After the Clay Library’s demise, Mr. Pollock, who had taken over as its general editor, reconceived the project to extend far beyond Sanskrit. He shopped around in India for a new benefactor, to no avail. He then brought the idea to Sharmila Sen, executive editor at large at Harvard University Press, who connected him with Rohan Murty, the son of the Indian technology billionaire N. R. Narayana Murthy. (The two men spell their surnames differently.)

Image A 16th-century miniature of the Mughal hero Akbar hunting tigers. Credit... DeAgostini/Getty Images

The younger Mr. Murty, at the time a 26-year-old doctoral student in computer science at Harvard, put up $5.2 million to endow the new library, which will eventually be digitized, in perpetuity.

“He really understood the need for it,” Ms. Sen, who acquired the series, said. “We were both educated in the same kind of India, where we knew way more about Shakespeare and Wordsworth than about the classical texts of our own region.”

Some works in the first release will be familiar to many Indians even if they have never read them. “Sur’s Ocean,” a 1,000-page anthology of more than 400 poems attributed to the 16th-century Hindi poet Surdas (edited by Kenneth E. Bryant and translated by John Stratton Hawley), includes verses that have deeply penetrated popular oral tradition, while Surdas himself figures in a quiz-show question in the movie “Slumdog Millionaire.” Others are appearing in full translation for the first time. “The Story of Manu,” a 16th-century south Indian epic poem about the first human being (translated from Telugu by Velcheru Narayana Rao and David Shulman), has never before been translated into another language, Mr. Pollock said. (Like most of the original-language text in the series, the Telugu script is printed in a custom-designed font.)

The inaugural volumes include two works from the Muslim tradition with broad contemporary resonances. The ecstatic Sufi lyrics of the 18th-century Punjabi poet Bullhe Shah, translated by Christopher Shackle, have been sung by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and featured in Bollywood movies. The first of multiple projected volumes of Abu’l-Fazl’s “History of Akbar,” translated from Persian by Wheeler M. Thackston, chronicles the early life of a Mughal emperor celebrated today as a unifier who promoted religious pluralism.

The initial Murty release also includes the Therigatha, an anthology of verses by and about the earliest ordained Buddhist women, first written down in Sri Lanka more than 2,000 years ago and considered some of the world’s oldest surviving women’s poetry.

Those verses, which capture the women’s relief at being free of constricting roles as wives and mothers, have been embraced by modern Buddhists seeking a vision of Buddhism as concerned with the oppressed, the translator, Charles Hallisey, said. But they have yet to claim their rightful place in the broader canon of world literature, in part because of the stiffness of previous translations from Pali, a dead language, he said.