India’s cultural output, charted

Analysing 822 Indian-born individuals with a Wikipedia profile in 15+ languages.

If you’re interested in knowing who’s trending around the world, I can think of one resource that’s better than social media — Pantheon.world. In case you haven’t heard of it — Pantheon tracks historical characters with a presence in more than 15 language editions of Wikipedia, and presently has 70,000+ biographies in its dataset.

It’s a great way to visualise the cultural output of countries, and answer zany questions like — who had a bigger cultural impact — Buddha or Gandhi? Or compare countries (UK vs France) and their respective cultural impact. This dataset has plenty of other potential uses —movie producers can commission biographical movies based on this information, for example.

Playing around with the publicly available version of the dataset (with 11,328 entries) highlights the cultural influence of Europe and USA.

A timeline view highlights rising cultural production globally.

I was particularly interested in checking out Pantheon’s data on 822 Indian-born people — this dataviz below stacks them up by birth date and Wikipedia language editions.

Which of these historical figures would you like to see a biopic on?

It’s evident that India’s modern-day cultural output is dominated by politicians and actors, though its historically renowned for writers, philosophers, and religious figures. Mahatma Gandhi is the most renowned Indian*, followed by Rabindranath Tagore. I was also surprised to see Kalidasa’s name rank so highly.

*I would also like to point out that this dataset is somewhat flawed — Technically, Chanakya was born in what is now Pakistan, and Gautama Buddha was born in Nepal. I found a few other errors — such as R.K Laxman being classified as an extremist, and have reported them to Pantheon.