Ithihāsas
a character explorer for Hindu epics, built in a few hours
Details
- External ID
- 47756569
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Ithihāsas
- Website domain
- ithihasas.in
- Launched
- April 13, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 176
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.9505141388174807
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Description
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.
Enrichment
- Theme
- Vertical
- Media & entertainment
- Function
- Search & retrieval
- Audience
- B2C
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- character explorer for hindu epics
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Yes The author built this interactive character explorer in just a few hours using Next.js and frontend graph libraries. Curating the text and wiring up D3/force-directed graph visualizations is well within vibe-coding reach.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: D3 for visualization, NextJS and Fuse for search, Neo4J database
Concerns raised: AI-generated content lacks textual rigor and misses scholarly details, Character stat ratings (like RPG attributes) don't make scholarly sense, Accuracy concerns with oral tradition transmission over 5000 years, Oversimplifies fragmented Hindu religious traditions and regional variations, Basic genealogy (Kuru dynasty tree) appears incorrect in visualization
Feature requests: Label relationship edges to clarify and validate connections, Connect characters to specific stories/episodes they appear in, More in-depth character profiles beyond AI automation, Cross-reference multiple manuscript rescensions and textual variants
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 37 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #3 of 38 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 127 days after the earliest competitor.
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- Bhagavan · hn · 2026-02-08 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.43
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- A GUI for non programmers for Epic's version control system Lore · hn · 2026-09-21 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.36
- black-myth-wukong-interactive-map-overlay · github · 2026-09-13 · 41 upvotes · similarity 0.36
- Bhakti Arohan · ph · 2026-09-28 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.36
- Vaghenu, a meter aware sloka-to-chant, TTS for Sanskrit · hn · 2026-06-30 · 10 upvotes · similarity 0.35
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.