HYDERABAD: The journey to understand traditional games is a fascinating one. When I first embarked on this journey, I assumed that there would be a finite number of games that we would find and at some point, I would be able to say that I had successfully researched and documented all our traditional games. I quickly discovered how wrong I was. The sheer ingenuity of our ancestors in creating a variety of games using simple grids was staggering. Dice games, race games, hunt games, games of strategy, games of alignment…The list went on. Then I discovered that the same board was often used to play multiple games or in some cases, the game concept was adapted to multiple boards.
This left us with an infinite number of games to research and with little to no rules documented, we had an interesting quest ahead of us. A few days ago, a friend tagged me on Facebook with the image of a grid discovered in the historic Gandikota Fort on the right bank of the Pennar River in the Kadapa district of Andhra Pradesh. Grids like this were often inscribed on the stone floors of temples and monuments by builders, artisans, and even other visitors so they could play games. The question was this — was it a design or a game board and if it was a game, could I shed some light on this?
This is a question we constantly ask ourselves. How does one know the difference between a board game and a pattern or design? There are no easy answers. But over the years I have learned to document every pattern and grid and sometimes when you compare these you see parallels and answers start to emerge.
I saw the post late at night and then I simply could not sleep. At first glance, it seemed like an incomplete board of Dayakattam or Chaupad. Three sides of the board ran to the edge of the stone suggesting that it might not be a complete etching. However, on carefully examining the fourth side it was obvious that the board had either been left incomplete or was complete in this form. Crosses in a dice game generally represent a safe square. The fact that all four squares had crosses puzzled me.
Was it perhaps not a dice game after all? Or maybe not a game at all? I had a vague memory of documenting a similar image years ago in Rajasthan, but I had lost all evidence of it in the Chennai floods of 2015. So, I dug through mountains of research, notes, books, and other documents hoping to
find something and I did find a clue.
I found notes from a conversation I had recorded with a visiting artisan many years ago when I had tried to tap into his memories of games played by his grandparents. He had told me of a game played on a board “that looked like Chaupad but was smaller.” It was played with split tamarind seeds and the game pieces moved along the points and not in the squares as in most other games. He had no recollection of the finer rules or movement and could not even remember what the game was called.
As I skimmed my notes, I realised it was fascinating. I had dismissed his recollections at the time as they were incomplete. Now, however, they gave me a clue as to what this game could be. From other clues drawn from a couple of books with similar suggestions of game pieces moving along points, it is likely this game was played by four players with four game pieces each. On the throw of the tamarind seeds, the game pieces were moved around the board before proceeding to the safety of the centre square.
Here was a game that was played on the points of the grid rather than in the squares of the grid very different from most dice games in India. It probably meant there were no safe squares. It also meant so much greater versatility in the use of grids for games. There is evidence of a couple of other games played like this and it makes you wonder if many other boards we have seen were used to play games of this nature. But that is the story for another quest and another day.
If you or anyone you know has any information about the game, contact the author at vinita@kreedagames.com