How this site is written — and what it won’t claim.

Swaveda is a small independent site about Indian history. Articles here are drafted by AI; translations are not. This page describes what each stream is, what it does, and what it deliberately doesn’t do, so you can decide how much weight to put on what you read.

Articles

Daily-ish short pieces on Indian history — archaeology, genetics, historical linguistics, and what the texts say. These are written by AI and intended for a general reader, not the seminar room. They aim to be careful and accurate; they are not peer-reviewed, and they should not be treated as a substitute for the underlying scholarship. Think of an article as a starting point that points you towards the published work, not a final word.

A few things we deliberately do not do in articles:

• We don’t use the registers of grievance or triumph. No “the greatest civilisation,” no “the West refuses to accept,” no “lost golden age,” no “everything came from outside.”
• We don’t silently merge tradition with evidence. “The Mahabharata describes…” and “the Mahabharata war happened in…” are different sentences, and we keep them separate.
• We don’t state contested questions as settled. The Indo-Aryan migration question, the dating of the Vedic corpus, the decipherment of the Indus script, the identification of the Saraswati river, the origins of caste — all are live scholarly debates. When an article touches one, it names the disagreement rather than picking a winner.
• We don’t leave untranslated Sanskrit, Pali, or Tamil terms sitting on the page. On first use, terms come with a short gloss in parentheses.

Translations

The other half of the site is a small library of side-by-side translations of public-domain primary texts — currently the Arthashastra, the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, the Bhagavad Gita, and selected verses from the Vedas and the epics, with more being added over time. Each chapter shows the Devanagari (or IAST) original alongside an English translation, with a credit to the translator and a license note. These are hand-prepared from the public-domain editions; they are not AI-translated.

When commentary appears with a translation, it is signed and dated. Where we add framing, we say so.

Reader contributions

Any reader signed in with Google can submit a correction or addition under an article. Contributions go through a brief automatic evaluation that checks for factual consistency, source quality (we ask for a source URL with each submission, except for plain typos), and whether the framing is honest.

What happens next depends on the verdict:

• Clear factual corrections and typos with high confidence modify the article body directly. The original text is preserved in a revision history (visible at the top of the article as “Updated… · view history”). The contributor is credited by first name and last initial.
• Additions and bigger rewrites that look defensible queue for a human review before they touch the article. A one-click owner approval is the usual path.
• Legitimate but contested or unsupported views are preserved publicly as “reader notes” under the article. They’re visible to everyone alongside an editor’s one-line summary of how we read them. This is the transparency commitment: if someone made a careful point and we didn’t adopt it, you can see why.
• Spam, harassment, off-topic submissions, fabricated citations, and chauvinist framing in either direction are removed and not shown.

Corrections policy

When we get something wrong — a date stated too confidently, a claim that doesn’t hold up, a missing nuance — we fix it visibly. The article body changes and a revision row records what was there before. Email corrections@swaveda.com or use the comment form. Please include the article URL and the source you think we should be reading.

Limits we want you to know

AI-drafted writing makes mistakes a careful reviewer wouldn’t. The framings here are inevitably partial. The contested-topic list above is incomplete. Reader contributions are evaluated quickly, not by a panel of specialists. None of this is a substitute for reading the underlying papers, archaeological reports, and primary texts; the point of pointing you at them is precisely so you do.