Across more than 100 temples and forts, researchers are finding board games carved into stone floors, platforms, walls and lookout shelters. The markings are more than archaeological curiosities: they show how religious and fortified spaces once functioned as places of social interaction, waiting, learning and recreation.
The discoveries, documented by researchers including Vinita Sidhartha and the Mysuru-based cultural trust Ramsons Kala Pratishtana, also expose a difficulty in reading built heritage. Visitors tend to look upwards at temple towers, sculptures and deities. The researchers look down, searching for shallow lines that may reveal how people occupied the space between rituals, work and travel.
Sidhartha’s latest research, published in the CSMVS Journal, examines the game known as dahdi, or three nested squares. She found one such board at the entrance to the Saluvankuppam temple near Mamallapuram, a site unearthed by the 2004 tsunami. She also found a similar game beneath Krishna’s Butterball in Mamallapuram, in a gap less than six inches high. The location led her to conclude that the board was carved before the massive boulder came to rest there, although the precise date of the carving is not established in the supplied research.
The board resembles the European game nine men’s morris, a similarity that raises questions about how games travelled and how similar forms emerged in different places. Sidhartha believes some boards may have been cut by artisans who moved between temple construction and renovation projects. The deep lines on some boards, she says, suggest the use of skilled hands and tools. This remains an interpretation rather than a fully established history, but the distribution of similar markings provides a basis for investigating the movement of craft knowledge across regions.
The locations of the boards provide another clue to how these sites worked. Dharmendra Raghu of Ramsons Kala Pratishtana says the researchers often find games on elevated platforms or in shaded places where people could sit. In forts, boards appear at vantage points with wide views. At Salem Fort, Sidhartha found two boards in a small lookout shelter, supporting the possibility that guards used games to pass time while keeping watch.
That placement changes the way these structures can be understood. A temple floor was not only a surface for movement during ceremonies. A shaded platform could also be a place to wait, meet, teach or play. A fort lookout could combine surveillance with long periods of inactivity. The boards are therefore small records of the relationship between architecture and everyday behaviour, even when the original players and rules have disappeared.
Some discoveries also show how alterations to buildings can complicate interpretation. At the Erikatarama temple in Madurantakam, Sidhartha found a game etched on a compound wall. She believes a horizontal stone may have been reused during renovation. At Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru campus, she found another board behind foliage at a location later identified as an old quarry. These examples indicate that game markings cannot be read without understanding the changing history of a site, including repairs, material reuse and landscape transformation.
The researchers have documented boards in temples across Karnataka and in Odisha, Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh and Tamil Nadu. Their work includes the navakankari board found in December 2025 near the entrance gopuram of the Jalakanteshwara temple in Vellore. Other games include pallanguzhi, paramapadam, chowkabara and aadu puli attam. The spread of these games makes the sites part of a wider cultural landscape rather than isolated monuments.
Yet identifying the board is often easier than reconstructing how it was played. R G Singh of Ramsons Kala Pratishtana says one board may accommodate several games. The researchers compare the markings with anthropologists’ records, rules recorded by British writers, texts such as Krida Kausalya and Manasollasa, and recent academic research. Even those sources cannot resolve every case. Many rules existed in memory and were passed between generations without a written rulebook.
That dependence on living memory is important for heritage work. A carved board can survive after its meaning has been forgotten, but the built object alone cannot always restore the social practice around it. The researchers therefore rely on people who still know the games. Autorickshaw and taxi drivers near temples in Karnataka and Tiruvannamalai have explained games such as chowkabara to the team, recalling how they play while waiting for passengers. In Hampi, the researchers found women drawing boards on marble temple floors with leaf sap.
These observations connect historic surfaces to contemporary patterns of waiting and informal occupation. The same kinds of pauses that may once have produced carved boards can still create opportunities for play, particularly around transport work and temple activity. The evidence does not establish an unbroken tradition at every site, but it shows that games remain part of everyday knowledge in some communities even when visitors and formal heritage interpretation overlook them.
The games also carried different forms of learning. V Balambal, a former history professor at the University of Madras and author of Folk Games of Tamil Nadu, says pallanguzhi and its variants have been used to teach arithmetic and develop mental skills in parts of Africa and the West Indies. She has conducted workshops for children with special needs and visually impaired children, describing the game as inclusive. Paramapadam, which influenced modern snakes and ladders, represented virtue and vice through ladders and falls, although modern versions do not retain those lessons.
Aadu puli attam presents another social idea through its structure. Three tigers face 15 goats, which must cooperate to trap them. Sidhartha interprets the game as representing how a community can confront a larger challenge by working together. The interpretation is not a direct record of what every historical player believed, but the game’s unequal numbers and required cooperation make it a useful example of how rules can encode social relationships.
The institutional challenge is that these markings often fall between established heritage categories. They may be mistaken for architectural plans, dismissed as damage or ignored because they lack the visual scale of sculpture and monumental construction. Most people visiting the temples today do not know the games exist. Without documentation, a board can disappear from public understanding even if the stone itself remains in place.
This creates a distinction between conserving a surface and conserving its meaning. Physical protection may preserve the lines, but interpretation requires recording their locations, forms, possible rules and links to living communities. The supplied account does not identify a single national documentation or conservation programme for these boards. Instead, the work is being carried out by independent researchers, cultural organisations and local knowledge holders, suggesting that the evidence base remains dispersed.
The revival efforts described in the report extend beyond documentation. Sidhartha has spent 25 years reviving traditional games through Kreeda, workshops in schools and an experience centre. Ramsons Kala Pratishtana has worked with dhurrie weavers to adapt traditional craft techniques into game boards and has trained teachers to introduce the games to children. These projects treat the games as both cultural material and usable social practices.
That approach also raises a question about how public heritage is presented. Temples and forts are often interpreted through dynasties, religious significance, architecture and major events. The etched games add another layer: the history of ordinary time spent inside these spaces. They reveal guards waiting at a fort, visitors occupying shaded platforms, workers carrying knowledge across regions and communities using play to teach counting, cooperation or moral ideas.
The evidence remains incomplete. Researchers are still trying to understand two arrowheads carved opposite each other on a temple floor in K R Nagar near Mysuru, while the rules of several other boards remain uncertain. The age of many markings is also difficult to establish from the carving alone. What is clear is that these surfaces preserve information that conventional monument-focused accounts can miss.
The larger urban question is how cities and heritage sites recognise informal use. Public life is not recorded only in grand buildings or official plans. It is also embedded in places where people sit, wait, watch, teach and play. India’s temple and fort game boards offer a rare material record of those activities. Their preservation will depend not only on protecting stone, but also on connecting archaeological observation with local memory, craft practice and the continuing need for unstructured play.
