About
A free collection of Hindu stories for children — the Rāmāyaṇa, the Mahābhārata, the Purāṇas and the Upaniṣads, and the Tamil and North Indian saints that most collections leave out. 63 are written and published so far, of 92 planned.
The short version. Every story names the work and the chapter it comes from, at the top of the page. Where the tellings genuinely differ, we print which one we are telling and why. It is free, there is no advertising, and you do not need an account to read any of it.
At twenty to nine at night, a parent does not want a generator. They want the one right story — already chosen, already checked, laid out for a voice — and a reason to come back tomorrow. You can ask a chat window for a bedtime story and it will give you one, but you will not know whether the ending was invented, and neither will your child.
The source sits at the top of each story: Bhāgavata Purāṇa, Skandha 10, chapters 24–25. Underneath the collection, each story carries a list of the claims its writer was allowed to use, each tied to where it came from — so checking a story means checking it against that list, not against somebody's memory.
And where a telling is not the one you might expect, the page says so before the story starts. The squirrel who carried sand to the bridge is not in Vālmīki — it reaches us through the Tamil retellings, and that is printed rather than hidden. A parent who learns that has learned something true, and has learned that we tell them.
Short breath lines. A printed pause before the turn, where the reader stops. A last line marked to slow down for. Every name tappable for a respelling, so nobody has to guess nuh-chi-KAY-taa in front of a seven-year-old.
Each story exists in two lengths, and the short one is not the long one with paragraphs deleted — it is written separately, with its own turn and its own last line. Three minutes on a school night, six when there is time.
Every story closes with one open question to ask your child, a plain fallback line for when they shrug, and honest answers to the follow-ups children actually ask — including the awkward ones. Was Indra bad, then? gets a real answer, not a deflection. The moral is arrived at, not delivered.
Every story carries an age floor, set by asking whether we would read this, tonight, to a child of exactly that age — not by how famous it is. Where a story touches death, injustice or a parent doing real harm, a short note tells you what is actually coming, in plain words, before you begin. No parent should be ambushed at bedtime.
Nothing is cut from the collection. The Mahābhārata is a war and the Periya Purāṇam is in places brutal, and sanitising them produces a collection nobody needs. Instead the hardest stories are held behind a setting: they never turn up as tonight's pick until you switch them on, and the care note is shown first. You decide when your child is ready, because you are the only one who can.
Choose the night, not the story. Pull the sources and write down every claim the telling is allowed to make. Draft the long version, then draft the short one separately. An age and care pass, a read-aloud pass, then the closing question. Then a person approves it. Then it is published.
Between those, the drafts go through mechanical checks and an adversarial review that argues against them from the editions. Those layers have caught real mistakes — a birth order taken from the wrong region, an episode quietly borrowed from the chapter next door, an Upaniṣad verse said to stop where it does not. They are also not enough on their own: checking a story against sources its own drafter chose is marking your own homework. That is why a person still reads every story out loud before it ships, and why the last check is the one below.
At the foot of every story there is a link to tell us something is wrong. It takes no account and asks for no name. Reports are checked against the source before anything changes — and when a story does change, its version moves, so anything made from the old text is detectable rather than silently stale.
Nothing, and there is no advertising anywhere on the site. No account is needed to read. If you sign in it is only so your place survives a cleared cache and reaches a second device. What we do and do not store is set out on the privacy page, including exactly what part artificial intelligence plays in making these stories and what it is not allowed anywhere near.
There is a story chosen for you every night, against the calendar and the season. You can follow on WhatsApp or Instagram, subscribe to the feed, or simply open the site at dusk. Anything else — a question, a correction, a school or library asking for something in writing — reaches us at sandhyakathas@gmail.com.