Why typing Devanagari Alphabets (Marathi, Sanskrit, Hindi) on a personal computer is so difficult? And why typing Devanagari in Latin is so easy and preferred by many?


Introduction & Background

I have been planning to write this blog post for many years. I have been facing this issue since I had my first Microsoft Windows Operating System-based computer in 2002. After that, it was partially solved on a Mac in 2008. I faced the issue of Marathi on the web when I had my website mandarapte.com in 2010 and then my community Marathi website chitpavankatta.com in 2012.

The idea of writing this blog post or writing documentation about why we face the problem of typing Marathi / Sanskrit / Hindi with Devanagari Script on a computer got more critical when some category of journalists or people who started false propaganda to tell the Marathi population at large that Devanagari Script for the Marathi language is no more relevant anymore instead we should abandon Devanagari Script Alphabets and start using Latin Script to write the Marathi Language. These people gave an example of the young generation who are writing, chatting, or texting on their mobile phones using Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. They use Latin script to write Marathi rather than Devanagari script.

At that time, I attended a few lectures on Devanagari Calligraphy and Typography, where I met an important person like Mr Mukund Gokhale from Pune, who had done extensive work in building Marathi Typewriter with his two or three seniors in his field. He also worked with famous calligraphers and typographers to bring Devanagari onto the computer, i.e. designing popular Devanagari fonts for Computers. At that time, I was working at IITB as a web designer. After that, I met Mukund Gokhale at his Pune home to discuss why Marathi Typing is so tricky and why it is targeted by anti-nationals with no linguistic background to speak about abandoning the Devanagari script. We discussed it at length. He even showed me software he developed with his developer tech support to design Marathi-based digital artworks and designs. It was his initiative to create an alternative solution to Adobe Photoshop / Illustrator that doesn’t support Devanagari Script in 2014/17. And now it’s the year 2021. Because of these long conversations on the phone or when we met each other personally, I even developed the Devanagari Learning app for iPhone, iPad and Mac.

When this propaganda started by abusing the Marathi language and falsely showcasing its irrelevance in today’s world, I talked with popular Hindu Orators who were tirelessly working to stop it. People like me were middlemen between famous Hindu orators and calligrapher/typographer Mukund Gokhale to share knowledge and know-how and connect the dots.

So, I am going to write here my observations that I learned while talking with Mukund Gokhale. Some observations are in my capacity as I am myself a designer and developer who wants to talk and design/develop in Marathi.

Observation 01:

There is always no sync between the time you would take to choose the alphabet on your mobile’s soft keyboard to type and your thoughts, which run further ahead.

Observation 02:

Today’s technology is not advanced; it is just taking baby steps to support languages like Marathi / Sanskrit, which are older than 5,000 years. So it’s a technology problem, and there is no problem with languages. We will learn why it is so…

Observation 03:

Technology is developed using the English language itself. A software program is then converted to a machine-level language called binary, which only contains numbers like 0 and 1, i.e., yes or no (in layman’s language). So, there is no support for Jodakshars of Marathi, Sanskrit, and Hindi, which combine two words to create a third word.

Observation 04:

Today’s computer keyboard has 250 or 300 plastic keys; the way the keyboard is designed, they allot two functions for one key, i.e. you can toggle the shift key to perform two functions using a single key. But in the Marathi/Sanskrit language, there are more than 5,00,000 Alphabets, i.e. 12 Swars (Vowels) + Vyanjana (Consonants) 36 + Barakhadi 410, and all these alphabets conjunctions create ‘Jodakshar’ which count more than 5,00,000 in numbers. So fitting all 5,00,000 alphabets on plastic keys is impossible.

Observation 05:

So, technologists solved typing in Marathi / Sanskrit / Hindi problems using Unicode (UTF-8). Unicode also supports Emoji and Devanagari Alphabets. However, the problem with Unicode is that it is based on assigning a number to the alphabet, like numbering them for identity. So it creates a heavy burden on technology to support all this in one go, i.e. on the Web, Mobile, Tablet and Computer, even the same on HTML, on Apple Mac, iPhone, iPad, Microsoft Windows, Android, and Linux. So, being in sync with every technology platform is a management problem.

Observation 06:

Even popular search engines like Google, with their AI (Artificial Intelligence) and ML (Machine learning), don’t understand the Marathi language well enough to translate it from Marathi to English or English to Marathi. So it shows the quality that technology lacks even in today’s world, where Google can easily translate the German Language to English and English to German without any problem.

Observation 07:

Marathi Typing on a plastic or soft keyboard is very slow because of the Keyboard layout and structure. To type successfully, you must find every velanti (ascender) and ukar (descender).

Observation 08:

Devanagari is a 5,000-year-old script and typing on computer mobile made easy by the iPhone soft keyboard evolution in

Observation 09:

Words that are typed in Devanagari don’t always display right on the web as every possible user has different text encoding settings for web browsers because of his locality and language preference, i.e. web page text encoding for Marathi / Sanskrit / Hindi should always be Unicode (UTF-8)

Observation 10:

As Mukund Gokhale told me about his experience in developing a Marathi typewriter with his senior colleagues, he surveyed and got inspiration from English typewriter keyboard layout, i.e. lay-outing alphabets in famous and less popular alphabet structure, then dividing it into vowels, consonants and velanti, matra and ukar separately, i.e. frequent words on the first screen and less important words with the second screen with shift key pressed. He told me that his and his team’s assumptions were false and have to be rectified now with modern technologies like software keyboard on iPhone and iPad, which has infinite possibilities for custom key layouts.

Observation 11:

If you are an avid Marathi Blogger, you may already know that you don’t get digital content ads (advertisements) on AdSense as Google or any other search engine doesn’t understand the meaning of Marathi languages, so Marathi Websites can’t monetise, so there is no profitable ads base business for Marathi blogs. As mentioned, the Search Engine can’t understand Marathi or any Indic language. Because of this, you don’t get search traffic, and you don’t get a higher search ranking to be on the first page of Google Search Results.

Observation 12:

Apple iPhone Soft Minglish or Hinglish Keyboard, or if you use Google’s Transliteration website to type ‘Mama’, you get options to choose the Devanagari word. If you press the spacebar, it gets converted to the famous Marathi Devanagari Text automatically. But this app feature is still based on the correct input selection by the user; it doesn’t support automatically applying the right hraswa or dirgha velantis or right grammar for the word.

I hope this knowledge helps you to get to the root of the problem and to better understand our Indic / Hindu Languages.

If you have any questions or suggestions, or if you have any new input or observations to add, please let me know in the comment section below.

Thanks & Regards
Mandar Apte

Published by Mandar Apte

Mandar is a Mumbai-based multi-disciplinary designer with UX/UI, Logo, Symbol, and Brand Identity design expertise. He currently runs his Mudrkashar Linguistic Apple iPhone, iPad, and Mac app business in the heart of Mumbai city.

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