# About the Chitrakāvya archive

*Where the archive came from, what it rebuilds from the IIIT-Bangalore project, and how to cite it.*

# 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.

Lineage

-   Lab
    
    IIITB-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 reference
    
    Joshi and Sridharan, 2020
    
    Their paper in Resonance is the modern reference for the Rudraṭa knight's tour.
    
-   Long-form
    
    Sreenivasarao Vempati
    
    Blog essays that remain the most readable long-form English introduction to chitrabandha.
    
-   Infrastructure
    
    Vidyut 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.

Reading list

-   [Visuals, the bandha gallery](/chitrakavya/visuals)
-   [Pādukā, verses 929 and 930](/chitrakavya/paduka)
-   [Knight's Tour, the interactive](/chitrakavya/knights-tour)
-   [Resources, papers and primary corpus](/chitrakavya/resources)
-   [Chitra-kāvya on Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chitra-kavya)
-   [koushikr/Chitrakavya on GitHub](https://github.com/koushikr/Chitrakavya)
-   [vrraghy.github.io, Chitrakaavyas](https://vrraghy.github.io/chitrakaavya/)

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