Cowry shells came into the picture much later and became a popular choice, especially among the common people. Sources and evidences in the study of board games become more accessible as we approach the middle of the first millennium, the period of development of the games like chaupar and backgammon. Backgammon Backgammon seems to have emerged around the early Gupta period.
Micaela Soar extensively surveyed extant archeological evidences to conclude that the early Indian form of backgammon emerged around CE from the Punjab region and became the characteristic 2 x 12 row board game of backgammon.
At the height of its popularity, it found representation in the art and culture of the time, famously as the game of Shiva and Parvati at various temples in the Ellora caves.
Chaupar Chaupar or pachisi has an even more interesting timeline. It reached its high point during the Mughal period as attested by the giant outdoor game board built by Akbar. It is also the game that most traditions ascribe to the downfall of Yudishthira in the Mahabharata. Various forms of chaupar have flourished in India. The most modern version of this game is ludo, which was reintroduced in India by the British around Many commercial versions of Indian chaupar were extremely popular in the US in the twentieth century.
Gyan chaupar The race game gyan chaupar also has a similar history. It was probably invented by Jain monks as a didactic game in the early part of the second millennium and later adopted by Hindu and Sufi traditions throughout the centuries of assimilation during the Bhakti period. However, it was reintroduced in India as the British game of snakes and ladders from the twentieth century onwards.
Chaturanga Chaturanga was one of the more popular aristocratic games of ancient India. Developing around the sixth century CE, it started off as a didactic game to teach young princes about the four anga s parts of the royal army: the infantry, the elephants, the chariot and the cavalry.
The game was invented in India before being introduced to the West Asians, who took it to Europe from where chess, its most modern version, emerged. The word chaturanga first appeared in the Mahabharata and Ramayana.
This immensely popular game has undergone various changes from chaturanga to shatranj to finally chess. Most of the extant game boards that have been recovered come from the seventeenth century onwards. Therefore, histories of games that remained popular till then are easier to construct than others.
A man of great cultural refinement and a board game enthusiast himself, he went to great lengths to help document and collect various folk board game traditions of India, resulting in long encyclopedias on the subject. For any ancient games enthusiast in South Asia, his collection is a treasure trove yet to be understood and written about. Scholars have only recently started going through his collections and have discovered various new aspects of South Indian games.
Let us now look at the various cultural contexts in which these games come up and the roles they serve in their respective economy of meanings and symbols. First, we investigate the notion of the divine that occurs in various board games and its attendant representational forms.
The Divine Play The question of the divine has always preceded the question of play and pleasure in ancient India. Numerous strands of Hindu philosophy fashion the world as an endless form of maya or illusion, highlighting the perpetual nature of the divine play or lila. As such, understanding the divine through its representations in traditions of ancient Indian board games becomes crucial.
Shiva and Parvati One of the most enduring motifs throughout Indian art has been Shiva and Parvati playing a game of dice. In CE, Persians learned this game and named it Shatranj. A strike-and-pocket table game that is popularly played throughout South Asia and in a few Middle-Eastern countries, carrom is said to have originated in the Indian subcontinent. You can find an ancient glass carrom board in Patiala, Punjab.
Carrom gained popularity after World War I, and is now played at family or social gatherings for fun. Earlier in India it was called Pachisi , and the board was made out of cloth or jute. A depiction of Pachisi is found in the caves of Ajanta in Maharashtra, showing that the game was quite popular in the Medieval Era. In the late 19 th century, different variations of the same game were played in England; in , a similar game appeared that was called Ludo, and thus the name was patented.
Created by Sant saint Gyandev in the 13 th century, this game of vice and virtues was used in Hindu Dharma to teach good values to children. The snakes represented vice and the ladders virtues. The squares where the ladders were found depicted virtues; for example, square 12 was faith, 51 was reliability, 76 was knowledge, and so on. Similarly, the squares where the snakes were found were known as vices; square 41 was disobedience, 49 was vulgarity, 84 was anger, et cetera.
The hundredth square represented Moksha or Nirvana. With time, the game underwent a number of changes, but the meaning remained the same: if you do good deeds, you go to heaven, and if you do bad deeds, you will be reborn. If certain accounts are to be believed, oblong dice were found in excavations at Harrapan sites like Lothal, Alamgirpur, Kalibangan, Desalpur and Ropar. These dice were earlier used for gambling. Dice then spread to Persia and became a part of popular board games there.
Early mentions of dice are also found in the Rig Veda and Atharva Veda. Modern playing cards originated in ancient India, and were called Krida-Patram. Games of this kind seem to have developed everywhere and some may be early ancestors of backgammon. Mesopotamia The most ancient possible ancestor of the game to be found so far dates back some five thousand years to the ancient civilization of Sumer which flourished in southern Mesopotamia in what is now Iraq.
In the royal cemetery he found five game layouts which bear some slight resemblance to our backgammon boards. They were made of wood, intricately decorated with a mosaic of shell, bone, lapis lazuli, red paste, and red limestone set in bitumen, and adorned with animals and rosettes. Soon after Woolley's discovery, in another part of ancient Mesopotamia, archaeologists found a similar gaming board. This one was less lavishly decorated, but under the board, in neat piles, were found two sets of playing pieces and dice.
One set of men consisted of simple black squares, each inlaid with five lapis dots; the others were shell squares engraved with vignettes. Each player apparently had seven men and six dice. Pharoah Play There is evidence that several thousand years later the Egyptian Pharaohs were enjoying another board game that may be an ancestor of backgammon.
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