A friend of mine recently visited Ladakh. During her visit, she went to Unlock Hundarman – Museum of Memories, a community-led heritage project in the village of Hundarman, near Kargil in Ladakh, very close to the Line of Control. It was created to preserve the memories, objects, and stories of a village whose history was dramatically altered by the Indo-Pak conflicts of the mid-20th century.
Hundarman was once a thriving settlement on historic trade routes. After the wars between India and Pakistan and subsequent border changes, families were separated, homes were abandoned, and everyday were objects left behind. The old village gradually became a kind of time capsule.
The museum was established within an old ancestral house in the abandoned part of the village. Rather than being a conventional museum of rare artefacts, it preserves everyday objects that are used to tell the stories of ordinary people whose lives were disrupted by shifting borders.
Interestingly, some of the objects were related to games in the local Balti/Ladakhi play traditions. My friend, as many of my friends do now, was quick to send me some photographs of the panels describing these games. Among them is a game played with goat knucklebones, which is an important example of the wider Eurasian tradition of astragal/knucklebone play extending from the Mediterranean to the Himalayas.
The 'knucklebone' used in games is usually the astragalus (talus), an ankle bone from a sheep or goat. It is a small, unusually-shaped hard bone that naturally comes to rest on one of four main sides when thrown. Because of this property, it functions almost like a natural die. In fact, many believe that the knucklebone inspired the creation of dice.
Knucklebones, like all dice, were used in divination in an effort to predict the future. The sides of the bone were interpreted symbolically and used to predict fortunes or answer questions. The most common use of knucklebones in play was as dice. Players threw the bones and scored according to the face that landed uppermost. The position of the bone determined points, luck, penalties, or elimination.
But knucklebones were used not just as dice but also as pieces in gameplay. For example, there is evidence to show that they were used in the place of stones or pebbles to play a game similar to five stones. Here players tossed one bone into the air and picked up others before catching the first one.
Another common documented use is in striking games. Knucklebones are flicked at targets in games much like we do in a game of marbles. For communities that raised sheep and goats, these bones were plentiful, durable, and ready-made for play. No special equipment was needed.
The panel at Unlock Hundarman describes a game that seems a combination of a dice game and a striking game like marbles. In the first stage, players pick one knucklebone each and throw them in the circle. The position of the bone seems to indicate who will stay in the game and who is eliminated.
In the second stage, players who throw the face up position called Rhta continue in the game and get a chance to strike another game piece out of the circle. These panels at Unlock Hundarman are invaluable as they situate play within the larger story of people's lives rather than presenting games as detached rules and boards.
In a village shaped by borders, conflict, and loss, even a small bone reminds us that play is never trivial; it carries memory, movement, and the everyday lives of people across time.