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At the tender age of five, Mummadi Krishnaraja Wadiyar III was declared Mysore’s 22nd Maharaja. Finding himself in the Jaganmohan Palace, he had more than royal shoes to fill — his predecessor Tipu Sultan had died in action, ending the fourth Anglo-Mysore War in 1799. Wadiyar would not be able to match this strongman legacy, but is remembered for carving out respect as a polyglot and cultural beacon; a patron who would one day help revive Kannada theatre, literature, and interestingly, the many homegrown board games of India.
In 1830, Mysore saw the farmer-led Nagar Uprising, which was quelled by the Wadiyars with the help of the British East India Company. Droughts and the kingdom’s grim financial crisis would later lead the British to depose the king for his ‘misrule’ and take over administrative duties, making Mummadi only a titular monarch until his death in 1868. Instead of fighting back, or philandering as many kings of his time did, the curious Mummadi would begin to take refuge in art, astrology, and board games — pastimes that matched his ‘softer’ sensibilities.
For those familiar with Premchand, this may remind them of his short story Shatranj Ke Khilari (The Chess Players), published in 1977 – or its better known film adaptation by Satyajit Ray. The narrative follows Mirza Sajjad Ali and Mir Roshan Ali, two avid chess players from the gentry of the kingdom of Awadh, which had a “friendship” with the British. Their king, Wajid Ali Khan, is largely devoted to preserving Lucknowi culture, which, coupled with the nobles’ neglect of their duties for chess, allows the British to annex Awadh.
Despite the close parallels, records suggest that Mummadi’s pursuits were neither as a lone painter in an ivory tower — though he did revive the Mysore school of painting — or solely as a patron of Mysore’s culture, though even music and jewellery flourished under his care. He had the logical mind of an academic, which when combined with art, poured itself into a dedication to creating, and preserving, board games. Visit the Jaganmohan Palace today, and you will find a chess-based maths puzzle, the famous ‘Knight’s Tour’ painted on its walls.
Chess players may find this puzzle familiar. Your knight, constricted to its L-shaped move, has to tour every single square of a chess board without repeating any places. The earliest known mention of this problem is by Kashmiri poet Rudrata in the 9th century (Kavyalankara), where he likened the pattern to the arrangement of the steps of a horse. However, the king (of Mysore, not the board) tweaked this puzzle, inscribing letters on each of these squares to form acrostic word games. A solver could decipher these to form a set of words, or even a verse.
At least six manuscripts that document a long list of games credit Mummadi as the author, and he commissioned several more. Dr Vasantha Rangachar details little known quips about Mummadi’s takes (multiple) on the Knight’s Tour in an edition of Marg Magazine. He writes that in one of the manuscripts – Chaturangada Bannada Mane – there are pages of knight’s puzzles that form diagrams of sacred geese, peacocks, and lingams, found through uncovering where the knight goes. The squares are adorned with letters, which represent words, which in turn represent numbers that reportedly would depict riddles found in ancient texts, morals of which Mummadi wanted to impart.
Several objects, like ivory dice, silk material board games, puzzles engraved on rosewood, brass plates and diagrams, continue to depict game configurations at the palace-turned-gallery. However, a bulk of these objects and manuscripts remain abroad – whether in the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, or other exhibits and auctions. It is said the king would often present games on silk handkerchiefs to Europeans who visited his palace.
In 2005, one of these puzzles would appear in an exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution’s Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in the United States. Titled Asian Games: The Art of Contest, it featured, among 160 other games from Persia, China, Japan and India, a trick box made by the king himself. To open it itself was a puzzle, and once you did, you would find 11 other games ‘hidden’ inside.
The exhibit was curated by one Asia Society, which also happened to edit a detailed book on the topic with the same name. Rather than by sections of culture and origin, the book is divided by types of games — such as ‘Power and Dexterity’ and ‘War and Territory’. In the curiously titled ‘Tossing and Turning’ section, Irving Finkel, one of the authors and a renowned philologist, would dedicate a chapter to ‘A Raja’s Diversions: Board Games at Mysore’, reminding the world of the almost 150-year-old trick box that had captivated modern-day American children.
If you thought the box contained the games, though, you were wrong. As the box unfolds, it reveals all the games to be housed on its surfaces, with a drawer on the side containing all the pieces. The games are engraved — some on a triangular wooden flap, some hidden below the top lid. Finkel writes that the games include chess, pachisi and nine “traditional” games that feature figures of animals, houses and soldiers, possibly played as war and hunt games, finish-line games, and solitaire-based games among others.
