They had never seen one before but before long we were all playing boisterously for hours, scrubbing the board with dabs of my mother’s talcum powder and arguing over whether the striker was being placed correctly. A month later when they returned to England they landed at Heathrow carrying, much to their mother’s horror, a carrom board.
Souvik Mukherjee is tapping into that love for board games with the Goutam Sen Memorial Board Game Museum at his home in Ballygunge in Kolkata. Goutam Sen was his father-in-law and an avid chess player who died during the pandemic. The museum which came up in 2023 is a tribute to him, but it goes way beyond chess.
There’s no entry fee to the private museum but you need an appointment. Mukherjee, whose day job is in academia, is both the curator and the guide.
“It’s a perennial battle against dust,” he says apologetically, removing the plastic cover from the display cases. “I have colonised the veranda of the house,” he laughs. “But I would like to colonise more territory.” As of now, he can display about a tenth of his collection, some 70 games out of a collection of around 600.
It’s like an Ali Baba’s cave of wonders except with QR codes. The sound of traffic outside recedes as Mukherjee dives into a world of intrigue and drama laced with chance and strategy. There’s the royal game of Ur, possibly the oldest board game in the world, discovered in a 4,400-year-old royal tomb in Mesopotamia in the 1930s. Mukherjee has a replica he got from the British Museum in London. “It’s a fairly simple two-person game but the rules were discovered much later,” he says. “From a Cochin Jewish family who had migrated to Israel. They called the game Asha.”
Then there’s Senet, the game of Pharaohs, played with pyramidal dice on a rectangular board of 30 squares, some with hieroglyphics. There’s Go from Japan, Viking chess from Scandinavia, Bagh-chal from Nepal where 15 goats try to evade three tigers on a board. “If a tiger jumps over the goat, it eats the goat. But if there are two goats in a straight line, the tiger can’t jump and it’s cornered.”
Many of the games that are not on display are stacked around the room. One could almost do a timeline of world history through board games. There’s a game that talks about racism using slaves and slaveholders, a suffragettes game where players have to evade the police and get to the House of Commons, even a Gandhi game. “You basically play as Congress, Muslim League, the extremists, the British Raj and so on. It’s a really intense game with a very thick manual,” says Mukherjee. And there’s no guarantee Gandhi will win every time.
The games also reflect currents of migration. Games from East Africa end up in south India and then spread around the world. Parcheesi was the precursor of Ludo, played with cowrie shells as dice. “It was taken to England in the 1890s and patented as Ludo,” says Mukherjee. “I have a copy of the patent.” Next to the parcheesi sits its close cousin, chaupar, played with long dice. “The actor Jayant Kripalani remembered how their family had a chaupar board and how everyone would swear up a storm while playing it,” says Mukherjee. “But the interesting thing was they didn’t swear at each other. They would swear at the dice.” Incidentally, he does not believe Yudhistir played chaupar in the Mahabharat. That was only in the B. R. Chopra television version.
There is the eternal debate about where chess originated. Mukherjee points to a chaturanga board and says the first references to a game like chaturanga are in Banabhatta’s Harshacharita, though the earliest rules he has managed to find are in the 13th century Chaturanga Dipika. The board has a king with four armies—horses, chariots, elephants and boats. “That’s why in Bengali even now we often call the castle nauka or boat,” he says.
But the variants of chess Mukherjee has collected—from Incas with llamas facing off against conquistadors to Russian matryoshka dolls to a Burmese chess set with pagodas and elephants (and no king, only a general because the king thought it was lèse-majesté to be represented by a chess piece)—all show that in the end the origin story hardly matters. Humans travelled and the games travelled with them and they absorbed the stories they encountered along the way. The board for these games is essentially the world itself.
Mukherjee’s research interest was actually in video games, the very thing that’s supposed to have killed board games. “While I was writing my thesis I realised how much Indian heritage there was in these games, particularly in games that told stories,” he says. “Then I came across Gyan Chaupar and was astounded at the number of variations—Sufi, Bhakti, Golokdham where the winner finally ends up in Baikuntha or heaven. I saw how the West took over Gyan Chaupar and turned it into Snakes and Ladders.” Soon he was collecting games from all around the world and at one point it dawned on him that he could build an archive. “No one had much interest in building an archive. We don’t respect this kind of culture. But it would vanish if no one recorded it.”
That attitude comes from our conflicted attitudes towards leisure. Board games pre-date cardboard. They were often just played by scratching lines in the dirt. They were infantilised, regarded as something meant for children or the way women passed time in their chambers. Real men played outdoor games. In his book Nation at Play—A History of Sport in India, Ronojoy Sen quotes anthropologists Kendall Blanchard and A. T. Cheska who define sport as a “a physical exertive activity that is aggressively competitive within constraints imposed by definition and rules.” Board games don’t fit those definitions. Thus, other than perhaps chess, we felt no need to regard board games with any seriousness. And even chess was often the playground of the effete and indolent like the nawabi shatranj ke khiladi of Oudh, playing chess while their kingdom fell apart around them.
That reminds Mukherjee of a story about Fanorona, a game from Madagascar. A queen of Madagascar kept playing the game because she thought the outcome would tell her the strategy she needed to take against the invading French. “By the time she finished the game, the island was colonised,” says Mukherjee.
Indeed board games do carry with them the languor of a sunny winter afternoon or a rainy monsoon evening, a feel of time never-ending. That is probably why so many of us brought our old carrom boards and Ludo sets out of dusty hibernation during the covid lockdown. And board game nights for the public have become popular at Mukherjee’s museum.
As for that carrom board my cousins carried back, for years it would be dragged out when we visited London. Some of the pieces were lost and replaced by others. After my aunt and uncle died and the house was sold, it was donated to a Bangladeshi family in London. But the story of the carrom board that went to London became part of our family lore although it’s only now that I understand my cousins were not just carrying back a board game.
They were carrying the memory of a serendipitous summer, the joy of discovering cousins they never really knew and the ache of not knowing when we would see each other again. And the hope that every time the striker met a counter on the carrom board, it would rekindle that memory.
There was no strategy here. But by some lucky chance we had found family in a board game.
Cult Friction is a fortnightly column on issues we keep rubbing up against.
Sandip Roy is a writer, journalist and radio host. He posts @sandipr
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