Jain scholarship of the last century lives largely in patrikas — journals published by trusts and sabhas, in small print runs, and now sitting in cupboards. What is in them is often uncited simply because it cannot be found.
Why this exists
A researcher looking for what was written about Kharavela, or about anekāntavāda, in the Hindi journals of the 1930s has had no practical way to find it. The volumes are scattered, unindexed, and where they have been digitised at all it is usually as a single scanned file per year — searchable by nothing, citable as nothing more precise than the volume.
Patrika takes those volumes apart. Every article is catalogued individually: its own title, its own author, its own page range, its own permanent link. That is the entire point of the project, and it is what separates it from a folder of PDFs.
॥ सम्यग्दर्शन-ज्ञान-चारित्राणि मोक्षमार्गः ॥
Right faith, right knowledge and right conduct together form the path to liberation. — Tattvarth Sutra 1.1
What is in it
The archive currently holds 3,691 catalogued articles across 2 patrikas, by 821 authors.
Articles can be read in two ways. The scan is the original, page for page as it was printed. The text is the same article typed in and proofread, which is far easier to read and to quote from. Not every article has its text yet, and the listing always says which you are getting rather than presenting a missing one as an error.
Cataloguing is ongoing and deliberately unhurried. An article is added when someone has read enough of it to describe it correctly — not when a file has been copied into a folder.
How it is indexed
Each article carries up to three titles: the Hindi original, an English translation, and a diacritical (IAST) transliteration. All three are searchable, so the same article is found whether you type अनेकान्तवाद, anekāntavāda or anekantavada without the diacritics.
Names are the hard part. A single scholar appears across four decades of one journal under half a dozen printed forms — with honorifics, without them, abbreviated, respelt. The archive strips the honorifics to recognise the person while keeping the printed form exactly as it appeared, so an author page gathers the work rather than scattering it.
One current limitation, stated plainly: search covers the catalogue — titles, authors, subjects, journals — not the full text inside the scans. Searching a phrase from the middle of an article will not find it yet. Full-text search needs OCR that handles Devanagari well, and that is work we have not done.
Why you must sign in to read
Browsing is completely open. Every article listing, author, subject and journal on Patrika can be searched and read by anyone, with no account and no cookie.
Opening a scan or reading the text needs a free account. This is not a way of collecting your details — we ask for an email address and nothing else, and there is no password to forget. The scans and the texts are copyrighted, some of them held under permission from publishers and families rather than owned outright, and being able to show that access is recorded is what allows the trust to keep offering them openly instead of restricting them to a reading room.
What we record, and what we do not, is set out in full in the privacy policy.
The trust
Patrika is published by Samyakgyan Prachar-Prasar Trust (सम्यग्ज्ञान प्रचार-प्रसार ट्रस्ट), based in Jaipur, Rajasthan, India.
TO BE SUPPLIED: the founding year, the trustees, and a paragraph on the wider work of the trust
How you can help
- Correct us. A misread name or a wrong year is worth writing in about. Corrections are the most useful mail we receive.
- Tell us what is missing. If an article you need is not here, request it. Those requests decide what gets digitised next.
- Lend us volumes. If you hold patrikas that are not in this archive, particularly complete runs, please get in touch. We can arrange scanning and originals are returned.
- Cite what you use. Every article page carries a formatted citation. Citing the article rather than the volume is what makes this scholarship findable by the next researcher.
