Decoding India’s
Historic Scripts with AI

From Modi Script to Modern Marathi:
Building New datasets for IndicScript AI models.

Who We Are

Indic-Scripts Research Forum is a newly formed research group based in Pune, India, focused on building machine-readable systems for ancient and historic Indian scripts.

Our work currently centers on Modi-scripted Marathi, its transliteration and translation into modern Marathi, with a roadmap that include other Indic scripts such as Pali and Brahmi.

Why We Exist

Existing efforts to transliterate Modi script into Devanagari have been limited in scope and accuracy. Our own tests on publicly announced models show that sentence-level approaches with small datasets often produce illegible and historically unusable output.

We are addressing this gap by investing the time and effort required to construct large, high-quality character and word-level datasets and robust AI pipelines grounded in dictionaries and expert knowledge.

What We Do

Focus on past experimentations at the Modi Character level research

Test characters to form words

Reprogram to improve word construction algorithms

Test algorithms to transliterate Modi scripted words to Marathi

Build word-level paired datasets:

  • Modi script → transliterated Marathi (Devanagari)
  • Transliteration → modern Marathi equivalents

Digitize, code, and build datasets using:

  • Historic dictionaries (e.g., Aitihasik Shabdakosh and other Marathi/old Marathi dictionaries)
  • Marathi Vishwakosh and other reference works
  • Thousands of Maratha history books and documents

Use vector databases and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to:

  • Link words, meanings, places, people, events
  • Provide context-aware answers and translations

Design and fine-tune specialized models and a future Maratha history LLM

Our Vision

Our long-term vision is to create reliable AI tools that can read, understand, and explain historic Indian documents — not just at the surface level of text, but with awareness of period-specific language, idioms, and historical context. We want historians, archivists, students, and citizens to be able to access centuries of material that is today locked away in scripts very few people can read.

Join us in building the foundation for AI that understands India’s past.

Together, we can preserve heritage and empower the future.

Collaborate with Us →