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Indica APIs

The Indica APIs give you JSON dictionaries of data from ancient India.

Do we know what life was like in ancient India? That depends. To begin with, ancient itself is open to several definitions. And secondly, our knowledge of the past is fragmented. We know about ancient India through its songs and stories, transmitted orally for the most part from one generation to the next.

Indologists have sifted through these oral traditions and compiled scholarly books. But, this treasure chest isn't available in a machine-readable, interoperable form.

These APIs aim to bridge that gap. The APIs speak in JSON, which is a language notation that's understood by almost all machines today.

  • Arthashashtra API
  • Ashokan edicts API

Authentication

Not needed. These are open APIs.

License

These APIs are distributed under the MIT license. This means you are free to use the data any which way you want, so long as you don't hold me liable and you give me an attribution. See The MIT License (MIT).

All content on this website, unless otherwise stated, is distributed under the Creative Commons license. This means the content is dedicated as-is, without any liability, to the worldwide public domain. See The Creative Commons Zero v1.0 Universal license.

Rate limits

The APIs are hosted on Heroku, where I have a limit of 500 hours a month. This limit includes all my apps hosted on Heroku (I have other apps there besides these APIs). I am neither tracking who makes how many calls to the APIs nor throttling calls on IP-address basis. My only request is, call these APIs in a fair manner so that I have some hours always available to run my other projects.

Heavy use

If you need to use the APIs rather heavily, please let me know. I'll generate for you a free token, which will give you access to an authenticated hosting service that I also use. This authenticated service has a rate limit of 10,000 API calls a month for free accounts.

Release history

  • 2.0 (July 2022)
    • Deprecated all query parameters
    • Introduced the following path parameters:
      • /book/{mandal}
      • /meter/{meter}
      • /poet/{sungby}
      • /poetcategory/{poetcategory}
      • /god/{sungfor}
      • /god/{sungfor}/{mandal}
      • /godbypoet/{sungfor}/{sungby}
      • /godcategory/{sungforcategory}
      • /godcategorybypoetcategory/{sungforcategory}/{sungbycategory}
    • Changed the endpoint to https://api-rv.herokuapp.com/rv/v2/meta/
  • 1.2 (December 2020)
    • Changed the endpoint to https://api-rv.herokuapp.com/rv/v1
  • 1.1 (October 2018)
    • Changed the endpoint from https://sheetlabs.com/RV/ to https://sheetlabs.com/IND/
    • Added the following two parameters: sungbycategory and sungforcategory
  • 1.0 (August 2018)
    • First release
  • 2.0 (July 2022)
    • Deprecated all query parameters
    • Introduced the following path parameters:
      • /words/{word}
      • /descriptions/{description}
      • /categories/{category}
    • Changed the endpoint to https://api-vs.herokuapp.com/vs/v2/
  • 1.2 (December 2020)
    • Changed the endpoint to https://api-vs.herokuapp.com/vs/v1
  • 1.1 (October 2018)
    • Changed the endpoint from https://sheetlabs.com/RV/ to https://sheetlabs.com/IND/
  • 1.0 (August 2018)
    • First release
  • Beta (April 2020)

Coffee chat

Why did you make these APIs?

Because they weren't there.

What can I do with this data?

You can process the data to make visually appealing or easily consumable information. Some examples are at HowTo-s and dataviz.

Also, I'll be very happy to link back to your implementation or app if you send me a URL.

What is the source of this data?

See About the Rig Veda API, About the Vedic Society API, and About the Mahabharat query service.

I found an error in the data.

Please log an issue in these GitHub repositories:

And you are...?

Anindita Basu.