Vinita Sidhartha, 59, is a hardcore gamer, but not the kind you’re thinking of — the pale teen hunched over a console, waiting for the latest update to drop. She crawls behind foliage on a university campus, and reaches into the less than six-inch gap under the 250-tonne Krishna’s Butterball in Mamallapuram. Vinita is the kind who trudges across thousands of square feet of temple floors to find games.
Their latest find, in Dec 2025, was the game of ‘navakankari’ (also a version of nine men’s morris) etched into the stone near the entrance gopuram of the Jalakanteshwara temple in Vellore. They have documented board games on the floors of more than 100 temples, mostly in Karnataka but also in Odisha, Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh and Tamil Nadu. Because one board can accommodate several games, working out the rules of some of the games is a challenge, says Singh,.
“But for many everyday games, the rulebook exists in people’s heads, passed from one generation to another,” he says. The team draws on anthropologists’ records of traditional games, rules noted by British writers, texts such as ‘Krida Kausalya’ and ‘Manasollasa’, and recent academic research.
She has spent 25 years reviving India’s traditional games though Kreeda, the organisation she founded. Because children are losing the ability for unstructured play, vinita believes traditional games vanish faster than classical art forms.
V Balambal, former professor of history at the University of Madras, author of ‘Folk Games of Tamil Nadu’, says temple games such as pallanguzhi and its variants have been used to teach arithmetic and develop mental skills in parts of Africa and the West Indies. It is an inclusive game,” she says. “We worked with dhurrie weavers to explore how their techniques could make game boards,” he says.
“I have conducted several workshops on it for children with special needs and those who are visually impaired. “Paramapadam, which inspired modern ‘snakes and ladders’, was meant to teach about virtue and vice. Honesty and kindness take you up the ladder, while lying, stealing and greed bring you down. Modern-day versions do not incorporate these lessons. “Rather than playing chess or cricket, they go for chess class or cricket class. The importance of play for the sake of play, not just to learn, has gone. She also conducts workshops at school and has an experience centre. Singh’s trust works through crafts and in classrooms to revive the games. “We wanted to add a new dimension to traditional crafts. They have also trained teachers to introduce the games to children.