Ramayana Book MCP Server

ramayana-mcp

An MCP (Model Context Protocol) server for the Ramayana Book (svenkatreddy/ramayana-mcp). Search verses, fetch Sanskrit plus English/Hindi/Telugu translations, and get a deterministic verse of the day. Same codebase serves three targets:

(dependency-free handler; the SDK's ESM transport crashes Vercel's runtime)

• stdio (src/stdio.ts) — Claude Desktop, Cursor, and Smithery hosting
• Vercel serverless (api/mcp.ts) — stateless JSON-RPC over HTTP at /api/mcp

Tools

Plus a ramayana://kandas resource with kanda/chapter/verse counts.

Verse of the day

verseofthe_day hashes the calendar date (FNV-1a, YYYY-MM-DD, UTC by default) and maps it uniformly onto all 24,214 indexed verses. The same date always returns the same verse; pass an explicit date to look up any other day.

Local setup

npm install
npm run build-index   # builds data/ from a Ramayana_Book checkout
npm run build
npm start             # stdio server

build-index reads the RamayanaBook repo from RAMAYANABOOK_DIR (default: ../../ramayana-modernization/repo relative to this package).

Claude Desktop config (claudedesktopconfig.json):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "ramayana-book": {
      "command": "node",
      "args": ["/absolute/path/to/ramayana-mcp/dist/src/stdio.js"]
    }
  }
}

Deploy on Vercel (free Hobby plan, no payment needed)

the function. The MCP endpoint is https://.vercel.app/api/mcp.

1. Push this directory to a new GitHub repo (create the repo yourself on github.com).
2. In the Vercel dashboard: Add New Project -> Import the repo -> Deploy.
3. No build config needed; vercel.json already ships the data/ files with

The endpoint is stateless (one POST per JSON-RPC request, no sessions), which fits the Hobby plan's function limits. Point any MCP client at the URL above.

Publish on Smithery (for discoverability)

TypeScript runtime; Smithery installs, builds, and imports createServer plus configSchema from src/index.ts. No API keys or config needed.

1. Push the repo to GitHub (public) - done: svenkatreddy/ramayana-mcp.
2. Go to smithery.ai, sign in with GitHub.
3. Add / deploy the ramayana-mcp repo. smithery.yaml declares the

Smithery hosts the server and gives it a registry page with one-click install for Claude Desktop, Cursor, and other clients.

Data and attribution

Verse data is built from the Ramayana_Book repository:

• Sanskrit: Sanskrit Wikisource (Wikimedia); 3 chapters restored from IIT Kanpur's critical edition
• English: Valmiki Ramayan Dataset (MIT) — M.N. Dutt's translation (1891-1894), IIT Kanpur, Gyaandweep
• Hindi: Chaturvedi Dwarka Prasad Sharma's Hindi Ramayana (used with permission)
• Telugu: Telugu Wikisource contributors (CC BY-SA)

Re-run npm run build-index after the Ramayana_Book translations change.

License

The server code in this repo is MIT licensed (see LICENSE).

The verse data under data/ carries the licenses of its sources, not MIT: Sanskrit from Sanskrit Wikisource (Wikimedia), English from the MIT-licensed Valmiki Ramayan Dataset, Hindi from Chaturvedi Dwarka Prasad Sharma's translation (used with permission), Telugu from Telugu Wikisource contributors (CC BY-SA). See the Ramayana_Book translation sources for full attribution.