The argument, the lineage, a reading list.
Chitrakāvya reads classical Sanskrit visual verse as a computational object, alongside its life as literature. A bandha is a poem built to be three things at once: a sound, a shape and a rule. The designer trades execution speed for descriptive density, and Sanskrit's stable word order and single-glyph akṣara make the trade possible.
The corpus is a long empirical survey of how much meaning a 32-syllable verse can carry while also drawing a wheel and tracing a knight's tour. By the archive's reckoning this anticipates constraint satisfaction by about 1,200 years.
- LabIIITB-CSL
The Computational Sciences Laboratory at IIIT-Bangalore, where the project began as a research initiative and whose team curated the original archive.
- The modern referenceJoshi and Sridharan, 2020
Their paper in Resonance is the modern reference for the Rudraṭa knight's tour.
- Long-formSreenivasarao Vempati
Blog essays that remain the most readable long-form English introduction to chitrabandha.
- InfrastructureVidyut and Ambuda
Open-source Sanskrit tooling that makes the corpus digitally workable: sandhi, derivation, tagging.
Vedānta Deśika solved the knight's tour in poetry five centuries before Euler. The original archive suffered link rot, dark Flash media, paywalled PDFs and broken anchors; this is a link-checked rebuild, first published in April 2026 and moved here in October 2026.