our cultural artifacts.

What's worse? There isn't even a decent, comprehensive list of Indian works in the public domain. That's how bad things are.

The Solution (For Now)

This site has been in the making for 5-6 years, percolating in the back of my mind. I kept asking myself: what would it take to build a Project Gutenberg for India?

The honest answer? I don't have the financial resources or deep technical know-how to build something at that scale. But what changed in recent years was the rise of AI coding tools like Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex. They made me realize: even if I can't create a full-fledged digital library, I can do something simpler but potentially just as valuable.

Dhwani is that something.

It's a curated directory—an aggregation of links to important Indian works in the public domain. I'm searching through Archive.org, Project Gutenberg, Wikisource, Open Library, and other repositories for Indian literary and historical works. For each one, I'm creating individual entries with descriptions (with some help from AI) and reference links from multiple sources.

Maybe in the future, technology will advance enough that even technically incompetent idiots like me will be able to make these works fully readable online. But until then, Dhwani serves as a simple archive, a directory of great literary and historical works from our past—from the Vedas and Upanishads to the Ramayana and Mahabharata, to works by Kabir and countless others.

The Hope

My hope is simple: that someone curious about our cultural heritage stumbles across this directory, finds an old PDF, starts extracting interesting insights, and learns something new. Maybe they'll share a fascinating tidbit. Maybe they'll be inspired to dig deeper.

I even dream of building a mini-magazine based purely on reading these historical texts and surfacing the most interesting facts, stories, and wisdom—a publication built on forgotten knowledge. But I'm just one person with a full-time job and bills to pay. If someone wants to fund that dream, I'm all ears. Until then, this is what I can offer.

Why "Dhwani"?

Dhwani (ಧ್ವನಿ) is the Kannada word for "voice" or "sound." When I was thinking about names, many English options came to mind, but I wanted something distinctly Indian and elegant. This name resonated with my soul.

The intuition was simple: these works are voices from history, echoing across time. Hence, Dhwani.