[aatharuv]

2 decades ago, when X windows support for Indian language display in Unicode was spotty at best, I'd created an LD_PRELOAD hack, libxindic, to do character reordering for mostly correct display (It really didn't do the right thing with Tamil as Tamil ligates the -u and -uu matras to the base characters. It was useful back then, and even worked with Mozilla (but was a bit unstable).

http://www.mit.edu/afs/sipb/user/aatharuv/projects/xindic/