[100 Emerging Women Leaders] Charanya Kumar is creating a niche with games on Indian mythology

Charanya Kumar, a resident of Chennai, had to wait until January 2023 to bring her passion and love for gaming to life in the form of Chittam, an interactive gaming company inspired by Indian mythology.

In the meantime, she pursued engineering and graduated with a master’s in computer science from the US at the peak of the recession in 2008. Given the global financial issues, Kumar jumped on the first offer she received from IBM.

After a career in consulting spanning 14 years across four companies, Kumar decided to pursue a business based on values from Indian mythology. As of May 2024, Chittam has sold its games to 700 users globally.

A homecoming

In 2011, while dealing with a personal crisis, Kumar rediscovered the Hindu epics—Mahabharata and Bhagavatam—which had influenced her growing up. Her grandmother’s counsel, “Whenever you find yourself at life’s crossroads, your cultural roots will come to your aid,” resonated with her.

She read the epics over and over again and found “every answer to life” she was looking for.

“What I found in these texts wasn’t just an out-of-the-world spiritual connection, but tremendous value and principles that I could apply to our daily lives in these times,” says Kumar.

Eventually, Kumar took a break from work and pursued an MBA from INSEAD, Singapore and France, in 2014. “Following difficult times in my personal life, the impetus to start something of my own was growing in me. And although I didn’t know what it was going to be, the MBA was my first courageous step in that direction,” she says.

After a quick stint at Wipro, Kumar co-founded the game company Gurucool Fun, along with Radha Narayanan and Santhosh Subramaniam in 2020. “However, very quickly, I realised that this leadership was not working out for me,” she says, adding, “Instead of trying to rekindle it, I felt it was finally time to embark on the journey I had been working for all those years.”

Bringing people together

Kumar launched Chittam with five products, which quickly grew to 13 in its first year of launch. “These were games, activities, and books that would educate children about India’s cultural heritage and history with an element of fun,” says Kumar. 

“From the very beginning, our core principle has been the same—simple gameplay and content that is always the king,” she adds. These games are designed in a way that the family elders would know one section and children the other.

“For instance, we have a board game called ‘Party Talks’ (a pun on the word ‘paati’, which translates to grandmother in Tamil), designed around Tamil proverbs. Here, children draw and solve challenges related to proverbs for their teammates to guess, while the elders in the family—who are more likely to be familiar with these proverbs—help them answer,” explains Kumar. 

“I tested this game with my grandmothers and grandmothers-in-law who are in their 80s and 90s,” she adds.

Chittam’s bestseller game, ‘Bharata Vilas’ is a card game that explores India’s weaves, dance forms, monuments, and native cuisines. “The best thing about this game, as with most of our games, is that it brings different generations of people in a family together,” she says. 

“This is so relevant when meaningful conversations within families have become rare. In a highly disconnected world, one of the things we wanted to offer was connection and sharing, which are aspects inherent to our culture that are fading away,” Kumar adds.

Chittam’s range of games is priced between Rs 295 and Rs 1,500. In its first year, Chittam clocked in a revenue of Rs 15 lakh. It also bagged Rs 30 lakh as part of its first seed round recently, and it is now tapping into state and central government startup schemes.

Additionally, Chittam has participated in three editions of By Hand From Heart—an exhibition curated by entrepreneurs Kshiti Davey and Deepa Sekar. 

Funding poses one of the biggest challenges for Kumar as an entrepreneur and a woman in the traditional games space. “Entertainment and education are two clearly defined sectors, and we don’t fall under either. This tends to come in the way when we look for funding,” says Kumar. 

“I sense that a comprehensive understanding of the need and the market for Indian cultural education is missing among investors. The moment I say we are working on Indian culture, there is a tendency to immediately assume we are a non-profit working with craftspeople,” she adds.

She notes that it is harder being a woman in a niche space like ‘edutainment’ under the broad umbrella of cultural entrepreneurship. “All these factors make it difficult to be a B2C in this space,” Kumar says.