About

vedicode collects devotional songs — aartis, chalisas, stotras, ashtaks and mantras — and presents each one so it can actually be sung, not just read. Every song shows its original text beside a romanization, so someone who cannot read Devanagari can still follow the line as it is sung.

The collection currently holds 45 songs across 431 verses, in Sanskrit, Hindi and Marathi.

Transliteration is not translation

These are two different things, and the distinction is the reason the site is laid out the way it is.

A transliteration is the same words in a different script. Marathi written in Devanagari and Marathi written in Roman letters are one text, sung identically — only the spelling changes. The romanizations here are phonetic and practical rather than academic: they are spelled the way the line is actually sung, in plain letters, with no diacritics to decode.

A translation is what the words mean, rendered in another language. A romanized aarti is not English — it is Sanskrit or Marathi respelled. That is why the two columns are kept separate and labelled separately, and why you can change one without changing the other.

Reading a song

Each song page puts the verses in a shared grid, joined by verse number, so a line always sits beside its own counterpart. Each column has its own language selector: you can read the lyrics romanized while the meaning stays in English, or any other combination the song has. Reader mode strips the page back to the text alone and scales the type up for singing from a distance.

A note on accuracy

These are traditional texts, and many circulate in several slightly different versions — spellings, verse counts and refrains vary between regions and between printed editions. Where a romanization or a translation reads wrongly to you, it may well be wrong. Corrections are genuinely welcome; see the contact page.