A GRAPH-THEORETIC APPROACH TO CHATURANGA TURANGA BANDHĀM IN ANCIENT INDIAN KĀVYĀ
By
Rama Vijaykumar
Department of Mathematics, S.I.W.S. N.R. Swamy College of Commerce & Economics and Smt. Thirumalai College of Science (Autonomous), Wadala, Mumbai, Maharashtra, India- 400031
Email: ramav@siwscollege.edu.in
(Received: August 01, 2025; Revised: June 08, 2026; Accepted: June 10, 2026)
DOI: https://doi.org/10.58250/jnanabha.2026.561P-11
Abstract
Ancient Indian scriptures are a vast ocean of knowledge, embedding profound insights within verses, shlokas, and sutras. These texts often connect deeply with disciplines such as mathematics, medicine, astronomy, astrology, cosmology, and philosophy. This paper aims to explore a specific verse that discloses the existence of graph-theoretic concepts in ancient Indian text, dating back to the 9th century A.D. Through an analytical study of a shloka arranged in the poetic structure of Kāvyām, which stands out for its intellectual and visual appeal, we uncover a representation of the Knights Tour on a chessboardtraversing each cell exactly once without repetition. This poetic construct mirrors the properties of a Hamiltonian path and introduces the foundational idea of what is now formalized as a Hamiltonian graph, thus showcasing a remarkable early instance of graph-theoretic thought in ancient Indian tradition.
2020 Mathematical Sciences Classification: 05C45 (Primary), 05C38, 68R10, 01A32 (Secondary)
Keywords and Phrases: : Kāvyām, Chitrakāvyām, Chaturanga, Turanga, Shlokas, Hamiltonian Path, Bipartite graph and Regular graph.