Take the 2-minute tour ×

The Padma Purana is one of the eighteen Mahapuranas (Major Puranas), and it includes many important things, including a retelling of the Ramayana, a religious dialogue between Shiva and Parvati called the Shiva Gita, and several Sahasranamams (lists of 1000 names of a god), including a Vishnu Sahasranam (different from the more famous one that Bhishma told in the Mahabharata), a Rama Sahasranamam, and a Venkatesha Sahasranam (in praise of Venkateshwara).

As far as I know, the only (unabridged) English translation of the Padma Purana is this 10-volume translation by N.A. Deshpande from the 1950's, published by Motilal Banarsidass. My question is, is the whole translation available for free on the internet? I've found most of the volumes of it online, as I discuss in my answer, but the whole thing still eludes me.

Naturally, since this is a reputable site, I only want legal sources, nothing that involves copyright-infringement.

share|improve this question

1 Answer 1

up vote 5 down vote accepted

I've so far found two legal sources that have certain volumes of the Motilal-Banarsidass translation of the Padma Purana:

  1. DSpace, the digital repository of the West Bengal Public Library Network, which has books in PDF format, but breaks each book into 80-page chunks.

  2. The Digital Library of India (DLI), which currently has lots of books only in TIFF format but is in the process of converting them all to PDF. I converted them to PDF using DLI Downloader. (I used version 5.4, available here, which is the latest version compatible with Windows XP).

So here are the volumes I've found so far using these two sources (remember there are 10 volumes total):

Volume 3 (from DLI)

Volume 4 (from DSpace)

Volume 5 (from DLI)

Volume 6 (from DLI)

Volume 7 (from DSpace)

Volume 8 (from DSpace)

Volume 9 (from Dspace)

Volume 10 (from DLI)

Note that the index of the Padma Purana is at the end of volume 10.

I also found links to both Volume 1 and Volume 2, but I haven't confirmed that the links are legal, so I'm refraining from posting them in case they infringes on copyright. Does anyone know whether this book is in the public domain, or whether it's still under copyright?

share|improve this answer

Your Answer


