About this atlas

The Mahabharata Atlas is a map and timeline of the epic. Move through the story event by event and watch kingdoms take sides, characters travel, and the war gather. It is meant for general readers and students who want to see the geography, the kinship and the politics of the story rather than only read about them, and who want to know what the oldest text says as against what retellings have added.

Where to start

If you have never read the Mahabharata, open event 1 and read the short version of each event; the full story and the source notes are there when you want them. The journeys tell the same story one person at a time, in plainer words; Yudhishthira’s road is the one that carries the epic’s questions about promises, lies and what a king owes.
If you think you already know it, go to Not in the text: the scenes everyone remembers that the Critical Edition does not contain, with where each comes from.
If you are teaching or looking something up, the family tree, the levy of armies, the Bhagavad Gita and the characters each stand on their own. Every event and person has its own address, so a link takes a class straight to it.

What the text is

Facts here follow the Critical Edition prepared at the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute (BORI, Pune, 1933–1966), in the English translation by Bibek Debroy (Penguin, 10 volumes). Chapter references use the Critical Edition’s numbering, written as parva.adhyaya: 2.43 is the forty-third chapter of the Sabha Parva.

Many of the best-known scenes of the epic come from later manuscripts, regional versions, or modern films and television. When one of them is relevant, it is shown and labelledTraditional orAdaptation, never presented as what the text says. Statements labelledCritical Edition are things the Critical Edition text actually contains. Where that text came from, in its own words and in the scholars’, is on Where the text comes from. For the full bibliography, the translations used, and the references behind each place on the map, see the Sources page.

What the map is not

No place in the Mahabharata has a surveyed location. The kingdoms drawn here are rough blobs centred on where scholars and tradition put them; their edges are deliberately wobbly to signal that they are sketches, not borders. Every marker carries a confidence label:

Traditional site a modern place that tradition and often archaeology associate with the ancient name (Hastinapur, Kurukshetra, Dwarka). The association is plausible, not proven.
Approximate the text gives a region or a direction but no site (the Kamyaka forest, Kamboja, Indrakila). The marker only shows the general area.
Disputed scholars disagree substantially.

The map can also colour present-day districts by the nearest kingdom. That view is off by default and stays off until you switch it on, because it looks like a map of borders and the epic has none: the districts are today’s administrative units, and the colours are an artist’s impression of reach, not territory. If you screenshot it for a class, say so.

The coastline and rivers come from Natural Earth (public domain) and show the present day. The Sarasvati, central to the story, is drawn by Natural Earth as the seasonal Ghaggar, and ancient river courses differed from today’s. No absolute dates are given: the timeline is narrative order only.

Scope of this version

The atlas runs from Shantanu and Ganga to the ascent to heaven, in 51 events with at least one in each of the eighteen parvas (18 in all): the Kuru line and the Pandavas’ youth, the dice game and the exile, the levy and the embassies, the Bhagavad Gita as an event of its own, each of the eighteen days at Kurukshetra, the night raid, the women on the field, Yudhishthira’s coronation and Bhishma’s teaching, the horse sacrifice, the elders’ years in the forest, the end of the Vrishnis, the great departure, what Yudhishthira sees at the end, and how the story came to be told. 7 journeys follow one person each from birth to the end of the story.

The grain is uneven, and on purpose: one event per war day, but the twelve years in the forest are one event and Bhishma’s long teaching in the Shanti and Anushasana Parvas is one more. The pre-war books and the teaching books are where the next events will be added. Duryodhana’s road is not yet written.

For teachers and parents

The site holds two registers. The journeys and the In short opener on every event are written in plain words for young readers. The full story on each event, the source notes and the Sources page are written for adults and older students, and they tell the text as it is.

The epic contains rape, abduction, child-killing, gambling with people as stakes, and a queen dragged into a hall during her period. The atlas does not soften these. 8 events carry a short For teachers and parents line at the top saying what is in them, so you can decide before a class reads on.
Nothing on the site needs an account, and nothing a reader does leaves their browser. Progress, the puzzle score and the card deck are kept in the browser only.
For a first class, the family tree (“both sides of the war are Kurus”), the levy of armies (the political map of the war) and Not in the text (what the text says versus what television taught) each work on their own in a few minutes.

Who is responsible

The atlas is made and edited by one person, an independent reader of the epic rather than an academic Sanskritist, with the Critical Edition e-text open beside the translation. Every chapter number on the site was checked against that text, and every story labelled Traditional or Adaptation was searched for in it before being labelled. Where scholars disagree, the Sources page says who was followed. The readings are one editor’s; the data files are public in the repository so that anyone can check them, and every page has a Suggest a correction link. Corrections with a chapter reference are looked up and, where right, applied.

How it is built

Everything on screen comes from a handful of data files: 53 places, 21 kingdoms, 53 characters, 51 events and 7 journeys, plus the glossary and the family tree. Each event records a summary, its Critical Edition chapters, source notes, the characters and places involved, journeys, and a delta: which kingdoms changed sides, who moved where. The state shown at any point of the timeline is the sum of all deltas up to that point, so adding an event never requires editing the ones before it.

Built with Next.js, TypeScript, React and MapLibre GL JS. The map renders entirely from bundled GeoJSON with no tile server.

Character art

Each character carries an emblem drawn for this atlas: Arjuna’s bow, Bhima’s mace, Karna’s sun and earrings, Bhishma’s bed of arrows. Most cards also carry a portrait painted for the atlas; the rest show the emblem until theirs is done. See the Characters page.