What Counts as History
The Sanskrit word for history is itihasa: "thus indeed it was." The tradition applied the word to the Mahabharata. A war between cousins, and around it some 89,000 verses of argument about what a person owes to family, to a kingdom, and to the truth. The choice of word says how the tradition understood its own past: not as a sequence of dates but as experience worked through, and set down so that it could be worked through again.
What Homer is to Greece, Vyasa is to India.
That understanding decides what Indian history is made of. Chronicle is one part of it: Kalhana's Rajatarangini for Kashmir, Bana's life of Harsha, the edicts that Ashoka cut into rock and the grants that later kings cut into copper. The larger part was kept in other forms. A grammar that fixed a language. A law code, and the centuries of commentary that argued with it. A medical treatise. A manual of statecraft. A hymn, a play, a temple wall. Each is a record of a problem people faced and the way they thought it through.
A register lists what happened. A history holds what a people made of what happened. To study Indian history is therefore to study the Vedas and the epics, the philosophers and the physicians, the poets and the lawgivers, alongside the coins, the inscriptions and the cities. Not as background to the history. As the history itself.
Read this way, Indian history stops being a subject apart from Indian literature, philosophy and science. It is the frame that holds them together, and the way in.
What the Record Holds
Sorted by the questions it was answering, the corpus reads as a catalogue of experience rather than a shelf of genres. Nine questions, and the texts that took them up.
How should a state be run?
Kautilya's Arthashastra sets out taxation, espionage, diplomacy, law and the regulation of trade in a single manual. The Ashokan edicts, carved across the subcontinent in the 3rd century BCE, are a ruler's own public account of how he chose to govern.
What do we owe each other?
The Mahabharata and the Ramayana work the question through character and consequence: a promise kept at ruinous cost, a war fought inside a family. The Dharmashastra literature then turned the argument into law, commentary and dispute.
How does the body work, and fail?
The Charaka Samhita on medicine and the Sushruta Samhita on surgery: diagnosis, pharmacology, surgical instruments and the ethics of the physician, compiled across the early centuries of the common era. The foundation of Ayurveda.
How does language work?
Panini's Ashtadhyayi, composed around the 4th century BCE, describes Sanskrit in just under 4,000 rules. It remains the reference grammar of the language, and a working model of how a complete rule system can be built.
What can be known, and how?
Six schools of philosophy, each with a foundational text and centuries of commentary: Nyaya on inference, Vaisheshika on matter, Samkhya on the categories of experience, Yoga on practice, Mimamsa on interpretation, Vedanta on the self. Buddhist and Jain thinkers, Nagarjuna and Dignaga among them, argued with all six.
How do we count, measure and predict?
Aryabhata's astronomy (499 CE), Brahmagupta's rules for zero and negative numbers (628 CE), and Jain treatises on very large numbers and combinations. The decimal place-value system the world now uses was worked out in this literature.
What did they hold sacred, and how did they say it?
The Rigveda: 1,028 hymns, the oldest layer of the record, carried by voice for well over two thousand years before writing became its usual vehicle. The Upanishads that follow turn the hymns' questions inward.
How did they imagine and perform?
Kalidasa's Shakuntala, Shudraka's Mricchakatika, the Jataka tales, the Tamil Sangam anthologies. Drama, courtly poetry, moral fable and love lyric, each a record of what an audience recognised as true.
How far did they travel, and who came to them?
Roman coins in Kerala and Tamil Nadu. Sanskrit inscriptions in Java and Cambodia. The temple plan of Angkor, the monastic chronicles of Sri Lanka, the Chola fleet in the Bay of Bengal in the 11th century. Exchange recorded in coin, stone and foreign account.
A Record Still in Use
Most ancient records are read across a gap: the language dead, the cities buried, the rites extinct. India's record is unusual in one respect: much of it never went out of use. Sanskrit is still taught, composed and recited. Vedic recitation continues in the form in which it was memorised. The Mahabharata is performed, adapted and argued over by hundreds of millions of people.
