Snakes and Ladders began as a spiritual game in India. How the British transformed it

Interestingly, British game manufacturers introduced the modern version of Snakes and Ladders in India in the late 19th century, even though the basic concept had travelled from India, where the game was known as Gyan Chaupar. Once in Europe, the game evolved alongside board games already popular there before eventually being re-exported to the Indian market.

In an interview with indianexpress.com, Schmidt-Madsen discusses the religious function of Gyan Chaupar, why the imagery of snakes and ladders appealed to British audiences, and how the game was transformed before making its way back to India.

Read the edited excerpts:

Q. Do we know how and when board games became popular in the world?

Schmidt-Madsen: The earliest undisputed evidence of board games goes back to the Bronze Age civilisations of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the Indus Valley. Games were played across all strata of society, but they are not always easy to spot. Because of their ephemeral nature and association with social ills such as gambling and idleness, they tend to hide among archaeological artefacts and between lines of text.

Most early board games are found in tombs and other funerary contexts. This means that the archaeological evidence is biased toward elite culture. Recently scholars have begun paying more attention to game diagrams carved into the floors of temples, forts, public buildings, and other historical structures. This points to a much more widespread culture of play than previously attested.

Literary sources show similar absences. They rarely address games directly and when they do, they usually condemn them or use them as metaphors for something more exalted. No clear descriptions show what the games looked like or how they were played. Reconstructing early games and the experiences they afforded players is largely an exercise in speculation.

The only thing we can be sure of is that games were woven into the cultural tapestry of human history from the earliest times. We are a playful species and it is natural for us to play, both as individuals and as societies.

Some claim that religious communities are the exception that proves the rule. This is because of the injunctions against playing that we often find in their holy writ and monastic codes. But early literary evidence, as well as later ethnographical evidence, shows that playing games is common within religious institutions. The injunctions against it should therefore be taken as negative proof of its widespread popularity.

At the end of the day, it is difficult to say exactly when games became popular. The best answer is probably that they didn’t need to become popular, since they were always popular.

Q. What caught your attention about Snakes and Ladders? 

Schmidt-Madsen: What caught my attention about Snakes and Ladders specifically is that it is one of the very few games where the board is actually inscribed. Most traditional board games consist solely of abstract diagrams, but Snakes and Ladders has words written in the squares.

Or at least that was the case in the early Indian version of the game, known as Gyan Chaupar, or The Game of Knowledge. Later, when Gyan Chaupar was adopted by the British, the words were mostly replaced by illustrations, or even disappeared completely.

Q. What are they inscribed with?

Schmidt-Madsen: The squares of the boards were inscribed with key concepts pertaining to different religious knowledge systems. Each board would belong to a specific religious community and they would inscribe their own ideas about life and the universe on them. At first, Vaishnava and Jaina communities in western India created most boards, but later we also find boards from Sufi, Shaiva, Advaita Vedanta, and other religious communities.

The board represented an entire universe. And each square on the board represented an element of that universe, such as a principle of creation or a realm of existence. So naturally the boards varied between religious communities as they held different views of how the universe came to be, how it was organised, who inhabited it, and so on. And that is really the most beautiful thing about Gyan Chaupar: that such a multitude of different religious life worlds could be reflected in a single game.

Parampad Sopan (Ladder to Liberation) played during Vaikunth Ekadashi in parts of South India. Published by P.C. Shabadimath in Gadag, Karnataka, mid-20th century. (Express photo by Adrija Roychowdhury)

Q. Can you give me an example?

Schmidt-Madsen: The earliest and most widespread version of Gyan Chaupar is the Vaishnava Bhakti version. It maps three different main categories onto the board. The first is cosmogony, which describes the world’s creation. The second is cosmography, which details the world’s ordering. The third is religious practice, which outlines the various paths to liberation and their less attractive opposites.

