I’ve always found it hard to explore the Mahābhārata and Rāmāyaṇa online. Most content is either long-form or scattered, and understanding a character like Karna or Bhishma usually means opening multiple tabs.
I built https://www.ithihasas.in/ to solve that. It is a simple character explorer that lets you navigate the epics through people and their relationships instead of reading everything linearly.
This was also an experiment with Claude CLI. I was able to put together the first version in a couple of hours. It helped a lot with generating structured content and speeding up development, but UX and data consistency still needed manual work.
Would love feedback on the UX and whether this way of exploring mythology works for you.
Eg: Indra would have a much larger role in original versions of mahābhārata and rāmāyana compared to Hindu popular conscience. In Ramayana he defeated kabandha, lent weapons to Rāma, and the hero is frequently compared to him as "Indra among men" - making him technically the most mentioned God in Valmiki's text (https://manasataramgini.wordpress.com/2017/02/12/the-ramaya%...).
In Mahabharata he fights equally with the krishna-arjuna in the burning of khandava episode until a truce is reached (and for reasons beyond the present redactions of the epic and owing to his prominence as ārya national god, the new capital of pāndavas is named.... Indraprastha!).
This kind of stuff is virtually unknown to AI, which reinforces the present pop understanding of the epics, which is to say super shallow and not very interesting.
I’ve been working on a similar project for biblical texts. For example, here’s a character detail page for David: https://hypr.bible/en/entities/person/david/
I’m finding that character dictionaries like this are useful to people who want to engage with ancient texts but are not very familiar with them, but even if one is familiar, they are still quite helpful.
The Crimson Dusk theme is a nice touch too. Looking forward to seeing how the data coverage grows over time!
Right now the data isn’t directly modeled from primary sources like the Valmiki Ramayana or the Mahabharata. It’s an MVP built quickly using curated summaries, so the graph is definitely incomplete.
Planning to expand coverage and move towards a more accurate, source-grounded knowledge graph over time.
E.g. Laxman Rekha incident is not present in Valmiki Ramayana but is present in societal consciousness.
- The default vis has very low contrast (despite changing theme colors).. perhaps make the contrast stronger. I find this is the case with most AI-driven websites :-/ Same for some of the standard text ("family lineage", "group connections, etc)
- Pls cite the sources. That would be useful / important
- The dynasty tree looks useful... But is it incomplete? Or is only the visualization capped at some limit?
- Wasn't sure what the "Sections" dropdown on the left does
The challenge for sure is about the sheer number of characters, the number of years/decades in these epics, the complexity.
Would love to see some references, perhaps with quotes in Sankskrit / transliterated to English, at key points. [yes, this is challenging, no doubt]
Hope this is useful
Keep up the good work!
It’s not a problem just for us Hindus either. I see so much terrible Jesus/angel “artwork” everywhere. It makes me start to wonder if maybe the Wahabbis were onto something with their complete taboo around depictions of God or the prophets.
South Asian religions are in an especially bad position because so many works related to them have never been digitized (and quite frankly, in some cases what's available on the internet is of extremely low quality) [1]. I'd be pretty concerned if someone were to rely on entirely on these models since the probability of hallucinations (or at the very least, erasure of regional/ideological diversity) probably skyrockets because the information was never actually there in the training data to begin with.
[1] I was able to find a few works of Newari Buddhist iconography recently, so it might be changing: https://web.archive.org/web/20240901130203/https://download..... It still has a few mistakes and doesn't compare to what's out there, though.
That's a view you get in every single book, and it looks really weird here. I feel like it's important to get this really basic stuff right before doing the cool-looking graph visuals.
This with Amar Chitra Katha would be great.
- what actually happened may not be what was written
- what was written 5000 yrs ago may not be what you are reading now. lots of people may have created their own versions or modified the original in ways you did not foresee
- the author who originally wrote the books may also have exaggerated for storytelling effect
- the probability of all of the above mathematically speaking is non zero
india vedic texts are passed through "oral tradition" where you recite same text backward and forward and through patterned permutations of words, if there is error it shows up, it's like redundant error-correcting encoding / repetition validation
- my point is that most people fail to consider the fact that there may have been major errors during the entire period of 5000 yrs
So they exist in many rescensions across India each with their own edits and interpolations. Some attempt has been made to create "critical" editions by taking the intersection of existing manuscripts but since there's no expectation of fidelity in transmission, we will never know what the original stories were.
So you can get even the western indologists to agree the battle of 10 kings mentioned in Rigveda very likely happened, and a Vasishtha and a Vishwamitra and a Trasadasyu existed in real life. However the epics leave out or conflict in many details with the aforementioned Vedic texts. Eg: a shantanu finds mention in Rigveda, a Parikshit and Janamejaya are mentioned in later samhitas. However there's no mention of pāndavas, kāuravas or a grand scale war. Neither there is a mention of a vyāsa / krishna dvaipayana in vasishtha's lineage in the accurately transmitted texts. It's very difficult to take Mahābhārata as an accurate historical document.
> Draupadi-- strength 6, wisdom 8
Are you creating RPG characters?
Its clear you used AI to create the whole thing, but did you stop to think if it makes sense?
