In the 18th-century Wadiyar court of Mysore, painters worked in miniature to produce Ganjifa — circular playing cards for the ten-suited Dashavatara game, each disc devoted to one avatar of Vishnu. Every card is a small illuminated world: a dark ink-green roundel at the center, ringed in gold leaf, framed by a deep maroon-brown border mixed from local mud pigment. The palette was never accidental. Ground earth pigments gave the border its lacquered mud-red-brown; temple-green ink filled the sacred field; gold line-work marked the boundary between the divine figure and the material world. This is a design language of concentric containment — devotion held inside a ring, held inside a border, held inside the hand.