Decoding India’s
Historic Scripts with AI

• Historic Modi-script manuscripts and letters
• Modi → Devanagari transliterated works from “Dafters”
• Specialized history dictionaries and encyclopedias:
  • Aitihasik Shabdakosh (Y. N. Kelkar, 1962)
  • Marathi Vishwakosh
  • Dictionary of Old Marathi
  • Other Marathi–Marathi, English–Marathi, and terminology dictionaries
• ~4,000+ Marathi book titles related to Maratha history (planned corpus)

Why Word-Level Pairing

Our experience shows that sentence‑level transliteration in old Devanagari Marathi is often difficult to understand and cannot be reliably reused outside that specific sentence.

By focusing on word‑level pairings, we:

• Enable flexible recombination across multiple texts
• Make dictionary verification and correction easier
• Provide stronger supervision for AI models, improving accuracy and generalization.

• Digitization – Scan Modi manuscripts and printed transliterated Marathi works.
• Segmentation – Use custom JS tools to split Modi and Devanagari text into word-level units.
• Pairing & Annotation – Pair Modi script words with transliterated and modern Marathi words, add dictionary-based meanings, and historical tags (people, places, events).
• Vectorization – Convert dictionary and word entries into vectors and store in a vector database.
• Model Training & RAG – Use the datasets for:
  • Transliteration and translation models
  • Retrieval-augmented generation for historical Q&A
  • Future fine-tuning of a Maratha history LLM