Abstract

In 1891, Alfred Collier patented a game that he called the Royal Game of Ludo and around the same time, Frederick Henry Ayres, another British toymaker, patented the game of Snakes and Ladders. Both of these are boardgames that made a huge impact in colonial and post-independence India, South Asian countries and also globally. What is not usually recognized is that both of these were originally played in India centuries before the patents were registered. Across the Atlantic, another version of Collier’s game was patented, as hearsay goes, by a certain John Hamilton of Hudson River Bay company, who registered the game in 1867. Once again, like Collier’s patent, in fact, we have an ‘invention’ of a game already existing for many centuries in the Indian subcontinent. Hamilton’s game was titled Parcheesi, a name closer to the Indian original, Pachisi (which derives from the word for twenty-five in many North Indian languages). Pachisi is also widely popular as Chaupar and has had a long tradition of play in the Indian subcontinent. In fact, there is a Chaupar board etched on the ground in Fatehpur Sikri in Agra, the seat of the Mughal empire, where apparently the emperor played the game with humans acting as game pieces. Snakes and Ladders, too, has a long and rich history and it was played long before in the Indian subcontinent as Gyan Chaupar and Moksha Pata, both pedagogic game-boards designed to instruct the players in the ways of Karma.

The move from the colony to the metropole in both cases would constitute an example of transculturation, as the Cuban anthropologist, Fernando Ortiz, defines the term. Ortiz locates his theoretical framework within the context of colonialism, asserting that transculturation is a combined process of adding new characteristics (acculturation), loss of original characteristics and meaning (deculturation) and then the redefining of some characteristics (neoculturation). From the transition of Chaupar to the Royal Game of Ludo or the Karmic game that identifies with Indic philosophy to the Protestant work ethic-based Snakes and Ladders, there is evidently a clear example of transculturation at play. It is no surprise that Collier’s game is called the ‘Royal’ game and that he has made the goal of the game the ‘monarch square.’ In the move from the colonies to the metropole (or the heart of the British Empire), the monarch as the arch-colonialist becomes a pivotal figure in the modified game. Similarly, the Protestant work ethic that informs Snakes and Ladders and arguably, another more modern example, The Game of Life, is a far cry from the original game and clearly a colonial and European modification.

This talk aims to ‘replay’ these common board games by examining the fissures of transmission and the process of travel of these games from colony to the metropole and back. Often trivialised as children’s pastimes, board games usually fall below the purview of Cultural Studies, Performance Studies and even the much more recent Game Studies. As such, the boardgame is 'rendered subaltern', as it were, by the colonial apparatus of the British Raj and, consequently, the academic systems of post-colonial South Asia. What is necessary now is to unpack the hitherto suppressed colonial logic that has reshaped and re-disseminated notions of leisure, culture, and identity and to use the frameworks of Postcoloniality, Decoloniality, and Subalternity to write over using overarching stereotypes created by colonial thinking.

Biography

Souvik Mukherjee is associate professor in Cultural Studies at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences Calcutta, India. His research looks at a variety of game-related topics including videogames and storytelling, videogames as colonial and postcolonial media, gaming cultures in the Indian subcontinent, and Indian boardgames and their colonial avatars. Souvik is the author of Videogames and Storytelling: Reading Games and Playing Books (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), Videogames and Postcolonialism: Empire Plays Back (Springer UK, 2017), Videogames in the Indian Subcontinent: Development, Culture(s) and Representations (Bloomsbury India, 2022), and most recently Indian Boardgames, Colonial Avatars Transculturation, Colonialism and Boardgames (De Gruyter Brill, 2025). He was named a ‘DiGRA Distinguished Scholar’ in 2019 by the Digital Games Research Association and a Higher Education Video Game Alliance (HEVGA) fellow in 2022. He has been a board member of the Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) and a founder-member of DiGRA India and DHARTI, the Digital Humanities group in India. He is also an affiliated senior research fellow at the Centre of Excellence, Game Studies at Tampere University.