KalpaDB: Indian Speculative Fiction Database

KalpaDB is an open, structured database of Indian speculative fiction — science fiction, fantasy, and horror — across Indian languages and media. This dataset is version 2.0, a snapshot of the public catalogue at https://kalpadb.com taken on 19 September 2026. It expands substantially on v1.0 (which covered books, persons, and publishers only): this release adds short stories, comics, magazines, screen/audio media, and — new work types — academic scholarship and press coverage about Indian speculative fiction. In total, it contains 1,281 book editions, 1,149 stories, 417 media works (film, TV, audio, games, and stage), 120 comics, 105 coverage items (press features, interviews, obituaries), 36 academic articles, and 27 magazine titles, credited across 1,838 people and 238 publishers and imprints — 5,211 rows in all, up from 469 at v1.0. Each of the nine entities is provided in two formats: CSV (flattened for spreadsheets, with multi-valued fields joined by " | ") and JSON (richer, with nested arrays and objects such as each book's list of physical/digital formats, or each academic article's ordered, citation-ready author list). Records include titles in their original scripts, authorship/credit and publisher information, series and edition data, and bibliographic details where known; academic articles and coverage items carry citation/reference metadata only, with no full text stored. Coverage spans many Indian languages, with Bengali still the most densely catalogued. Genre tagging remains uneven across the catalogue and will keep expanding in future versions; most records are volunteer-contributed and reviewed rather than professionally fact-checked, so this dataset is best treated as a strong research starting point rather than a guaranteed-authoritative source — see each record's verification_status. No personal or user data is included — only the public catalogue. The dataset is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) licence; please credit "KalpaDB" and its creator, Dip Ghosh, and link back to https://kalpadb.com. See the included README.md for a full field reference and citation guidance.