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.

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

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%...).

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.

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.

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.

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!

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)

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

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Looks great. Which libraries / themes did you use?

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.

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.

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

Is this fully vibe coded?

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

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

Just want to say that the UI is very pleasant.

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

Very very cool. Thanks. Will explore

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

Nice, good one!!

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?

Too cool