About YugMap.com

YugMap.com — every era of Bharat, on one map. It is a political time machine for Bharat and its neighbours (Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka), from the farming villages of Mehrgarh (c. 7000 BCE) to today. Pick any year and the map shows every significant polity that existed at that moment, not just the most famous empire.

One land, many names. As you move the slider, the map's heading changes to what the land was called in that age: Bharat (Bharatavarsha, in the Vedas, epics and Puranas), Hind (Al-Hind, as Al-Biruni and the Delhi Sultans knew it), Hindustan (the Mughal name), India (the British Raj), and today Bharat · India, as Article 1 of the Constitution puts it: “India, that is Bharat”.

The core design decision. Indian history is often taught as a relay — Maurya → Gupta → Delhi Sultanate → Mughal → British → India — as though one empire neatly replaced another across the whole subcontinent. That was almost never true. This app shows contemporaries side by side:

250 BCE — the Mauryas, alongside the Tamil kingdoms and Hellenistic powers of the northwest
800 CE — Palas, Pratiharas and Rashtrakutas contesting Kannauj, with Pallavas, Pandyas and many regional powers
1400 CE — a shrunken Delhi Sultanate beside Vijayanagara, the Bahmanis, Bengal, Gujarat, Malwa, Jaunpur, Mewar and the Ahoms
1700 CE — the Mughals at their widest, Marathas, Ahoms, Rajput states, Mysore and European trading posts

Three levels of detail

Level 1 — Major periods

Layers such as “Mahajanapadas” or “Tripartite Struggle”. They can overlap.

187

Level 2 — Dynasties & kingdoms

Shown on the map by default.

Level 3 — Minor polities & phases

Gana-sanghas, small kingdoms, and the dynasties within an empire (e.g. Tughlaq within the Delhi Sultanate).

391 rulers · 229 personalities · 490 events · 62 sites · 11,041 quiz questions

Reading the map

Historical extents are approximate. Each pre-modern polity is drawn as an area around its core, sized to its rough extent and trimmed to the coastline. Empires that grew and shrank have extent keyframes (the Mughal area is small in 1530, huge in 1690 and just Delhi by 1803). Real boundaries can be added as GeoJSON in the admin panel.
Modern states use real outlines — India and its neighbours are drawn from Natural Earth's public-domain data in its India point-of-view edition, which follows India's official depiction of its borders.
The slider spans 9,026 years. Every event in the database appears as a tick beneath it — tall ticks for major events, short ones for minor events — and clicking one jumps straight to it.
Dashed outlines mean the dates are approximate (c.) or debated.
Earlier layers are cultures, not empires. Before c. 600 BCE the map shows archaeological cultures and communities (“Civilizations & Archaeological Cultures”), not states with borders.
Overlap is normal. A tributary kingdom may sit inside an empire's circle; princely states coexist with the British Raj.
Year convention: there is no year 0 — 1 BCE is followed by 1 CE.

Quiz

The quiz is generated from this site's own data: every correct answer is a stored fact, and wrong options are chosen to be provably wrong (for example, a kingdom that did not exist in the year asked). Each question's text is unique.

Privacy & self-hosting

Everything — the map, fonts, scripts and data — is served from this site. The explorer makes no requests to third-party APIs, map-tile servers, CDNs or font services.

Sources & accuracy

The structure follows the standard political-history periodisation used in school and university curricula (including NCERT's treatment of the Mauryan-to-Gupta span, the five dynasties of the Delhi Sultanate, the regional kingdoms contemporary with it, and the transition from Company to Crown rule). Dates are the conventional ones; many ancient dates are uncertain by decades. Treat this as an exploration tool and a starting point, not as a citation.

Spotted an error? Corrections are easy to make in the admin panel.