In front of the tourist-ridden Mysore Zoo, there is a slightly quieter non-profit arts centre — the Ramsons Kala Pratishtana, founded in 1995. Its secretary, R G Singh, is one of three authors behind Indian Traditional Board Games, A Guide to The Art of Play, along with curators Raghu Dharmendra and C R Dileep Kumar. A rare tome, it contains almost 20 years worth of research on Indian board games, and, you guessed it, a chapter on Mummadi’s inventions.
“Most games the Maharaja made, preserved or experimented with are actually very simple,” Singh insisted to The Indian Express over the phone, “and some are still played across Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, and Andhra Pradesh”. From goats & tigers and pachisi to chowka bara and mancala, he suggested the games that Mummadi treasured perhaps precede his own legacy.
Singh himself discovered the existence of these games by accident. His main interest, he said, lay in traditional Mysore paintings, of which he claims to have the single largest collection in India. “I found handpainted board games. When I dug deeper, I found lithographs of games, wooden-carved games with ivory in-lays, and brass board games.”
Their work goes beyond curation. Every two years, the Pratishtana hosts very specifically an exhibit of board games – the last one happened this April and May. The centre also invites visitors to play with models of Mummadi’s games, made with new, improvised materials. “Ivory is banned. So we use whitewood, and paint it in different colours. We also replace ivory in-lays with wood or brass. Games with materials such as silk tend to tear over time, so we are careful,” said Singh. For those who can’t make the trip, Ramsons offers hundreds of posts on the Maharaja’s games on their blog.
Dr Vasantha Rangachar wrote in Marg that Mummadi wished to “broadcast” his puzzles to people across the globe, but “little attention” has been paid to this legacy. Every scholar on the subject seems to have the same opinion, almost like a woeful prefix to their chapters.
In fact, if you’re not from Mysore, you probably wouldn’t have known of the king’s obsession with the movement of the knight across a 144-chequered chess board (a regular board has 64 squares), conquering every possible move without repeating a square. Or that he was one of very few people able to do so in the 1800s. Or that he experimented with pachisi, a game predating the Mahabharata, traditionally played by four people on a cross-like board. He made versions that could be played by up to 16 people. He also showed an encyclopedic focus in documenting regional games, having their rules written down clearly for posterity.
Mummadi similarly tinkered with ganjifa cards, adding 16 more suits to its usual four, and playing with the rules by introducing wild and trump cards. Mysore would become a production centre for this richly painted game, thought to have entered India with the Mughals. Mummadi would go on to create a variant called Mysore Chad Ganjifa, which much like Akbar’s Din-e-Ilahi, could not garner appeal outside the royal court. It is remembered due to its inclusion in the Sritattvanidhi (“The Illustrious Treasure of Realities”), one of the king’s many treatises.
In 2017, when R G Singh combed through diaries and notes “sent from the Resident’s office to the Viceroy’s Home Office”, they spoke of Mummadi’s personality. We learn that he was considered “soft-spoken” but a “knowledgeable conversationalist”, and a “satirist” who was also “courteous”. The subtlety of Mummadi’s beliefs can also be gleaned by his introduction of Karmic philosophy and symbolism into pachisi, putting in elements from the classic snakes and ladders game that had already been imbued with morality (ladders decorated with virtues, and snakes with vices).
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He also makes note of the king’s rarer inventions that have surfaced in London’s auction houses, tracing for example a gaming board carved with rosewood and ivory, called Shivasayujya Mukti Ata. A stylised version of pachisi, one has to reach its central square, inscribed as the abode of Shiva. That’s if you don’t flip the board to find the other game Devisayujya Mukti, based on Mysore’s goddess Chamundeshwari – it’s on the same premise with the same rules, but spiritual differences evidently meant a lot to Mummadi.
Dr Souvik Mukherjee, who teaches at Kolkata’s Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, told The Indian Express over the phone that he was shocked to find out any newspaper had decided to do a piece on the king. After all, the Maharaja’s contributions had long been overshadowed by the insult of deposition, as well as the rulers who came before and after him — the fierce Tipu, and the policy-forward Chamarajendra Wadiyar X. Mukherjee runs the cosy Gautam Sen Memorial Boardgames Museum, which houses over 200 board games. Some are obtained from museums abroad.
When asked about housing one of Mummadi’s royal creations, he laughs. “I am a professor, he was an emperor. I only hope to get permission to have a picture of his games one day.”
This feature is by Express Puzzles & Games, where we share Indian mini crosswords, quizzes, sudoku, word games and contests. You can follow the fun on @iepuzzles on Instagram.
