About Us

What this is

Stotrams is a place to read stotras, mantras, sahasranāmas, nāmāvalis, sūktas and related devotional texts, sorted by deity and by kind. Each one appears in its original Devanāgarī and, where the text allows it, in the other Indian scripts and in Roman transliteration, so that someone who reads Tamil or Telugu or Kannada but not Devanāgarī can still recite it.

Beside the Sanskrit sit the devotional songs composed in the languages of their regions — Hindi chalisas and aartis, Marathi abhangas and granthas, Tamil and Telugu devotional poetry — each on a shelf of its own. You can find a text by its name, by the line it opens with, or by its deity, composer, festival or what it is traditionally recited for; how to read a stotra hereshows the rest.

It started because the texts were scattered. Some sat in scanned PDFs, some in pages that broke on a phone, some behind advertising that made them hard to read aloud from. None of that had anything to do with the texts themselves, which have survived a great deal worse. We wanted one place where you could find a stotra, read it in a script you can actually read, and understand what it says.

Where the texts come from

The Sanskrit comes from established public-domain repositories of classical literature — the same digitised collections that scholars and reciters have been using for years. We don't rewrite verses, shorten them, or modernise them. What we do change is the presentation: verse boundaries, headings, spacing and colophons get reflowed so a text reads cleanly on a screen instead of arriving as an undifferentiated block.

Where a stotra has more than one received reading — and a good number do, because these texts travelled through different regions and different lineages before anyone wrote them down — we publish the one our source gives and don't pretend the alternatives don't exist. If you recite a different version, that isn't necessarily a mistake on either side. It's usually worth telling us about anyway.

How the meanings are written

Two very different things happen here, and it matters which is which.

Transliteration — turning Devanāgarī into Tamil, Telugu, Bengali and the rest — is mechanical. It's a rule-based conversion of one script into another, letter for letter, and it involves no interpretation at all. When it's wrong it's wrong in a way that can be found and fixed outright.

Meanings are not mechanical. The English translations and the short notes about a text's origin are drafted with machine assistance and then checked by people against the Sanskrit. That process catches a great deal and misses some things. Devotional Sanskrit is dense, it is old, and a compound can often be read two defensible ways — so treat a translation here as help with following the verse, not as a verdict on it. Where we're unsure, we would rather say so than write a confident sentence we can't stand behind. Ourdisclaimer puts this in plainer terms.

Not every text has a meaning attached yet, and not every meaning is at the same depth. Some texts carry a word-by-word gloss — they are gathered on theWord by word shelf — and most don't, so far. We add to this continuously, which is a polite way of saying it is unfinished and will stay unfinished for a long while.

The people who built it

Much of what is best here came from volunteers. People who read a stotra in their own script and noticed a letter that had gone astray. People who sat down with a printed edition and checked a text line by line against it. People who recorded recitations, or wrote out the meaning of a verse properly, or pointed out that a stotra had been filed under the wrong deity for months and nobody had noticed.

None of them were paid, and most came to it because they recite these texts themselves and wanted them to be right. If that sounds like you, thevolunteer form asks what you can read and how much time you actually have. There's no minimum, and there's no interview.

What we're still getting wrong

Plenty. Texts with no meaning yet. Meanings that are serviceable but flat. Categories that made sense when there were fewer stotras and now group things oddly. Names spelled the way one region spells them and not the way another does, so the search finds a text for some people and not for others.

We'd rather hear about it than not. If you find something wrong,tell us what and where — a verse number and a line is enough to start with. Corrections to the Sanskrit are checked against the source before anything changes, so it isn't instant, but it does happen.

Free, and staying that way

There's no account, no subscription and no paywall, and nothing here is going behind one. The texts aren't ours to sell. They belong to everyone who recites them, which by now is a fairly large number of people across a fairly long stretch of time.