Last night I asked a Chinese friend about this game and to illustrate I started drawing out a board. It was interesting that even as I started drawing it he still thought I was talking about tsiang ki, normal Chinese chess and it occured to me that the fixed nature of the den and the surrounding traps are very similar to the palace and palace guards in tsiang ki and there's the further similarity of the lakes with the river. At first impression this seems a strong indicator that the game is of Chinese origin, a simplified children's version of the "adult" tsiang ki, not Indian, so I'm interested in the sources that give it as Indian. However, if jungle pre-dates tsiang ki, another possibility is that tsiang ki arose from a synthesis of jungle with chaturanga or mak ruk. There's a tendency for historians to want a simple linear progression in the history of "chess" so it's interesting that Chinese and Korean chesses show characteristics of jungle as well as the more typical chess characteristics, yet Japanese and pre-renaissance European chess share elements from mak ruk. It seems to me likely that there was something of a flux of co-existing games centred loosley around Burma before they took on their different fixed forms with further migration.