7 ms·

Show HN: Ithihāsas – a character explorer for Hindu epics, built in a few hours

176 points by cvrajeesh 5mo ago

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/ 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.

dhruvmittal 5mo 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.
ksdme9 5mo ago
Is it just my setup or is the contrast so bad that I cannot read anything.
ashtavakra 5mo 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)
- cvrajeesh 5mo 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.
  - wordspotting 5mo 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.
  - TheLNL 5mo 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.
- jauntywundrkind 5mo 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!!
FrancisGerard 5mo 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/ 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.
aanet 5mo 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 5mo ago
[deleted]
avrionov 5mo ago
Looks great. Which libraries / themes did you use?
- cvrajeesh 5mo ago
  D3 for Viz, NextJS and Fuse for search
stinger 5mo 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_smith 5mo 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.
phyzix5761 5mo ago
Very nice. Is the UI inspired by Org Roam UI?
PradeetPatel 5mo 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!
- naravara 5mo 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.
  - amritananda 5mo 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.bajracharya.org/books/iconography-of-nepalese-buddhism.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20240901130203/https://download..... It still has a few mistakes and doesn't compare to what's out there, though.
danish00111 5mo 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.
random_walker 5mo ago
Nice, good one!!
cleverdash 5mo ago
[dead]
qwertyuiop_ 5mo ago
[flagged]
ms7892 5mo ago
Too cool
atulvi 5mo 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.
lateforwork 5mo ago
Very nice. The relationship graph flickers too much when I move the mouse over it. Consider adding an animated fade.
alephnerd 5mo 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.
ultrasounder 5mo 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.
swaminarayan 5mo ago
this is not mythology. this is ithihasas meaning thus it happened
- vivzkestrel 5mo ago
  - but there is one point you have not accounted for - 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
  - faangguyindia 5mo ago
    >- 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 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
    - vivzkestrel 5mo ago
      - you dont know if there was an error that happened when it went via recitation from one generation to the other before it was converged into a book - 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
    - never_inline 5mo ago
      Dude, that sort of transmission is only applicable to the four vedas (and even they exist in rescensions, some have later insertions eg: Maitrayani samhita, and the meter is generally lost due to language shifts). When you say "Vedic" those are the texts which count. Rāmāyana and Mahabhārata are not really "vedic" nor subject to such accurate transmission rules. 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.
the_arun 5mo ago
Do you use any DB? like Neo4J? or static jsons generated at build time?
- cvrajeesh 5mo ago
  Powered by static JSON
r0b05 5mo ago
Just want to say that the UI is very pleasant.
sparin9 5mo ago
This is a genuinely delightful project. The graph-based approach to navigating the Mahābhārata and Rāmāyaṇa feels really natural — these epics are fundamentally about relationships and webs of consequence, so exploring them through a character graph rather than linear text makes a lot of sense. The Crimson Dusk theme is a nice touch too. Looking forward to seeing how the data coverage grows over time!
- ButlerianJihad 5mo ago
  You're Absolutely Right! Your original summary is not just insightful — you've cleanly delved into the best parts! What else can you share with us tonight?
quadrifoliate 5mo ago
In the Mahābhārata, what's going on with the dynasty tree of the Kurus? 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.
connectsnk 5mo ago
Very very cool. Thanks. Will explore
yalogin 5mo ago
I like the approach, however, could tell this is done by AI, someone that studied it at the periphery. The characters, if you are automating the creation, should be a lot more in depth, at least that’s what I would expect.
anilgulecha 5mo ago
it's a novelty to see the connections. One way it will be useful is to connect every character to the stories they're part of - either in the site, or in new tab. this will allow exploring the stories for each one of them. This will make people come to this for more than novelty, imo.
inveflo 5mo ago
I think the real problem isn’t just accessing data, but how fragmented the workflow is. Even with good tools, you still end up context-switching constantly.
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
shantnutiwari 5mo ago
Is this a joke? > 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?
deepikaa_s 5mo ago
I like how it's mapped out the relationship graph. The edges could be labelled to follow and validate quickly
never_inline 5mo ago
1. Is this actually based on any textual analysis or just AI generated? The popular understanding of the epic material is rather poor and the AI is stupid on it. 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%E1%B9%87a-and-a-para-ramaya%E1%B9%87a-in-numbers-i-epic-as-religion/ 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.
aos_architect 5mo ago
[dead]
rockstar2001 5mo ago
Is this fully vibe coded?
Riany 5mo ago
[dead]

176 points by cvrajeesh 5mo ago

dhruvmittal 5mo 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.

ksdme9 5mo ago

Is it just my setup or is the contrast so bad that I cannot read anything.

ashtavakra 5mo 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)

cvrajeesh 5mo 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.
- wordspotting 5mo 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.
- TheLNL 5mo 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.
jauntywundrkind 5mo 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!!