The standard Vaishnava Bhakti board has 72 squares. The squares are organised into a grid of eight rows and nine columns. The central column is the most important, as it holds not only the grid but also the entire universe together. Each square in the column represents a plane of existence, beginning at the bottom with earth, sky, and heaven, and continuing upward with the extraterrestrial planes inhabited by semi-divine and divine beings. At the very top of the column sits Vaikuntha, or the heaven of Vishnu, which is identical with liberation from the cycle of rebirth in Vaishnava Bhakti.

The rest of the squares would invoke other religious concepts and ideas that might speak to you when you landed on them. And even if they did not, you could still play the game. Just as any child today can play a modern abstract game of Snakes and Ladders. Throw the die, move your pawn, climb up a ladder, slide down a snake, try to reach the top of the board. On a game mechanical level, that is all there is to it. But on a philosophical level, there is an entire world of knowledge to explore.

Such simplicity and depth are much sought after and difficult to achieve, even among modern professional game designers.

Q. In your book you write that the game goes by different names in different communities, but it is in essence the same concept. Why was that the case?

Schmidt-Madsen: The point that I am making in the book is that the formal game system remains the same, even when the different religious interpretations of it differ.

If you think of Snakes and Ladders as a formal system, it consists of a unidirectional track of sequential squares. Players each control a single pawn that moves along the track according to the throw of a die. If they land on certain squares, they are either moved forward or backwards to a different square. The goal is to reach a specific square which, interestingly, was not placed at the end of the track in the original game of Gyan Chaupar. Instead, it was placed a few squares before the end of the track. This meant that players risked moving past it. Then they had to slide down the snake at the end of the track and start climbing again.

The final square’s position gave the game a cyclical feel. If you overshot it, you would have to keep on moving in circles until you hit it. And this is where we begin to see the intersection of the formal system and its different religious interpretations. The cyclical track represented the cycle of rebirth, the pawns represented the souls who traverse it, the dice represented the fates who control them, and the snakes and ladders represented the karmic forces pulling them toward or pushing them away from final liberation. This was the game’s basic framework. And no matter which religious terminology you inscribe the individual squares with, the overall concept of a karmic journey through existence toward liberation remains.

Now, it is unclear why the imagery of snakes and ladders was chosen to represent negative and positive karmic fruition, respectively. If we look more closely, we find the imagery is not always snakes and ladders. If you go to Nepal, for example, there are no ladders, only good snakes and bad snakes. And in West Asia, there are often arrows instead of ladders, and sometimes chains instead of snakes. So, the imagery can really be anything. It depends on what it represents to the community who creates the board.

Gyan Bazi (Game of Knowledge) depicting the universe according to Jain tradition. Original drawn by Krish Harsh Chand in Mandsaur, Madhya Pradesh, 1855 CE. (Express photo by Adrija Roychowdhury)

Returning to the Vaishnava Bhakti board, we have already seen that it has 72 squares. And if you multiply the number of squares by one thousand, you will find that they represent the 72,000 energy channels in the subtle or astral body. These energy channels are called nadis, and they are often depicted as snakes. Some boards even have text passages instructing us to understand the snakes as nadis. So when you look at the board and see it as a representation of the macrocosmic universe, you may also see it as a microcosmic representation of your own body. The game does not just want to tell you something about the universe; it wants to tell you something about yourself.

The ladders are harder to explain because they are not normally used to represent energy channels or other features in the subtle body. I don’t have the final answer as to why they were so widely used, but we do find references to ladders in some spiritual texts. The muktisopana, or ladder to liberation, is a concept that appears in early Nath yogic texts. And in Tamil Nadu, the game is known as paramapadasopana, or the ladder leading to the highest place. So ladders appear as metaphors for spiritual progress, though the evidence is not nearly as strong as for the metaphorical use of snakes. For now, we have to accept that we cannot point to a concrete source for the adoption of ladders in Gyan Chaupar.

Q. The Indian version clearly was heavily invested with religious symbolism, as you just mentioned. Did the European version strip it of its religious connotation completely? 

