About the project
Five thousand years of India, drawn on one floor
Bhoomi796 is a single enormous drawing you can walk around in. It is roughly twenty-six thousand pixels wide and holds 608 people, buildings, animals and moments from Indian history, arranged left to right in the order they happened. At the far left, somebody is grinding ochre to paint a bison on a rock at Bhimbetka. At the far right, somebody is watching a lander touch down near the Moon's south pole. In between is everyone else.
It takes its shape from Pavel Sannikau's Floor 796 — a wonderful, endless cutaway of a space station packed with references — and asks a different question: what if the floor were Indian, and what if the references were real? Every drawing here is generated by original code rather than traced from anything, every description is written from scratch, and nothing on the floor is borrowed artwork.
How to read the floor
The building has three levels and they are not decoration.
- The main corridor runs the length of the floor and is strictly chronological. Thirty-six halls, each one an era or a theme: the Indus waterworks, the Kurukshetra bay, the Zero Laboratory, the Mughal atelier, the Salt Road, Mission Control, and — because history is also what happens on a Tuesday — a railway junction, a wedding hall and an eternal bazaar.
- The level above is sky and roofline: the Himalaya, the minaret skyline, the marble domes, a launch window, the 2026 skyline, and a commentary box where the gods offer opinions nobody asked for.
- The level below is everything underneath: the covered drains of Mohenjo-daro, a manuscript crypt, a stepwell, the Cellular Jail corridor, a secret radio transmitter, the metro, and a server farm where your UPI payment actually goes.
Wander
A floor this long defeats most people who try to drag across it, so there is a Wander mode. Press it — or the space bar — and the camera eases from scene to scene on a route that walks the halls in order, pausing on each one long enough to read the caption, dipping up to a rooftop or down to a basement now and then. Touch anything at all and it hands control back immediately. Leave the floor alone for a minute and it starts wandering on its own, which is the closest a website can get to a screensaver worth watching.
What is actually on it
The roster is deliberately broad, because "iconic Indian" is a bigger category than any one list. It includes:
- Rulers and empires — Ashoka's change of heart carved into rock, Rajaraja Chola's temple accounts, Razia Sultana, Krishnadevaraya, Akbar's late-night debating hall, Ahilyabai Holkar's suspiciously clean books, Ranjit Singh.
- Myth and epic — the Ramayana and Mahabharata casts, treated as the literature they are, plus Ganesha taking dictation and refusing to let the pen stop.
- Science, maths and space — Aryabhata computing the sky at twenty-three, Sushruta rebuilding a nose from a forehead, Ramanujan posting theorems to Cambridge from a clerk's desk, Anna Mani building India's weather instruments, Chandrayaan-3, and an astronaut who took an unreasonable amount of Indian food to the space station in 2025.
- The freedom struggle — Bhagat Singh reading in a cell, Matangini Hazra at seventy-three holding a flag up as she fell, Usha Mehta moving a radio transmitter by taxi, and the drafting committee of seven that was really a committee of one.
- Cinema, music, dance and sport — from a man mortgaging his life insurance to make the first Indian feature in 1913, to a teenager becoming world chess champion in 2024.
- Wonders and places — forty-five of them, from the Great Bath to the Chenab Bridge, drawn as themselves and standing where they belong in time.
- Everyday India — the chaiwala, the dabbawala, the TTE with a clipboard, the dancing uncle, the aunty with follow-up questions, and the cow that owns the junction.
On the jokes
The tone is affectionate. It pokes at situations — traffic, exams, buffet strategy, the eternal upper-berth negotiation, a capital city that got moved twice — rather than at people's faith or communities. Where the history is genuinely heavy, and there is a lot of it that is, the writing stops being funny and says the thing plainly. Partition is not a punchline.
Explore in words
Every era also has a written page, with the full text of every entry in it, for reading rather than dragging:
Corrections and additions
Five hundred and sixty entries were written by hand and some of them will be wrong, or unfair, or will have left out somebody who obviously belongs. That is what the contact page is for. This floor is meant to keep growing — there is a lot of building left.