How AI is bridging India’s linguistic divide in publishing

India has never lacked stories. What it has lacked, for decades, is a practical way to move those stories across its many languages.

Sure, works by famous authors like M.T. Vasudevan are available in several Indian languages, but these are fortunate exceptions. For a reader to access works of lesser-known regional authors, options are much more limited: either read it in English or learn the language.

India’s linguistic divide won’t disappear immediately. Many languages still lack sufficient training data, and AI tools continue to struggle with idioms, humour and cultural nuance. But the direction of progress is encouraging. Tools designed initially for dominant languages are slowly being adapted to work across India’s full linguistic spectrum.

This is not a cultural gap as much as a technical one. For years, technical advancements, especially in the publishing world, have been centred around English, leaving the rest to play ...