The Royal Game of Ur, which was played in Mesopotamia thousands of years ago and became popular in the entire middle-east region, was found during excavations a century ago, but its rules were discovered in India only recently.
“The Jewish community settled in Kochi used to play this game as Aasha. An old woman from the community, who was living in an Israeli kibbutz, had remembered the rules,” says Souvik Mukherjee, who has started a boardgame museum in the city. The rules learnt from her matched with the earlier impressions. “The Royal Game of Ur is the earliest known boardgame. But the rules came to be known only after the 1980s,” says Mukherjee, 44, a faculty member at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata. Previously he taught English at Presidency University, Kolkata.
He obtained the model of the game from the British Museum. The board is made up of little squares and the players are meant to exit the board, but this happens with a metaphysical resonance. The game was played for divination, in this life, or the afterlife, says Mukherjee, And the exit, after following a certain course, could mean not a drop into oblivion after the earthy years, but a guarantee of some spot in eternity.
“The game can be played on the board, or on the mobile phone, as I have downloaded the app,” he says. This applies to many of the games at the museum.
The Royal Game of Ur is the first one that he points out among the 60 games on display, neatly laid out in glass cases with lights fitted in. One suddenly becomes aware that games are not just games, but are carriers of ideas, beliefs, myths, stories, histories and possibilities, both spiritual and temporal, and connect the world in ways we have forgotten.
Each game tells a story. Often more than one story.
Mukherjee started the museum at 57/13 Ballygunge Circular Road in November. It is a labour of love, in many ways.
The museum was set up in the memory of Mukherjee’s father-in-law, Gautam Sen, an avid and expert chess player, who was well-known in the state’s chess circles. He passed away from Covid. The museum is located at his residence in Ballygunge Circular Road and named after him.
It is also the outcome of Mukherjee’s passionate interest in games.
Videogames were his area of academic interest from the time he was a student of the English department at Jadavpur University (JU), Kolkata. His main research is in this area. He got his MPhil from JU and his PhD from Nottingham Trent University in the UK. But now he is also researching board games. “So the museum is an extension of my work,” says Mukherjee, author of several books on games. His wife, Amrita Sen, who is on the faculty of Calcutta University, is a huge support for the museum and its primary cheerleader.
Mukherjee takes a visitor through the games, one by one.
The Royal Game of Ur is followed by Mancala, a game dating back to the 6th and 7th centuries, from Eritrea and Ethiopia. The board has little pits with cowries or seeds in them. Mancala arrived in southern India as Pallanguzhi and from there it travelled to the Philippines. “It is proof of maritime exchanges with many places in Africa,” says Mukherjee.
Enslaved peoples, moved from one end of the earth to another, also carried with them their own games. The course of games indicates the course of major movements of peoples, trades and colonisation.
The next game, Senet, was played in ancient Egypt, signifying karmic life movement. The idea is to exit the board, presumably, again, with some metaphysical prospects.
Apparently the Pharaoh played the game every day before he sat down to his day’s business.
Mukherjee has about 200 games in his museum.
The spiritual element becomes explicit in two games from India, Gyan Chaupar and Golokdham, both of which have been the subject of Mukherjee’s research.
Gyan Chaupar is a board crawling with snakes and marked by ladders. This board is made up of little squares, too, and yes, it is the precursor of Snakes and Ladders. But Gyan Chaupar is about ascending to the divine state (Vaikuntha, Vishnu’s abode), after inhabiting, or passing through several spiritual states or falling prey to a vice, embodied in a snake. Each square spells out a virtue, vice, location or state of being: you start at janma (birth), then go through maya, krodha (anger), lobha (greed). Snakes wait for you at irsha (envy) and dvesh (ill-feeling). The words are written in Devanagari.
This game was transported to England. In 1832, a Captain Henry Dundas Robertson presented the “Shastree’s Game of Heaven and Hell” to the Royal Asiatic Society in London, writes Mukherjee in an article. When the game returned to India, it had become a children’s race game, with the spiritual script deleted and its venom much gone. The colonial filter has cleaned us out a lot.
Golokdham is a similar game in Bengali. The board at the museum starts at samsarkhetra (worldly life) at the first square and ends in golokdham (Vishnu’s abode) in the 64th square. Each square comes with instructions of movement according to cowrie counts and represents geographical and mythical locations and by the time one arrives at golokdham, one has undergone several moral and spiritual transformations, and possibly births, too. The museum’s array of chessboards is dazzling: there is Viking chess.
Aztec chess, chessboards with Chinese terracotta soldiers, Russian dolls, and one even with Incas versus Conquistadores, bought from Peru. On display is a fine handcrafted board of the Nepali game Baghchal, which pits tigers against goats, as is a game involving Suffragettes, Suffragetto, from around 1900. A beautiful kalamkari pasha cloth hangs on the wall.
Yet other than the remarkable collection of King Mummadi Krishnaraja Wodeyar of Mysore at Mysore Palace, and his own, there is no museum or archive of games in India, says Mukherjee.
The king would also create games, he says. The Knight’s Tool, a puzzle based on chess, is one. But games, though they contain within them worlds, sometimes literally, have failed to attract, let alone sustain, academic interest. “Perhaps they have been infantilised because children play them,” says Mukherjee.
Incidentally, Chinese Checkers is a German version of the late 19th century American game Halma; it was originally called Sternhalma and Hop Ching Checkers. “It is neither Chinese nor checkers, just as the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy nor Roman,” laughs Mukherjee.
And even as one substantial set of his games is built around spiritual aspiration, another is charged with fierce material desire.
All board games are, in a way, about capturing space, defeating the adversary and winning. But some games are actually about colonisation or replay it unequivocally for the new age.
A game like Afrikan tähti (Star of Africa) from Finland, designed in 1949 by Kari Mannerla, and still very popular in Finland and neighbouring countries, is about hunting a big African diamond. The Africa that we see here has not exactly been updated for our times.
The same drive is behind other contemporary games such as Catan (1995), Puerto Rico (2002), Struggle of Empires (2004), and Archipelago (2012). Which reminds us that aggression remains an important part of our pleasures.
But the games also tell us that colonised or coloniser, young or old, male or female, spiritually inclined or not, humans across the world want the same things for fun.