Sahapedia, an online gateway to India's cultural heritage

For the past five years, Sudha Gopalakrishnan and her team have been working on a huge project, one which is still incomplete. The enormity of their project--creating a web portal of India's cultural heritage--is such that it'll be years before it truly becomes whole. Nevertheless, even in its current form, Sahapedia is a unique portal.

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It literally is the online gateway to the country's cultural history-one which is home to both the city built by Aurangzeb's daughter (Shahjahanabad) and the cinemas created by a Bengali icon (Satyajit Ray). "It's just the beginning of a long initiative," says Gopalakrishnan, the executive director of Sahapedia. "What we have done so far is that we have worked for the past five years, put together some content on different aspects of India's culture into ten domains and opened up the platform to the public (last week). All the domains are inter-connected, and we have made them as comprehensive as possible through multimedia resources."

Sahapedia is unlike Wikipedia where anyone can create content. Naturally, since the subject matter requires expert views, all the content is created by those who are well-versed with the topic. Gopalakrishnan adds, "You need expertise to be able to write an article because he or she will be writing under a name and authenticating it. Anybody can't write about anything.

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Unlike Wikipedia, where anyone can contribute, here we can have one overview article by an expert of that domain. Plus there will be other perspectives." For example, she continues, "If the topic is Ram Leela, then somebody who knows Ram Leela very well can only contribute an article. There can be audio visual recordings as well. With each and every domain, we want to bring out the complexity and depth of it."

Sahapedia team had to (and continue to) collaborate with several experts and institutions across India. Gopalakrishnan says, "There are many people who have expertise in so many areas, and many institutions like Sangeet Natak Akademi or the IGNCA, which helped us in creating Sahapedia. When you think of it like that, it's a big mandate. And, it's an evolving platform, an evolving resource. Something like this on Indian culture, on an open platform which is also curated, has not happened in India till date."