FrancisGerard 5mo 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/ 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.

aanet 5mo 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 5mo ago

[deleted]

avrionov 5mo ago

Looks great. Which libraries / themes did you use?

cvrajeesh 5mo ago
D3 for Viz, NextJS and Fuse for search

stinger 5mo 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_smith 5mo 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.

phyzix5761 5mo ago

Very nice. Is the UI inspired by Org Roam UI?

PradeetPatel 5mo 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!

naravara 5mo 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.
- amritananda 5mo 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.bajracharya.org/books/iconography-of-nepalese-buddhism.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20240901130203/https://download..... It still has a few mistakes and doesn't compare to what's out there, though.

danish00111 5mo 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.

random_walker 5mo ago

Nice, good one!!

cleverdash 5mo ago

[dead]

qwertyuiop_ 5mo ago

[flagged]

ms7892 5mo ago

Too cool

atulvi 5mo 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.

lateforwork 5mo ago

Very nice. The relationship graph flickers too much when I move the mouse over it. Consider adding an animated fade.

alephnerd 5mo 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.

ultrasounder 5mo 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.

swaminarayan 5mo ago

this is not mythology. this is ithihasas meaning thus it happened

vivzkestrel 5mo ago
- but there is one point you have not accounted for - 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
- faangguyindia 5mo ago
  >- 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 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
  - vivzkestrel 5mo ago
    - you dont know if there was an error that happened when it went via recitation from one generation to the other before it was converged into a book - 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
  - never_inline 5mo ago
    Dude, that sort of transmission is only applicable to the four vedas (and even they exist in rescensions, some have later insertions eg: Maitrayani samhita, and the meter is generally lost due to language shifts). When you say "Vedic" those are the texts which count. Rāmāyana and Mahabhārata are not really "vedic" nor subject to such accurate transmission rules. 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.

the_arun 5mo ago

Do you use any DB? like Neo4J? or static jsons generated at build time?

cvrajeesh 5mo ago
Powered by static JSON

r0b05 5mo ago

Just want to say that the UI is very pleasant.

sparin9 5mo ago

This is a genuinely delightful project. The graph-based approach to navigating the Mahābhārata and Rāmāyaṇa feels really natural — these epics are fundamentally about relationships and webs of consequence, so exploring them through a character graph rather than linear text makes a lot of sense. The Crimson Dusk theme is a nice touch too. Looking forward to seeing how the data coverage grows over time!

ButlerianJihad 5mo ago
You're Absolutely Right! Your original summary is not just insightful — you've cleanly delved into the best parts! What else can you share with us tonight?

quadrifoliate 5mo ago

In the Mahābhārata, what's going on with the dynasty tree of the Kurus? 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.

connectsnk 5mo ago

Very very cool. Thanks. Will explore

yalogin 5mo ago

I like the approach, however, could tell this is done by AI, someone that studied it at the periphery. The characters, if you are automating the creation, should be a lot more in depth, at least that’s what I would expect.

anilgulecha 5mo ago

it's a novelty to see the connections. One way it will be useful is to connect every character to the stories they're part of - either in the site, or in new tab. this will allow exploring the stories for each one of them. This will make people come to this for more than novelty, imo.

inveflo 5mo ago

I think the real problem isn’t just accessing data, but how fragmented the workflow is. Even with good tools, you still end up context-switching constantly.

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]

shantnutiwari 5mo ago

Is this a joke? > 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?

deepikaa_s 5mo ago

I like how it's mapped out the relationship graph. The edges could be labelled to follow and validate quickly

never_inline 5mo ago

1. Is this actually based on any textual analysis or just AI generated? The popular understanding of the epic material is rather poor and the AI is stupid on it. 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%E1%B9%87a-and-a-para-ramaya%E1%B9%87a-in-numbers-i-epic-as-religion/ 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.

aos_architect 5mo ago

[dead]

rockstar2001 5mo ago

Is this fully vibe coded?

Riany 5mo ago

[dead]