About Bhoomi796

Bhoomi796 is a single very large drawing of Indian history that you can walk around in. It holds 608 people, buildings, animals and moments, arranged left to right in the order they happened, across 65 halls on three levels.

Where the idea comes from

It owes its shape to Pavel Sannikau's Floor 796, an endless cutaway of a space station packed with pop-culture references that has been growing since 2018. This project is an independent homage with a different question behind it: what if the floor were Indian, and what if almost everybody on it were real?

Bhoomi796 is not affiliated with Floor796 in any way, shares no code or artwork with it, and is not endorsed by its creator.

How it is made

There are no image files in the artwork. Every person, building and animal is drawn by original code at the moment you look at it — a description like "cotton dhoti, white, spinning wheel, seated" is turned into geometry by a renderer written for this project. That is why the whole floor loads in a moment and stays sharp at any zoom, and why nothing here is traced from a photograph or borrowed from anyone.

The writing is the same: 18,597 words, written from scratch for this site. No entry reproduces dialogue, lyrics or text from any book, film or song.

Who is on it

The roster is deliberately broad, because "iconic Indian" is a larger category than any single list. Rulers and rebels, mathematicians and musicians, saints and scientists, athletes and film-makers, the wonders they built and the moments that moved them — plus the chaiwala, the dabbawala and the cow that owns the junction, because a floor of only great people would be a lie about the country.

You can read the whole thing era by era.

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 and then moved back — rather than at anybody's faith or community. Where the history is heavy, and a good deal of it is, the writing stops being funny and says the thing plainly.

Keeping it free

There is no paywall and no sign-up. One advertisement sits in the sidebar, a few painted hoardings inside the artwork are sold directly to sponsors, and that is the entire business model. If you would like to sponsor a hoarding, the contact page is the place.

Corrections

608 entries were written by hand and some of them will be wrong, unfair, or will have left out somebody who obviously belongs. Corrections are genuinely welcome — see contact.