Krishna Seshadri

Krishna Seshadri is a Mumbai resident who turned a long-held love of history into BharatRajya, a free website where anyone can pick a year and see which kingdoms and dynasties ruled each part of India. The site was featured in episode 137 of Mann Ki Baat in August 2026 ^[1].

A fifteen-year idea

Seshadri, who trained as an engineer and works in marketing, says Indian history is usually taught one empire or region at a time, so learners rarely see the whole country at once ^[1][2]. He wanted to show, for example, who else ruled while the Mughals did, or who held the North East when Vasco da Gama reached Calicut ^[2]. He carried the idea for about 15 years but had no programming background ^[2].

He finally built the site in his spare time, after work and at weekends, using the AI assistant Claude to write the code step by step ^[2][3]. He describes it as a hobby project, built by one person rather than a committee of historians ^[2].

The atlas

BharatRajya has a timeline slider covering roughly 700 CE to the present, mapped across about 1,000 districts ^[2][3]. Alongside large empires such as the Mughals and Marathas it shows princely states and lesser-known powers, including the Cholas, Pallavas, Karkotas of Kashmir and Ahoms of Assam ^[1][3]. Readers can send corrections through the site, and its map data is released under a CC0 licence so students, teachers and researchers can reuse it freely ^[2][3].

The Prime Minister said he came across the site on social media, explored it and spoke to Seshadri by phone for the broadcast ^[1][3]. Seshadri said the recognition was the biggest validation he could have hoped for ^[2].