Schmidt-Madsen: Gyan Chaupar was brought to Europe by the British in the late 19th century. By then it had already existed for a couple of hundred years in India. It had spread to West Asia and developed many different thematic variations. But the variations were always grounded in religion. Only in Europe did it lose its religious connotations and become secularised.

The story, however, is more complex than that. Modern Snakes and Ladders is not only an adaptation of Gyan Chaupar. It has multiple influences, many of which come directly from games popular in Europe for hundreds of years. The idea of mapping human progress, whether religious or secular, onto a board was nothing new. What was truly new about Snakes and Ladders was the eponymous snakes and ladders themselves. The game borrowed this key element from the Indian game.

If you think of it from the perspective of a British game manufacturer, it actually makes very good sense. Around the turn of the 20th century, lithographic Gyan Chaupar boards were printed in the thousands in major urban centres such as Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, and Lahore. Many were beautifully illustrated and heavily inscribed, but a foreign game manufacturer ignorant of Indian deities, scripts, languages, and religious concepts would see them as nothing more than spectacle. Instead, they would probably focus on the snakes and ladders trailing across the boards and start thinking that maybe this was their lucky day.

See, the ingenuity of Snakes and Ladders is that it’s a visual device. Back then, most British games of a similar type were also inscribed, or even accompanied by a booklet with detailed descriptions of what the different squares represented and how they impacted play if you landed on them. This meant only people who could read could play the games. Whereas in Gyan Chaupar, despite the deep philosophical content of the boards, every child old enough to roll a die and move a pawn could play. This was because the basic game mechanic of promotion and demotion was visually encoded by the snakes and ladders.

So I think British game manufacturers took the snakes and ladders from the Indian game and used them in their own. The earliest example is an untitled game from 1892, and it is completely abstract except for the serpentine track and the snakes and ladders that connect different squares. Only a few years later, Snakes and Ladders would begin to be illustrated and inscribed in Britain as well, but the religious message of spiritual liberation was replaced with heavy-handed lessons in Victorian morality. Players were no longer taught to reintegrate with cosmic consciousness, but to succeed in society and achieve status and wealth.

Q. Do we know what about the snakes and ladders imagery appealed to the European audience?

Schmidt-Madsen: I think the imagery was adopted from the Indian game because it spoke to Christian Europeans directly without any need for cultural translation. In the Bible, it is a snake which tricks Eve into eating the forbidden fruit. And this, in turn, is what triggers the expulsion from Paradise and the fall of Man. As for the ladders, there is the Biblical story of Jacob’s ladder, which the angels use to travel between heaven and earth.

So it is quite obvious that snakes and ladders would have been widely understood as metaphors for vice and virtue, respectively. It would therefore have been easy to implement them in a European game without further explanation, regardless of whether the game was religious in nature.

Q. When was the game re-exported to India? 

Schmidt-Madsen: It is unclear when exactly Snakes and Ladders, or Ludo, for that matter, began to be marketed in India. Both games were widely available in Europe from the late 19th century, and we do in fact see a sharp drop in Indian Gyan Chaupar boards in the early 20th century. The same, however, is not true of Chaupar boards, which continued to be made until quite recently.

This is likely because Chaupar was a traditional folk game with a much longer history and much deeper roots than Gyan Chaupar. Still, when Ludo and Snakes and Ladders showed up in the Indian marketplace, they quickly overtook their predecessors.

One reason for the success of Ludo and Snakes and Ladders is that they were much simpler to play and understand than Chaupar and Gyan Chaupar. Another and more sinister reason is that they were commercial products in a British trading network built to crush any signs of local competition.

While the British adaptation of Ludo and Snakes and Ladders has often been framed as an example of colonialism and cultural appropriation, there is really nothing surprising about games crossing borders and taking on new guises. This is how games have spread and developed for millennia.

The real story of colonialism here is not the story of how an Indian game was adapted by the British. It is the story of how the British brought it back to cannibalise its ancestors.