📜 Literature of Bharat
From the hymns of the Rigveda and the Sangam poems to the epics, Kalidasa, the bhakti saints and the modern novel — the literatures of India, as NCERT tells their story.
🔥 The Vedas and early thought
The oldest compositions, first passed on by memory and recitation.
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c. 1500–1000 BCE
The Rigveda
Hymns in praise of deities, especially Agni, Indra and Soma.
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c. sixth century BCE onwards
The Upanishads
Thinkers asked about the meaning of life and the possibility of life after death; the Chhandogya Upanishad is among them.
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After the Buddha
The Tipitaka
The Buddha’s teachings were compiled as the Tipitaka, the ‘three baskets’; the Vinaya Pitaka held the rules of the sangha.
🏹 The epics and the story traditions
Two Sanskrit epics and a book of fables that travelled across India and the world.
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c. 500 BCE onwards
The Mahabharata
A colossal epic, in its present form over 100,000 verses, composed over about 1,000 years.
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The Ramayana and the Mahabharata across India
Together the two epics might fill some 7,000 pages; for more than two millennia they have been retold in regional literatures, in countless folk versions, and in the oral traditions of many tribal communities.
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At least 2,200 years old
The Panchatantra
Stories with animals as the main characters that teach life skills. Adapted in almost every Indian language, they travelled to Southeast Asia, the Arab world and Europe — about 200 adaptations in more than 50 languages.
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1919 onwards
A critical edition of the Mahabharata
Led by V. S. Sukthankar, scholars compared manuscripts from across the country; the project took 47 years and ran to over 13,000 pages.
🪶 Classical Sanskrit and Tamil
Court poetry and statecraft in Sanskrit, and the oldest literature of the south in Tamil.
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Mauryan period
The Arthashastra
A work on statecraft, parts of which were probably composed by Kautilya or Chanakya.
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c. first century CE
Sangam literature
The oldest literature in south India: anthologies of Tamil poems by an ‘assembly’ (sangam) of poets, consulted by historians for the society and culture of the time.
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c. fourth century CE
The Prayaga Prashasti
The Allahabad Pillar Inscription, composed in Sanskrit by Harishena, the court poet of Samudragupta.
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Gupta period
Kalidasa and the Meghaduta
Renowned for refined Sanskrit poetry. In the Meghaduta (‘The Cloud Messenger’) a banished yaksha sends a message to his beloved through a passing cloud.
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12th century
Jayadeva’s Gitagovinda
The Senas of Bengal hosted poets such as Jayadeva, whose Gitagovinda tells the story of Krishna and Radha.
🪔 Bhakti and Sufi poetry
Songs in the people’s own languages — of love, devotion and equality.
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Alvar tradition
The ‘Tamil Veda’ and Andal
The Alvars’ anthology, the Nalayira Divyaprabandham, was described as the Tamil Veda; the songs of Andal, a woman Alvar, are still sung.
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Twelfth century
Basavanna’s vachanas
Basavanna’s vachanas question empty ritual; his followers were known as Virashaivas.
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13th–14th centuries
Amir Khusrau
Known as the ‘father of Urdu literature’, he wrote mainly in Hindavi.
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15th century
Kabir
Kabirdas, presumably raised by a weaver couple, spoke of one god and decried the rituals of both Hinduism and Islam. His verses survive in the Bijak, the Granthavali and the Adi Granth.
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Early 16th century
Ravidas
Born in a family of leather-workers, Ravidas composed poetry of equality and the oneness of all.
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Saints across the regions
Guru Nanak’s teachings, with the hymns of several Hindu saints, are preserved in the Guru Granth Sahib; others include Mirabai in Rajasthan, Chaitanya Mahaprabhu in the east, Tukaram, Dnyaneshwar and Namdev in the west, and Purandaradasa and Kanakadasa in the south.
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Sufi tradition
Padmavat
A prem-akhyan (love story) by Malik Muhammad Jayasi.
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17th century
Dara Shikoh and the Upanishads
With learned scholars in Varanasi, Dara Shikoh translated 52 Upanishads from Sanskrit into Persian.
📖 Prose, scholarship and the modern age
Chronicles, the study of old texts, and the novel and poem in the age of the freedom struggle.
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1598
The Ain-i Akbari
Abu’l Fazl’s record of how Akbar’s empire was run, completed in 1598 after five revisions.
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Late 18th century
The Asiatic Society of Bengal
William Jones and his colleagues set it up, with the journal Asiatick Researches, to study and translate Sanskrit and Persian works.
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1882
Anandamath and ‘Vande Mataram’
Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Bengali novel contained the song ‘Vande Mataram’, which inspired the freedom struggle and became India’s national song.
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1913
Rabindranath Tagore’s Nobel Prize
The Nobel Prize in Literature, “because of his profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse”.
How we check: every entry is from an NCERT textbook or NobelPrize.org; our build fails unless its key phrases are found in the source itself. Dates are given only as the source gives them.