Climate extremes pose a fundamental threat to places, species, and people's livelihoods. Some standard methods to define extreme events are: consideration of record-breaking events (Coumou et al. 2013; Beniston 2015), identification of extremes from percentile-based approaches (Russo et al. 2015; Schär et al. 2016), extreme value theory (EVT). EVT has been used extensively to interpret climate extremes at regional and global scales on the basis of various standardized indices (Trenberth & Fasullo 2012; Katz 2013; Goswami et al. 2018; Singh et al. 2023). There are 27 indices available from ‘climdex.org’, all of which are derived from data on daily precipitation and temperature (https://www.climdex.org/learn/indices/). The expert team on climate change detection and indices (ETCCDI) of the World Climate Research Program (WCRP) has recommended these standardized indices to compare results across time periods, regions, and source datasets. Here, in this study, to analyse instantaneous and as well as cumulative responses of hydroclimatic extremes in the Narmada basin, we have taken three standard indices for precipitation (Table 1). Similar to precipitation, we have taken three indices for analysing the spatiotemporal variability of streamflow (discharge) extremes (Table 1). Central India faces extreme heat in summer that adversely affects the agricultural productivity of the region (Sharma & Mujumdar 2017; Singh et al. 2021). To analyse the spatiotemporal variability of extreme heat in the Narmada basin, we have also analysed three extreme indices for temperature (Table 1).