Section I · Visuals
A bandha is the binding of a śloka to a shape. The Sanskrit theorists — Daṇḍin, Bhāmaha, Rudraṭa, Mammaṭa — classified these objects with the precision of a mathematician naming a graph. The reading rule is part of the artefact: travel the spokes of a wheel; trace the petals of a lotus; walk the parallel rails of a drum. Below is a reconstructed gallery, with each figure rendered fresh as an SVG. The exemplar verses are sketched; for the canonical sources, see Resources.
Syllables placed at the rim, hub and spokes of an n-spoked wheel. Reading anti-clockwise around the rim yields one verse; reading along the spokes from rim to hub yields a second. Found from Daṇḍin's Kāvyādarśa onward; richly developed in the chakra-bandha verses of the Padukasahasra (chapter 30).
An eight-petalled lotus with a calyx. Each petal carries a unit of the verse; shared syllables sit on the petal joins, so a single character does double duty in two readings. The constraint forces deep lexical play.
A grid in the silhouette of a muraja (mridanga) drum. Read across the parallel "skins" of the drum to recover one verse; read along the curving body to recover another. The Agnipurāṇa fixes the metrical rules.
Syllables marshalled along the silhouette of a sword: hilt, guard, fuller, edge. Māgha (7th c.) is the locus classicus — Canto XIX of the Śiśupālavadha contains a celebrated khadga arrangement.
The verse coiled along the body of a snake. The reading begins at the tail and ends at the hood; mirror-readings double back. A favourite of the temple-inscriptional tradition; instances appear at Kanchi and Tirumala.
"Cow-urine pattern": two lines of verse arranged so that reading the same syllables alternately along a zigzag path produces a third, grammatically valid verse. A surprisingly compact instance of information sharing across line boundaries.
Interactive · the omnidirectional verse
A 4×4 (sometimes 8×8) grid in which the same śloka can be read in four directions — left-to-right, right-to-left, top-to-bottom, bottom-to-top — and yields the identical sequence of syllables. Below is the well-known verse "sā kāra sarasās tāra…" reconstructed on a 4×4 surface. Hover (or tap) a row, column, or diagonal to highlight a reading direction.
Modern English Chitrakāvya · Donald Knuth, 2005
In 2005, in correspondence with the IIITB-CSL group, Donald Knuth contributed two English-language chitrakāvyas — pairs of 32-word verses arranged on a 4×8 chessboard so that a knight's tour over the first verse produces the second. They are the only widely-known modern analogues of Vedānta Deśika's Pādukāsahasra and Sarvajña Bhaṭṭa's Harivijaya. Where the Sanskrit originals exploit the meaning-stable word order of Sanskrit, Knuth exploits the homophonic looseness of English: two and too, four and for, see and sea, terns and turns, passed and past are the same syllable when spoken aloud, even when the spelling shifts to suit the new sentence.
Both verses are reproduced below with audio recitations from the IIITB archive, and a step-button that walks a valid knight's tour over the sequential grid — watch the second verse light up as the knight visits the corresponding cells.
assets/onsets.json. Use Step / Auto-play if you'd rather
walk through silently.
Poem 1 · similar to Pādukāsahasra
Poem 2 · similar to Harivijaya
The original IIITB visuals page hosted these as Macromedia Flash animations
(Knuth poem.swf) with WAV recitations. The Flash media is
archived at Knuth poem.swf for
completeness, but no modern browser will play it; the audio above is
re-encoded from the original IIITB recitations.
Modern Sanskrit Chitrakāvyas · 1800–1900
The chitrakāvya tradition did not stop with Māgha or Vedānta Deśika. The nineteenth-century revival of devotional Sanskrit poetry — much of it composed in temple-towns from Kanchi to Pandharpur — produced fresh bandhas in figures the medieval anthologies barely touch: fish, gateway, umbrella, and ever more elaborate wheels. The figures below are reconstructions from the IIITB archive, redrawn fresh as SVG.
The verse fitted into the silhouette of a fish — body, tail, gill, eye. The reading begins at the mouth and runs along the spine; the dorsal and ventral curves carry refrains. Late-Vaiṣṇava poets favoured the form for invocations of Viṣṇu's matsya avatar.
The verse hung from a temple gateway — the lintel carries the opening line, the two pillars carry mirrored secondary lines that descend in parallel. A ceremonial form, common on stone-cut praise inscriptions at Tirupati and Srirangam.
The verse arranged around a parasol — canopy syllables read across the curved arc, staff syllables descend the vertical. The arrow (drawn here as in the original IIITB animation) indicates the start of reading.
A nineteenth-century elaboration of the classic eight-petal lotus to twelve, with a syllabic centre. The reading direction is given by an external arrow (preserved here from the original archive). One verse spirals inward; a second appears in the central calyx.
The classical wheel doubled to sixteen spokes, allowing two interlocking verses to share a hub syllable. Common in late-19th-century stuti literature; the form appears at Pandharpur and in the Maithili anthologies.
A tighter wheel with two concentric reading-rings, popular as a mnemonic in 19th-century pāṭhaśālā instruction. Reading directions differ between the outer rim and the inner ring.
A note on transcription
Many sarvatōbhadra and bandha verses lose their property under transliteration: the shapes are designed to be visible in Devanāgarī, where a syllable (akṣara) is one glyph. The graphs in this gallery are therefore rendered using Tiro Devanagari Sanskrit; if a syllable looks misaligned in your browser, font-fallback is the cause. For the underlying problem of how to computationally encode akṣara symmetry — see the Resonance article in Resources.