Meet Krishna Seshadri: Mumbai man praised by PM Modi for BharatRajya, a website mapping 800 years of Indian history that he built using Claude AI despite having no coding skills

Mumbai resident Krishna Seshadri spent 15 years thinking about how Indian history could be made more engaging before he finally turned the idea into a website. His project, BharatRajya, now lets users explore India's history across more than 800 years by selecting a year and seeing which rulers controlled different parts of the country.

The project recently drew Prime Minister Narendra Modi's attention. Modi explored the website himself before highlighting it during the 137th edition of his monthly radio programme Mann Ki Baat. He also spoke to Seshadri over the phone and asked how someone who was neither from the technology industry nor a history teacher had created the platform.

Seshadri's idea began with a problem with how history is taught

Seshadri, an engineer who later pursued an MBA and moved into marketing, said his interest in history stayed with him from childhood.

He believes the subject often becomes difficult to connect with when it is reduced to dates and events instead of being presented as a larger story.

“Teach it as stories, and people carry it with them for life. Reduce it to a list of dates and events, and people start to question why the subject exists at all,” Seshadri writes on his website.

His idea was to give people a broader view of what was happening across India at the same time.

“We are never told who else existed alongside the Mughal empire. Who was around when Muhammad of Ghor invaded? Who was ruling in the North East on the day Vasco da Gama landed at Calicut?” he said.

BharatRajya was his answer to those questions.

He had the idea but not the coding skills

Seshadri had spent years thinking about the historical data and how he wanted to present it, but he lacked the technical skills to build a functioning website.

That changed with generative AI, particularly Anthropic's Claude.

“What I lacked was the technical skill to turn any of it into something real. Then Claude came along,” Seshadri said.

He said he built the platform through repeated interactions with the AI assistant.

“Line by line, prompt by prompt, and countless debugging sessions later, a fifteen-year-old idea has finally become something you can open in a browser,” he said.

Seshadri also summed up just how far he had come from his earlier relationship with programming.

“That a guy, whose only association to code was the Pincode he lived in, could build something like this, is because of these great people,” he said.

What BharatRajya actually does

BharatRajya works as an interactive historical atlas. Users can move across a timeline and explore who ruled different parts of India during different periods.

The platform currently covers roughly 1,000 districts and more than 800 years of history, from around 700 CE to modern times.

The project also follows an open educational approach. Its mapping data has been released under a Creative Commons Zero licence, allowing students, teachers and researchers to freely use and remix the map layouts.

Seshadri does not present the project as a conventional academic history book. Instead, he describes it as something built to encourage exploration.

“BharatRajya was not built by a tenured committee of historians in tweed jackets, sitting in air conditioned rooms, arguing over footnotes,” he writes.

“It was built by one below average dude, sitting after work and over the weekends, powered by chai and junk food, who loved his history and wanted to make it explorable.”

PM Modi explored the website before praising it

Modi came across Seshadri's project on social media around Ashadha Ekadashi. The Prime Minister said he found the idea interesting and decided to learn more about the person behind it.

“I found this quite interesting too and thought of learning more about it. I discovered that this work has been done by Shriman Krishna Seshadri, a resident of Mumbai,” Modi said during Mann Ki Baat.

The Prime Minister then spoke directly with Seshadri, beginning with a question about his unusual combination of interests.

“My friend, I've learned that you neither belong to the tech world nor are you a history teacher; yet, you utilized technology to create a website dedicated to history. I am very curious, how did this all come about?” Modi asked.

Seshadri explained that he had studied engineering, followed it with an MBA and eventually entered marketing, but continued to pursue his interest in history.

He told Modi that he wanted to change the way people encounter India's past and make it easier to see different kingdoms and empires together.

He specifically pointed to the Cholas, Pallavas, Karkota dynasty of Kashmir and Ahoms of Assam as examples of major powers that often receive less attention than some of the better-known empires.

Why Modi's praise mattered to Seshadri

For Seshadri, Modi's interest went beyond simply mentioning BharatRajya on Mann Ki Baat.

He was particularly pleased that the Prime Minister had actually explored the website.

“The beautiful part about this whole talk was that PM Modi ji not only talked about the website but actually explore it. He scrolled, and he had seen various empires, features that we had created, the correction box,” Seshadri said.

He described that attention as the biggest recognition the project could receive.

“For a person like me who did this as a hobby, Modi ji who is so deeply entrenched in Indian history, culture and Indian way of life, him appreciating the website is the biggest validation I can ever get for my project,” he said.

When Modi asked him about his interests outside history and technology, Seshadri jokingly replied, “I am a boring type of person who remains immersed in history and technology.”

What began as a 15-year-old idea has now become a public interactive atlas, built by someone who says he did not have the coding skills to create it himself until AI tools gave him a way to bridge that gap.