Hindwi@hindwionline userverified user

Emergence of vernaculars is one of the remarkable linguistic trends of the ongoing digital era. But, languages don’t just pop out of thin air. They carry with them a legacy that never gets old. It is de facto fresh as new at all stages of their being, in the form of their particular literature. One could almost say that given a literary character, they are an antidote to time. Issuing from the last phases of the Prakrit language, Hindi literature is not only an exalted museum of about a thousand years, but also it is a joyous pilgrimage to the very heart of Here and Now. With a staggering rise in the number of Hindi readers, several spaces have appeared on the internet in a bid to cater to the rising demand, but none as vast and authentic as ‘Hindwi’ <www.hindwi.org> that currently has a collection of more than 15,000 verses of over 750 poets- ranging from the antiquity to the contemporary. “The vision behind hindwi.org,” says Dharmendra Saha, General Manager, Rekhta Foundation, “is to create the largest digital repository of Hindi literature, as we are doing with rekhta.org for Urdu literature, preserving the classical heritage, while also facilitating a platform for education and research purposes. The website already has a vast corpus of poetry and prose, in addition to blogs, anecdotes, and dictionary among other features and the process of enriching it further is constantly underway.” Google had recently shared that Hindi is the second-most used language globally on a wide range of its products. The vernacular’s web consumption is second only to English and has grown over 90 per cent during 2015-16. Hindwi is a path-breaking attempt to compile all Hindi literature at one place and make it available to the online readers in an easy to access, organized and authenticate digital form. Rekhta Foundation has been focused on its goal of preserving and promoting the literary heritage of the sub-continent ever since its inception. Its first enterprise - rekhta.org- has already been catering to these interests of Urdu speakers for more than a decade and hindwi.org is its attempt to endeavor the same in the literary domain of Hindi. Hindwi features the works of around 750 poets divided into 7939 poems, 1098 padas, 1604 dohas and 389 folksongs. All of these works are further grouped under demonstrative classifications of prosodic features, editors’ choice, representative works and literary eras of their composition etc. In addition to it, hindwi.org also provides its users with a rich and fresh array of Hindi blogs.