For the curious reader
Start at Home for the framing, then walk through the bandha gallery on Visuals. Allow about fifteen minutes.
Section IV · About
What this project is, and why we rebuilt it.
Chitrakāvya was a research initiative at the Computational Sciences Laboratory of IIIT-Bangalore: a collection of Sanskrit visual-verse artefacts examined under the gaze of modern combinatorics, with particular attention to the knight's-tour problem solved in poetry by Vedānta Deśika five centuries before Euler. The original web archive has suffered the usual fate — Flash media gone dark, IEEE PDFs paywalled, anchors broken — and so this site is a fresh, link-checked rebuild.
We have kept the original ambition: to read classical Indian poetry not only as literature but as computational object, and to argue that the corpus describes a paradigm of multi-objective compression we have only recently built machines to admire.
The argument, in one paragraph
An older idea of what computation is for.
A modern program is a recipe to perform a task. A bandha is a recipe to be three things at once: a sound, a shape, and a rule. The designer trades execution speed for descriptive density. Sanskrit, with its meaning-stable word order and its single-glyph akṣara, is a substrate that admits this trade. Read the chitrakāvya corpus as a long empirical survey of how much you can compress into a thirty-two-syllable verse, given that the verse must also draw a wheel and trace a knight's tour, and you find yourself looking at a research programme that anticipates the computer-science notion of constraint satisfaction by twelve hundred years.
How to read this site
Three suggested paths.
For the computer scientist
Open the Knight's Tour page first; the algorithm is the same, the artefact is older. Then read Joshi & Sridharan in Resources §B.
For the Sanskritist
Skip to Resources §A for the primary corpus. The site offers no editorial work on the verses themselves; it points to the editions that do.
Project lineage
Acknowledgements.
This rebuild stands on the work of many people. The IIITB-CSL Chitrakāvya team curated the original archive. Joshi and Sridharan's 2020 Resonance paper is the modern reference for the Rudraṭa knight's tour. The Sreenivasarao Vempati blog essays are still the most readable long-form introduction to chitrabandha for English readers. Vidyut and Ambuda's open-source Sanskrit infrastructure makes any digital project on the corpus tractable. None of them are responsible for any errors here.
Want to contribute? The site is a static HTML+SVG bundle in the
Chitrakavya/ folder of this workspace. Treat it as a research
archive — issue corrections, pull-request new bandhas, replace
substituted links with stronger primary sources.
Colophon
How this page is built.
Every illustration on this site is hand-drawn SVG; no external image is loaded. Devanāgarī text is set in Tiro Devanagari Sanskrit; Latin text in EB Garamond and Cormorant Garamond, with Inter for chrome. The interactive knight's tour is a 60-line vanilla JavaScript program; the path is generated by Warnsdorff's heuristic and verified Hamiltonian at build time. The total payload is under 70 kB.