The material record makes the same point in stone. The planned cities of Harappa and Dholavira, the Ashokan pillars, the painted caves of Ajanta, the Chola bronzes, the temples at Khajuraho and Konark: not the remains of a vanished people but the built layer of a tradition that kept building.
A student of most ancient records works with what a civilisation left behind. A student of India can also watch what it is still doing. That is the particular offer of this subject, and the reason its study is history rather than archaeology alone.
The Institution Behind BharatVidya
The Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute was founded on 6 July 1917 in Pune, and named after Ramkrishna Gopal Bhandarkar, a pioneer of scientific Orientology in India. For 109 years BORI has been an institutional anchor for the study, preservation and critical editing of India's textual record.
BORI's defining scholarly work is the Critical Edition of the Mahabharata. Begun in 1919 under V. S. Sukthankar and completed in 1966, it collated manuscripts from across the subcontinent to establish the constituted text of the epic: some 89,000 verses across 18 books. Forty-seven years of work on a single text.
In 2007 the Rigveda manuscripts preserved at BORI were inscribed on UNESCO's Memory of the World Register. The Annals of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, published since 1918, runs to 99 volumes on JSTOR.
How to Begin
For most of its history, BORI's collections and scholars have been reachable only by those who could come to Pune, read Sanskrit, or find their way through the conventions of academic Orientology. BharatVidya, a joint venture of BORI and Matra Media, exists to remove that condition.
The courses are taught by scholars who have spent careers inside these texts. They begin from the primary source, are framed as history, literature and philosophy, and assume curiosity rather than prior training. Learning is self-paced, with lifetime access, and BORI issues a certificate of completion for each course.
The catalogue covers archaeology and ancient geography, the Vedas and Upanishads, the Mahabharata, the Arthashastra and Dharmashastra, the Darshanas, Ayurveda and ancient mathematics, Sanskrit drama, temple architecture, and the Maratha state. For anyone who wants the record in the order it was made, the courses are arranged as a single reading order, from the Harappan cities to the seventeenth century.
Primary Sources
Each course begins from the text itself. The difference between studying the Arthashastra and reading about it is the difference between knowledge and hearsay.
Scholars, by Way of BORI
Faculty who have spent decades inside a single tradition, teaching what they research.
Self-Paced, Lifetime Access
No deadlines, no expiry. Return to a lecture a year later. The material waits.
Begin with the Chapter You Have Always Meant to Read
The Arthashastra. The Mahabharata. The Darshanas. The Vedas. Each is a chapter of the same record, and the chapters have an order.
See the Reading OrderFrequently Asked Questions
Indian history is the record of what people in the subcontinent lived through and what they made of it. That record includes epics, law, philosophy, medicine, grammar, mathematics and art, alongside chronicles, inscriptions and monuments.
The Indian tradition classified the Mahabharata as itihasa, meaning "thus indeed it was," rather than as poetry. Like Homer for Greece, it records how a people understood war, duty and kingship, which is what historians study an epic for.
Academic. BharatVidya courses are taught by scholars, built on primary texts, and framed as history, literature and philosophy. They are open to learners of any background.
No. Courses are taught in English or Marathi, assume no prior training, and introduce technical terms as they arise. A free introductory Sanskrit course exists for learners who want the language itself.
BORI is a research institute founded in Pune in 1917. It holds over 28,000 manuscripts, produced the Critical Edition of the Mahabharata between 1919 and 1966, and its Rigveda manuscripts are inscribed on UNESCO's Memory of the World Register.
Archaeology and ancient geography, the Vedas and Upanishads, the Mahabharata, the Arthashastra and Dharmashastra, Indian philosophy, Ayurveda and ancient mathematics, Sanskrit drama, temple architecture, Odissi, and the Maratha state.
Yes. India's contributions to mathematics, linguistics, medicine, philosophy and statecraft are part of world intellectual history, and much of the tradition is still practised, which is rare for an ancient record.