The canonical register: Kalki
A letter to a colleague, 31 July 2026 — on the name Kalki, and on the forms that keep failing it.
Your note said, roughly: surely the marks are a nicety. Permit me to use Kalki to show they are not.
First, the attestation. The name is attested as कल्कि, on the evidence Mahābhārata 3.191 (the earliest Kalki prophecy) and Kalki Purāṇa (the full biography) set down. On the evidence, it means "The avatāra yet to come — the tenth and final avatāra of Viṣṇu, who appears at the end of the Kali Yuga riding a white horse to destroy unrighteousness and restore the age of truth". The canonical transliteration is Kalki.
Say it aloud as the sources heard it: “KAHL-kee” The marks are what carry that sound to a reader who has never heard it spoken.
On the plain form — and I want to be precise, because you pushed on this. The plain form kalki differs from the canonical Kalki only by convention of display — case, not content. It is acceptable everywhere: in legacy systems, in plain-text citation, in the DNS itself. What is not acceptable is what follows in the register: respellings that change the letters, not just their case.
One more thing, because it always surprises: the name did not stay home. The Kalki cycle absorbed apocalyptic expectations from every quarter: the White Horse echoes the sun-horse of Indo-Iranian myth; the sword of the age borrows Paraśurāma’s axe; and Śambhala, his hidden kingdom, became the axis of Tibetan Buddhism’s Kalacakra — the wheel of time teachings centred on the king who will come.
And it never stopped working. Kalki is eschatology’s most durable prophetic figure in the living world: films, novels, and comics re-stage his coming endlessly, and ‘waiting for Kalki’ is an idiom for expecting the end of a corrupt order. The Śambhala legend seeded Theosophy’s Shambhala and, through it, a century of Western occult geography.
The Convention's Own History
Long before IAST was formalized in 1912, Sanskrit had Pāṇini — the fourth-century-BCE grammarian whose rules describe the language's sounds with a precision no other ancient tradition matched. That heritage is why the convention is so exact: retroflexes (ṭ, ḍ, ṇ, ṣ) are not accented dentals but separate phonemes with separate meanings; long and short vowels (ā/a, ī/i, ū/u) change words, not just timing. IAST writes those distinctions down with underdots and macrons so that a reader who has never heard Sanskrit can still read it correctly. Dropping the marks is not transliteration at a lower resolution — it is a different, lesser claim.
Where Protocol Meets Practice
The technical answer is simple: the canonical marks are legal IDNA 2008 characters, encoded as punycode under `xn--`. The practical answer is messier: legal does not mean stocked (registrar inventory is partial), and stocked does not mean typeable (stacked diacritics defeat mobile keyboards).
So the register's rule is a hierarchy of attested forms — full restoration, circumflex, macron-only, attested variant, and finally plain ASCII for the systems that cannot carry marks. Every rung is defensible because every rung is attested. The forms this register rules against are not rungs; they are errors, and errors do not get rungs.
Write back when you have checked the sources; they are better company than I am.
— The Register
The Verdict
Kalki is the canonical form: attested, checkable, and enforced across the temple, the lexicon, the cards, the APIs, and this register. The plain form kalki shares that standing — the two are the same name in every system. The false forms above are documented so that no reader has to take the temple's word on faith — the violations are stated, the sources are named, and the register stands open to challenge on every line.
The temple of Kalki stands at /kalki/.
The docket for this ruling: no false forms on the docket; no contested forms attested; the attestation rests on 4 cited sources — Mahābhārata 3.191 (the earliest Kalki prophecy), Kalki Purāṇa (the full biography), Bhaviṣya Purāṇa (the Kali Yuga lists).
The Register Continues
Entry 270 of 597 in the Canonical Register. Around it: the temple's founding dispatch, the Restoration File on the marks themselves, the Resonance File on the archetype at work, and the Rulebook behind all of it.
Continue the register — previous entry: Kālī (read it) · next entry: Kamapuaa (read it).
The Canonical Register is written from the same canonical record as the lexicon itself. If a false form is missing from this page, it is because the evidence does not support calling it false — or because we have not seen it yet. Show us, with a citation, and the register will answer.