Where to read Indian-language books legally for free

Plenty of Hindi and Marathi literature can be read legally without paying. The catch is that the free sources each do one thing well, and none of them has everything. This guide covers seven of them, says what each is good for today, and ends with the question of what to do when a book is still in copyright.

A quick rule before you start: in India, a book is generally public domain once 60 years have passed from the start of the year after its author died. A free copy of anything newer should come from the author or publisher. Our public domain guide explains the details.

Wikisource

Wikisource is the Wikimedia library of source texts, and it has separate Hindi and Marathi editions at hi.wikisource.org and mr.wikisource.org. Volunteers type up or proofread public-domain books, often page by page against a scan, so you can check a doubtful word against the original printed page.

It is the best place for clean, searchable text of older classics, saint poetry and 19th-century prose. Coverage is uneven because it depends on what volunteers have worked on, so a famous book may be missing while a minor one is complete.

Hindi Samay

Hindi Samay is a large, non-commercial Hindi literature site run as an academic project by the Mahatma Gandhi Antarrashtriya Hindi Vishwavidyalaya in Wardha. It has sections for novels, stories, poetry, plays, essays, criticism, children's literature and translations, plus collected-works pages for writers such as Premchand, Kabir, Bharatendu Harishchandra, Ramchandra Shukla and Rahim.

Hindi Samay is the most comfortable way to read Premchand and other classic Hindi prose in a browser. The texts are typed, so you can search and copy them. It also publishes some contemporary writers, who keep their own rights.

Rekhta and Hindwi

Rekhta is run by the non-profit Rekhta Foundation and calls itself the largest online collection of Urdu poetry. Poems are shown in Urdu script, in Devanagari and in Roman transliteration, which makes ghazals and nazms readable for Hindi speakers who do not know the Urdu script. It also has a large e-book section of digitized books and a dictionary.

Hindwi, the foundation's Hindi site at hindwi.org, launched in 2020. It arranges Hindi poetry by era, theme and form (doha, geet, kavitt and others), with poet pages from Kabir and Mirabai to the present, and it also has prose and an e-book section.

Go to these two for poetry, from the Bhakti poets to Urdu shayari, or to track down a half-remembered couplet. Not everything on these sites is public domain; modern poets appear with permission.

Project Gutenberg

Project Gutenberg is the oldest free e-book library, with clean e-books in EPUB, Kindle and plain-text formats. Its collection is mostly English and European, and its Hindi and Marathi holdings are small. Where it shines for this site's readers is English translations and Indian writing in English that is old enough to be free, for example:

• Tagore's Gitanjali (1912) and his translation of the Songs of Kabir (1915)
• Edwin Arnold's Bhagavad Gita, The Song Celestial (1885)
• Sarojini Naidu's The Golden Threshold (1905)
• Tagore's novel The Home and the World in its 1919 English translation

One caution: Project Gutenberg checks copyright under United States law. Its own notices tell readers outside the US to check their local laws before downloading. For most of the books above, Indian and US rules give the same answer, but not always.

Internet Archive

The Internet Archive holds hundreds of thousands of scanned Indian books, including a very large set of scans that began with the Digital Library of India project, which the archive now calls the Public Library of India. In 2019 its blog put that collection at more than 425,000 texts in over 100 languages. For Hindi and Marathi readers it is often the only place to see an old printed edition of a 19th- or early 20th-century book.

Scan quality varies, the catalog information is sometimes wrong, and the archive also runs a lending library of in-copyright books, which is a different thing from public-domain access. Before you treat a scan as free to share, check the author's death date yourself.

National Digital Library of India

The National Digital Library of India (NDLI) is run by IIT Kharagpur and sponsored by the Ministry of Education. It is a single search window over a very large number of items from many repositories, with an interface in English and major Indian languages. Registration is free, and some licensed material is only open to logged-in users. There are apps for Android and iOS.

NDLI is strongest on study material, textbooks, theses and cultural archives. It is built mainly for students and researchers, so expect to dig a little for literature, and note that many results link out to the source repository.

eSahity Pratishthan

eSahity Pratishthan has distributed Marathi e-books free of charge for many years, mostly in PDF and EPUB, with no registration needed. Most of its catalog is by living Marathi writers who have chosen to publish there, so the books are free to read but not public domain. The site has started selling some titles and accepts donations.

It is the place for contemporary Marathi writing that you will not find on the public-domain sites.

When the book is still in copyright

Many of the books we recommend, from Raag Darbari to Pu La Deshpande, are still protected. That does not make them hard to read.

• Libraries. Public and university libraries in India stock Hindi and Marathi classics, and many libraries abroad with South Asian collections do too. Ask about inter-library loans.
• Publisher e-books. Most major Hindi and Marathi publishers now sell e-book editions through the big e-book stores, often for less than the paperback.
• Audiobooks. Several apps have narrated Hindi and Marathi classics, including in-copyright titles licensed from publishers.
• Secondhand shops. Old paperbacks of Hindi and Marathi classics are cheap.

A pirated PDF of a living author's book takes money from the writer and the publisher who keep these books in print. If a free copy looks too good to be true, it usually is.

The reading list marks every book on this site as public domain, in copyright, or worth checking, and names the kinds of places where readers usually find it.