The agreement between you and us.

These terms cover your use of Swaveda (swaveda.com). By reading the site, signing in, or submitting a comment, you agree to them. They are written plainly so you can actually read them.

What Swaveda is

Swaveda is an independent publication about Indian history, drawing on genetics, archaeology, historical linguistics, and primary-source translation. Articles are drafted by an AI under hard editorial constraints, fact-checked by a second AI, and reviewed by a human before borderline pieces publish. The method page explains the pipeline.

Articles cite their sources inline. Translations link to the public-domain editions they reproduce. Even with the fact-check pass and human review, we may still get something wrong. If you spot an error, write to corrections@swaveda.com or use the comment form (see below); we fix mistakes visibly with a dated note.

Your account

You can read Swaveda without an account. To submit a comment, you sign in with Google. We require sign-in so contributions have an attributable author and so spam is harder to scale.

By signing in, you confirm that:

• The Google account is yours.
• You are at least 13 years old.
• You will not impersonate another person or organisation in the name or content of your contributions.

We may suspend or delete an account at any time, with or without notice, for any of the prohibited conduct listed below or for any violation of these terms.

Reader contributions

When you submit a comment, you grant Swaveda a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual licence to display, edit, quote, paraphrase, and republish your contribution on the site and in derived materials (for example: a future newsletter, an annual review post, a podcast). We may attribute your contribution to you using your Google account name (or part of it — see the privacy policy); we may also anonymise it.

The licence is non-exclusive: you keep ownership of what you wrote, and you can republish it elsewhere yourself. The licence is perpetual: once your contribution influences an article (for example by adding a fact or correcting a date), we retain the right to keep that change in the article body and its revision history even if you later ask for your account to be deleted — the source attribution will change to “Reader” at that point.

Submitted contributions are evaluated automatically. Some are folded into the article body; some are shown publicly as “reader notes” (contrarian or unsupported views, preserved for transparency); some are hidden (spam, abuse, off-topic, policy violations). The method page explains the evaluation rules.

Prohibited conduct

Don’t do these on Swaveda:

• Submit spam, malware, automated content, or advertising.
• Harass or threaten any person, or use slurs targeting any group.
• Submit fabricated citations or quotations attributed to real scholars or publications.
• Submit nationalist or chauvinist framing in either direction. “The greatest civilisation,” “the West refuses to accept,” or “everything came from outside” are all out of scope.
• Infringe copyright. If you quote a copyrighted source, cite it; the contribution should be your own paraphrase or argument, not a paste.
• Attempt to break the site, bypass authentication, scrape faster than a polite reader would, or otherwise abuse the infrastructure.

We remove contributions that violate this list and may suspend the account that submitted them.

Site content and intellectual property

Original Swaveda articles (the text we draft and publish) are made available under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence unless a specific article notes otherwise. You can quote, remix, and republish with credit (“Swaveda,” a link back, and the article title).

Translations of public-domain texts are themselves public domain. The accompanying commentary, when present, is Swaveda’s and falls under the same CC-BY-4.0 licence.

Third-party content we display under fair-use citation (paper titles, paragraph-length quotations, image thumbnails) remains owned by its original authors. Hero images are licensed via their stated terms (typically Pexels License or equivalent; attribution shown under the image).

Disclaimers

Swaveda publishes for general readers and provides citations so you can verify. It is not a peer-reviewed publication, and articles are not a substitute for primary sources or expert advice. Where a topic is contested, we say so and present multiple positions; that does not mean every position has equal evidentiary support, only that scholars actively disagree.

The site is provided “as is.” We make no warranty that it will be available, accurate, or fit for any particular purpose. The pipeline includes a fact-check step but it is not infallible. If accuracy matters for your work, go to the cited sources.

Limitation of liability

To the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, Swaveda and the person who runs it are not liable for any indirect, incidental, consequential, or special damages arising from your use of the site, including reliance on any published claim. Direct liability, where it cannot be excluded, is limited to ₹0 — the site is free.

Termination

You can stop using Swaveda at any time. We can suspend or remove an account at any time, with or without notice. The contribution-licence and intellectual-property provisions survive termination.

Changes to these terms

We may revise these terms. When we do, the “Last updated” date at the top changes. Material changes (especially to the contribution licence) will be noted at the top of this page for at least thirty days after the change.

Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of the Republic of India, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules. Any dispute arising from or related to your use of the site is subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of Bengaluru.

Contact

For questions about these terms or anything else, email corrections@swaveda.com. See also our privacy policy and method & corrections policy.