Krishnaraja Wodeyar III ascended to the throne of the Princely State of Mysore at age five in 1799 and remained there until his death in 1868. He wielded little real power under British colonial rule and had plenty of time and resources to devote himself to other pursuits. Favorite among them was the transformation of simple folk games into elaborate vehicles of religious, philosophical, and astrological knowledge rooted in the Hindu traditions that he was trying to preserve. He spelled out devotional hymns and traced divine images by moving chess pieces across diagrams and manifested the inherent symbolism of abstract games in richly detailed models of karma and cosmos. In one telling example, he reimagined the board of a popular game as the zodiacal circle, the pawns as the planetary bodies, and the dice as the fateful forces that govern their movement in the sky.
The importance of the ludic legacy of Krishnaraja Wodeyar III can hardly be overestimated. The games and game manuscripts he left behind provide a unique glimpse into the creative mind of an early modern designer working at the interface between the playful and the serious with no easy distinction between the two. Yet their current state of preservation and distribution makes any assessment of them a puzzle worthy of the Maharaja himself. Most have long since left the palace grounds where they were conceived and produced, and those that remain have suffered through monsoon rains, palace fires, and simple theft. If it were not for a small group of game scholars and enthusiasts, we probably would not even know about them today.
The working group brings together researchers, translators, and game manufacturers with intimate knowledge of the histories, cultures, and languages necessary to fully appreciate and understand the contributions of Krishnaraja Wodeyar III. It aims at providing a comprehensive overview of the games he invented and the texts that accompanied them. Above and beyond the mere listing of games and game manuscripts, it seeks to identify the knowledge systems that informed them and explore the myriad ways in which he expressed them through art, story, and game mechanics.