About Grand Old Books
Grand Old Books is dedicated to reviving forgotten literary treasures from around the world, starting with India. Many of the greatest novels in Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Odia, Marathi, Malayalam, and dozens of other languages have never been translated into English. If we don’t do it, these may be lost to the annals of history. The technologies of today finally allow us to bring these old books back to life.
How It Works
Every book on Grand Old Books goes through a multi-stage AI pipeline:
- OCR — Scanned pages are digitized using Sarvam AI’s multilingual OCR to extract the original text.
- Translation — The text is translated page-by-page into English using GPT-4.1, preserving the author’s voice and style.
- Illustration — Every chapter receives a unique AI-generated illustration using Google Gemini, bringing scenes to life visually.
- Annotation — Characters, places, and cultural terms are extracted from each chapter to build glossaries with descriptions and portraits.
The result is a beautifully illustrated, freely readable English edition of each classic—complete with character portraits, place and term glossaries, and cultural context that makes these novels accessible to anyone, anywhere.
What We Ask From You
This project gets better with your help. Here’s what we’d love to hear about:
- Translation errors or awkward passages we should fix
- Books you’d like to see added to the collection
- Languages we should expand into next
- Feature ideas to make this a more useful reading experience
Credits
Grand Old Books is built by Deedy Das.
All original texts featured on this site are in the public domain, with their copyright terms having expired in their countries of origin. The English translations and AI-generated illustrations are original works produced for this project and are provided free of charge for educational and cultural purposes. If you believe any content has been included in error, please contact us and we will address it promptly.