Hi HN!
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.
swaminarayana minute ago
this is not mythology. this is ithihasas meaning thus it happened
stinger7 hours ago
I like the attempt but mythology is significantly more layered that just the study of their characters at the end. A single perspective of these stories will help you get the lay of the land but you need to be very cautious if you want to use this to draw lessons and conclusions from them. For example, the protagonist and antagonist are different from the perspective of the other characters. Both these epics are all about the nuance and that needs to be captured effectively to do justice to them
ethan_smith4 hours ago
Good point. One way to handle this might be to show the same event from multiple character perspectives - like how Karna's story looks completely different depending on whether you enter it from Kunti's node vs Duryodhana's. The graph structure actually lends itself well to this since you could attach different narrative framings to each edge.
ultrasounderan hour ago
Absolutely slick UI and wonderful implementation. As an ardent follower of Santana Dharma I admire OP’s courage and grit to put this piece of work out there. More power to OP and hoping to see more Epics included. Thanks for making and sharing this.
danish001116 hours ago
Feels like you created an Obsidian of the entire Mahābhārata and Rāmāyaṇa... I love the Crimson Dusk theme. I think, for the relationship graph, when the clusters get too overloaded in some places, they should separate out even when I zoom in. When I zoom in, they're still too close to each other which makes it hard to read the bottom right section of Mahabharata.
FrancisGerard7 hours ago
Very cool! I like how cool it is to see the graph, but at the current density it’s a bit hard to read.
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.
ashtavakra7 hours ago
Good attempt. What were the sources for these graphs? Orginals? Valmiki Ramayanam and Vyasa Mahabharata? Looking at Mahabharata's relationship graph on the website - it feels like it is incomplete. There are probably ~400 to 500 active named characters in Mahabharata (among several thousands of named characters overall)
cvrajeeshop7 hours ago
That’s a fair point, and you’re right.
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.
TheLNL5 hours ago
I wonder how using wikidata as a source would work. I haven't checked but I assume these characters would be realtively comprehensively covered.
wordspotting6 hours ago
Can you do comparative textual analysis between original sources and popular retellings? Or highlight it better across different versions.
E.g. Laxman Rekha incident is not present in Valmiki Ramayana but is present in societal consciousness.
jauntywundrkind4 hours ago
And where did the stats come from? I find it very amusing & interesting & informative. I'm assuming you had the LLM generate these? That would be so interesting to see the prompts for!!
aanet7 hours ago
Good vis. I wasn't sure what to expect, tbh. A few notes:
- 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
[deleted]7 hours agocollapsed
PradeetPatel6 hours ago
What an incredibly diverse and inclusive UI design. I often find that Indian mythologies tend to be overshadowed, but with the advent of AI generated art and media there's been a resurgence of Indian-centric stories.
Keep up the good work!
naravara6 hours ago
The internet being flooded with AI slop masquerading as devotional artwork has been among the most depressing things about GenAI. It has no meaning or intention or devotion behind it, it’s just engagement farming. Nothing of value is added by having Devi with extra fingers on each hand and completely blurred messes for all the affects in her hands. Or pictures of Rama shooting a bansuri out of his bow. It’s just tripe. We could have told the stories with an overlay of open source artwork from Raja Ravi Varma or Gita Press or old Tanjore paintings or Chola bronzes or whatever if we couldn’t afford to hire an artist who knows what items Vishnu is supposed to be holding in each hand.
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.
amritananda5 hours ago
>Nothing of value is added by having Devi with extra fingers on each hand and completely blurred messes for all the affects in her hands
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.
SilverElfin39 minutes ago
If they’re never digitized then where do you get the originals?
dhruvmittal6 hours ago
Really cool stuff, but I really don't understand the dynasties viz. For example, Kunti somehow has her sons to the left of, right of, and above her, making the relationship unclear.
lateforwork4 hours ago
Very nice. The relationship graph flickers too much when I move the mouse over it. Consider adding an animated fade.
atulvi5 hours ago
This is cool, but also add the relationship between two entities on the edge as an edge label. Probably only when one node is highlighted.
avrionov7 hours ago
Looks great. Which libraries / themes did you use?
ksdme97 hours ago
Is it just my setup or is the contrast so bad that I cannot read anything.
phyzix57616 hours ago
Very nice. Is the UI inspired by Org Roam UI?
alephnerd3 hours ago
Would love this to be extended well beyond common Western known classics and other similarly complex ones like Ananda Math, Baburnama, etc.
This with Amar Chitra Katha would be great.
random_walker6 hours ago
Nice, good one!!
ms78925 hours ago
Too cool
cleverdash6 hours ago
[dead]
qwertyuiop_5 hours ago
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