Arjun Ullas, a Cambridge science teacher based in Hanoi, Vietnam, has been on a mission to create a World History Chart.
After 13 months of research, designing and fact-checking, he launched the chart in January 2022. As soon as Arjun shared screenshots of it on social media, enquiries from potential buyers poured in from around the world. The intention, Arjun clarifies, was not to make money, but represent the histories of India and other often-overlooked parts of the world.
It all began when he saw a copy of a world history timeline by Oxford that came out in 2011. “I felt only Europe was truly represented in it. It had little from the rest of the world,” he says.
Though historians and organisations have attempted to draw up world history timelines before, they were all largely Eurocentric, doing little justice to narratives from other parts of the world. “There is so much material available on Europe, but so little on India, sub-Saharan Africa, and pre-Columbian Americas. A puny state like the Netherlands, for instance, would have plenty of information on it, but Chhattisgarh or Zambia, which are much larger and more diverse would have none,” he adds.
Work on the chart was challenging, as some parts of the world are poorly studied. “The only information we have is from 19th century Europeans,” he says. In his chart, Arjun uses the Y axis to denote regions and X axis to denote time (from 3000 BCE to 2020 CE). “Kerala belongs to the Deccan / South India / Indian Ocean region of my chart. So, I had to find journals and publications by historians to ascertain what happened in Kerala in this period. For information on each historical event, I would check publications and mark it on the chart, juxtaposing it with the timeline,” he explains.
Born in Kochi, Arjun did his higher studies in the UK and worked as a business development manager in Dubai. Though his background is in Biotechnology and Business Management, Arjun’s heart was in the study of history and anthropology. Even as he worked, he read history, studied migrations and genetics. “Now, I have registered for a formal master’s degree in History,” he says.
Though a basic version (11 MB) of the chart is available for free viewing, Arjun is currently working on a website to sell the print-quality version. The chart can also be bought off his Instagram handle.
