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Born and raised in the United States, Indian-American litigator, marketing professional, and content creator Tarun Sridharan became fascinated with history and South Asian heritage through his extended family in Hyderabad, whose weekend activities included loitering around old, abandoned temples and digging up Kakatiya-era artifacts. Sridharan's fascination with history and his desire to explore his diasporic South Asian identity led him to create content with a focus on South and Southeast Asian history and heritage.
In 2019, Sridharan published the first animated video about the medieval maritime Chola Empire, which ruled significant portions of present-day south India, Sri Lanka, and parts of southeast Asia between the 9th and 13th centuries CE. The video received over 9,60,000 views and served as the launchpad for the Odd Compass project. With a growing community of over 3,30,000 subscribers on YouTube today, the channel is an informative, public-facing resource that helps viewers learn more about the lesser-known regional histories of South and Southeast Asia, especially the Indian subcontinent.
Odd Compass' animated videos are meticulously researched and beautifully animated — packing lots of details and information. Each episode spans fifteen to twenty minutes and focuses on a specific aspect of ancient Indian history like urban planning, dating and relationships, the maritime silk road, and different Indian dynasties and empires.
One of Odd Compass' best videos painstakingly imagines what an ancient Indian city in the mahajanapada-period may have looked like. Based on sources like archaeological remains, ancient travelogues by Greek and Chinese visitors like Megasthenes, Faxian, and Xuanzang, and modern research by historians such as John Marshall, John Keay, Romila Thapar, James Ferguson, and R. S. Sharma, the animated video thoroughly recreates a theoretical ancient Indian city from taverns and toilets to public baths, courtyard houses, restaurants, and other civic, religious, and royal structures with the help of a team of architectural historians.
Of course, there are certain gaps in some of these historical narratives — the conspicuous absence of any mention of the caste system and how it contributed to the social hierarchy and power dynamics in ancient Indian cities being the most glaring omission in the ancient Indian city episode, for example. Still, the videos are engaging, entertaining, and informative, and serve as accessible points of entry into deeper exploration of ancient Indian history.
