DE version is available. Content is displayed in original English for accuracy.
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.
Discussion (26 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
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.
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.
This with Amar Chitra Katha would be great.