Terms of Use

This archive is published by Mansarovar Sahitya, a registered literary society. Using the site — reading it, searching it, submitting to it, joining a circle — means you accept what follows.

If you are reading on behalf of a school, library or publisher, you are agreeing on their behalf as well as your own, and you confirm you are allowed to do so.

Reading is free and always will be. Membership pays for scanning, transcription and the reading room; it buys earlier access and printed issues, never exclusive access to a text that was otherwise open.

Membership is applied for on the site and paid by UPI: we email a payment link and a QR code, valid for seven days. A membership year runs from the day the payment clears. We do not accept card payments and will never ask for card details. If you cancel within thirty days and have not yet received a printed issue, we refund in full; after that we refund the unused months on request.

Poems written before 1800 — Tiruvalluvar to Ghananand — are in the public domain. You may copy, print, set, perform, teach from and republish them without asking us.

What we ask, and cannot require, is that you carry the source note with the text. Our editorial readings are choices among manuscript variants; naming where a reading came from is how the next reader can check it.

Poems and essays by living poets, and by poets whose work is still in copyright, are published here with the permission of the poet or their family. That permission runs to this archive alone.

You may quote up to four lines in a review, essay or classroom handout with attribution. Anything further — reprinting a whole poem, setting it to music, translating it for publication, using it in an advertisement — needs the rightsholder’s written consent. Write to us and we will pass the request on.

Scans and photographs of manuscripts are provided for study. Reproducing a scan in a commercial edition requires our permission and, where the manuscript is on deposit, the depositor’s.

Work you submit or post in a circle stays yours. By posting it you grant us a non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to store it, display it on the site, and include it in the magazine or an anthology drawn from the circles, with credit as you have asked to be credited.

You keep the right to publish the same work anywhere else, at any time. If you withdraw a piece we take it down from the site within seven days; issues already printed cannot be recalled.

You confirm that the work is yours, that any translation was made with the rightsholder’s permission, and that publishing it here breaches no other agreement you have signed.

The circles are moderated by volunteer convenors. Personal attacks, hate speech, plagiarism, spam and the posting of another person’s private material are removed; repeated breaches end in the loss of posting rights.

Criticism of a poem is not an attack on a poet, and robust disagreement is welcome. Reports go to two convenors, who act within twenty-four hours and tell the reporter what they decided.

We may remove a post without notice where it is unlawful or puts someone at risk. Everything else is removed with a note to its author explaining why.

The archive is offered as it is. Texts carry variants, dates are sometimes disputed, and transcription is ongoing work; we correct what we are shown but cannot warrant that every reading is definitive.

We do not guarantee uninterrupted access, and we may withdraw or change material — for instance when a rightsholder asks us to. Our liability is limited to the membership fee you have paid in the current year.

When these terms change materially we will say so on this page and email members at least fourteen days before the change takes effect. Continuing to use the archive after that date means accepting the new version.

These terms are governed by the laws of India, and the courts at Agra, Uttar Pradesh have jurisdiction. If any clause is found unenforceable, the rest stands.