Posting in Hindi (and eight other Indian languages)
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A lot of small businesses post in English because the tools were in English. Their customers talk to them in Hindi, Marathi or Tamil all day, and then the Instagram post arrives in a language half of them skim past.
Which language should you post in?
The one your customers speak to you in. Not the one that feels more professional.
If people walk in and say “bhaiya, yeh kitne ka hai”, write the caption the way they would say it. A caption in the customer’s own language gets read properly instead of scanned.
Some businesses mix, and that is fine too. English for the price and the product name, Hindi for the sentence around it. That is how most people actually speak.
Speaking is faster than typing
Typing Hindi on a phone keyboard is slow, and transliteration keyboards guess wrong often enough to be annoying.
Talking is faster. Hold the mic button and describe the post out loud, in your own language, the way you would explain it to someone. Your phone’s own speech recognition turns it into text. The audio is not stored anywhere.
Most people find this the single biggest time saver, more than the design itself.
Nine languages, the whole app
Chitra runs in nine Indian languages — the menus, the buttons and the captions, not just the input box. You can switch the whole app to the language you think in.
The Hindi AI post generator page shows what this looks like end to end.
A note on hashtags
Captions in Hindi, hashtags usually in Roman script. #Kurti gets searched more than #कुर्ती, even by people who read Hindi comfortably. Worth testing both if your customers are local. More on this in hashtags for Indian small businesses.
Festivals read differently
A Diwali greeting in Hindi lands warmer than the same words in English for most audiences in north India. A Pongal post in Tamil, likewise. If you only switch languages once a year, switch for the festival posts. See festival posts that look like your shop.
Check the words before posting
AI writes the caption, and it can get a word or a form of address wrong in any language. Read it once before you post, the same as you would with English. The AI content disclosure explains what is generated and what to check.
If you are just starting, the guide walks through your first post, and about Chitra explains who builds it.
More to read
How a salon can post every week without hiring a designer
A realistic weekly routine for a salon that has no marketing person, no designer and about fifteen minutes to spare.
Hashtags for Indian small businesses: fewer, but better
Thirty hashtags on a local shop post does almost nothing. Here is what to use instead, and why your city name matters more than #love.
How to write captions that sound like you
A caption has one job: make the next step obvious. Here is a simple shape that works for almost any small business post.