Game of strategy born in India: Finkel

Jaipur: China may have its gunpowder and paper, but India will have its chess. The game of strategy was certainly born in this country, and, perhaps developed from an early demonstration for battle strategy, anthropologist Irving Finkel said.
“Ashtapada is a game board documented by Patanjali in the 2nd century; some of its 64 squares had an X mark.Some chess boards are similarly ‘X’ marked, and I think chess adapted from Ashtapada,” said Finkel, to a crowd gathered to hear him speak on his area of expertise, ancient board games.
Finkel, curator of Mesopotamian cuneiform tablets at the British Museum, traces the origins of ancient board games and tries to piece together an anthropological reading of cultures, social habits, and migration pat terns. The game we common ly know as Ludo -“I play“ in Latin -is a corruption of the ancient Indian game `pachisi` or `chaupar', a complicated game whose earliest evidence was found in the court of Akbar in Fatehpur Sikri. The game was taken to England and in the 1850s, some enter prising chap sold it along with a two-and-half page rule book. Later, it was simplified by trimming the squares and dumbing down the rules.
Snakes and Ladders too had its home in India, and perhaps started out as a tool for religious or moral teaching.
The legends on the squares listed vices and virtues and one’s journey up or down the board via snakes and ladders, were a direct consequence of those. His hunt for board games has led to discoveries of game grids on walls and floors of temples, built structures in courtyards, and even on the steps of a building. “Temple priests don’t realise they have an ancient board game carved into the floor of their temple; they presume it’s part of the design,” he pointed out.
He said India should have a museum for board games.