India is one of the ancient cultures of our world. It is the land where many early and influential languages, discoveries, ideas, religions, architectures and arts emerged.
Prachin is a Sanskrit word (प्राचीन) that means "ancient, historic, old". We are a philanthropic, volunteers-based resource about "ancient, historic, old" sites and monuments in India.
On this website, you will find information about many of the less known, sometimes difficult to find historic sites of India. Our aim is to present field-verified, accurate, unbiased information about these heritage sites of India.
We visit, study, fact-check and provide the following information for free:- GPS data, links to maps and directions, so you can find and explore each if and when you wish to
- A timeline map, that places the historic site in comparison with others in India and elsewhere in the world
- Relative location of sites
- Convenient thematic lists
- A summary about the historic site – incomplete notes, what makes the site interesting, the arts and architecture, its significance and its relationship with other sites or ideas.
- A short list of useful publications and links we have reviewed before or after our visit. These are also not exhaustive. Some may contain information or views that we may or may not agree with. We will try to include select peer-reviewed scholarly publications, other notes and a diversity of views from different authors, web links that we believe are helpful resources at the time we included them. By including them on our website, we do not endorse the publication or the author(s), nor do we recommend them as the final word or even one to be treated as an authority on the monument or subject. We trust you will read and reflect on the links and scholarly sources we provide as a starting point.
- The pages of this website also include a selection of photos, photo-albums and architectural drawings. We own these as a part of our much larger collection. We herewith donate them into public domain worldwide without any restrictions. You can view, download, reproduce, modify and use these photos in any form, for any purposes including for commercial use, without asking for permission. In other words, all photos and drawings posted on this website are irrevocably dedicated into CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain. If you use our drawings or photos, we would appreciate if you include a link to this website and attribute it to us; however, it is okay if you do not because we do not insist you do.
All drawings and photos included on this website are a select subset from a larger collection of photographs, architectural drawings and plans we own in our archives. We have studied and photographed these sites with 21st century equipment, recording the GPS, compass, EXIF and other data. For some monuments, you may find a larger collection of our CC0 1.0 Universal public domain dedication and CC BY-ND creative commons dedication on archive.org, wikimedia commons and other creative commons inspired websites. Please contact us if you need access to our much larger collection of photographs than the few we post here.
This project is on-going. We have covered most of the historic sites in the following states: Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Chhattisgarh, Odisha, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh. Projects in the following states are in progress: Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Himachal Pradesh, Gujarat, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, West Bengal and Assam. Projects in other states and Union Territories are expected in the future. Our collection is already well over 1,100 sites in India.
While we make efforts to visit more sites and expand our coverage, we are not an exhaustive source of all historic sites in any region of India. We focus predominantly on pre-15th century historic sites of India, including but not limiting to those that are centrally protected by Archaeological Survey of India as national monuments, those sites that are state government protected, and those studied in scholarly publications since the 19th century.
We are thankful for the resources and encouragement provided by the Tapesh Yadav Foundation for Indian Heritage. It has underwritten the travel and curation efforts for this project, and irrevocably released all its rights into the CC0 1.0 Universal public domain.
Our purpose:
Our purpose and motivations include:
- Document the condition of the historic sites of India as we found them during our visit. We hope that the photos of the sites will in part bring attention and help preserve the pre-15th century Buddhist, Hindu, Jain and Sikh heritage of India. Some sites are crippling, a few so neglected that they are overgrown with weeds and tree limbs.
- We seek to freely share photographs and resources of over 2,000 historic sites in India. We hope to contribute to a better, more thorough and further objective study of these sites.
- We seek to build and freely share field verified, fact-based and scholarship-driven resources about India's Buddhist, Hindu, Jain and Sikh heritage to the curious. We hope our effort will someday create an information resource that parallels those available on Christian sites in Europe with Google My Maps and others (e.g. on Byzantine Catholic Churches, Eastern Orthodox Churches, The Convocation of Episcopal Churches, Presbyterian Churches, Genuine Greek Orthodox Churches, etc). Similar information is also available about Jewish sites, Islamic sites, and worldwide UNESCO sites. Customized Google My Maps for religious and historic sites have been available without and with public transport locations such as airports, for anyone to search and find on the internet. We thank Google Maps for the tools it has provided in past to others for years. We request and hope Google will treat Eastern religions with equal respect, equal welcome, applying same policies and terms that allow the above customized My Maps and related blogs. We hope Google staff will not selectively target and discriminate against equivalent resources for Eastern religions, that Google employees will treat resources for all religions without any systemic bias and prejudice.
- We will always be a free resource.
- We welcome your comments, suggestions and requests for access to our larger database of site photographs and architectural drawings. However, we may not respond to a comment or show it on our website.
Features guide:
Some notes on the maps we embed on a page:
- The pinned site location is based on our field visit and the location data we recorded. In our field experience, sometimes Google maps has errors such as
- wrong location (by a few blocks or a few kilometers),
- wrong photos, or frivolous photos/videos posted for a pinned Buddhist, Hindu, Jain or Sikh temple (some show photos of temples that are 100s of kilometer away, some photos are absurd spam)
- multiple pinned sites for the same historic site in the same town or village – all are wrong, or only one is correct, or
- a pinned location with temple name by the side of a road or in the middle of a farmer's field where there is no temple or historic site anywhere within a mile. This and other errors may be because (a) Google maps relies on crowd-sourcing for numerous remote historic sites in India and (b) its review procedures are flawed or careless about Indian historic and religious sites. We hope you will find our fair-use criticism and site location corrections useful in reducing such crowd-sourced misinformation.
- A numbered site on the embedded map can be clicked to open the information card in a side frame. This may provide a quick look and some scholarly comments.
- To reveal nearby sites that may be historically related to a numbered site, zoom in (+) and zoom out (-), buttons found near the lower left. More sites can be found with click-and-hold-and-drag-to-move the map.
- Click the share icon near the upper right corner if you wish to email comments or suggestions.
- See Google's My Maps features for additional help, changes Google makes to its My Maps features over time, and Google's restrictions.
- On a few occasions we may use an image available from another source to better inform the reader. We will do so only when that image was published with Creative Commons (CC) license. These are not in public domain, they carry the terms of the CC license. When we do, we will identify those images, attribute the source, type of CC license, and provide link(s) where appropriate. If you click the links, you can get more information about nested-history-of-authors, their nested-sources along with the nested-CC terms. For convenience, we provide here a central link to CC terms: Link 1, Link 2.
Thank you for visiting.
