Well, let the best team win!

Sans the Sacred

With the Cricket World Cup finals today, and with Virat Kohli’s record-breaking 50th ODI century in the semifinals this week, who can think beyond games! As you gear up for the match today, why not explore the world of games in ancient India?

It seems that games are a part of the earliest records of civilisation -- research has found fragments of possible boards used to play games at many different sites of the Indus Valley. Skill at playing various games is valued highly in the Kamasutra, which reels of a list of 64 arts that men must be familiar with to succeed at courting women, one of which is to be an accomplished player of board games.

The Manasollasa, a fascinating text from the twelfth century by the Chalukya King Someshvara III, gives us a glimpse into various aspects of courtly culture in the period. It has a special section on games, which describes all kinds of games -- swings and water games, word games, guessing games, drinking games, and board games, like chess, backgammon, and a game called phanjika that uses seven cowrie shells to be thrown, and the resultant face-up and face-down shells determine the movement of the pawns, much like the summer games we played!

Closer to our own times, the temples and ruins of the Vijayanagara empire tell us about the pastimes of people then. Among the games recovered from these is the famous tiger-lambs game that you might have played -- where one player controls the tiger, and the other maneuvers the lambs. The player with the tiger wins if they can ‘eat up’ the lambs, and the player with the lambs wins if they can successfully help the lambs escape by moving them around the board. Kings considered themselves too high and mighty for these commonplace games, but they did think highly of chess.

But games were not just for kings; they were considered an essential part of courtship. This context is familiar to us already, given the plethora of paintings and temple sculptures depicting couples engaged in playing dice. Divine couples are far from exempt, and the gods are not always gentlemanly.

The Skanda Purana narrates one such story of the divine sage Narada, who goes to Kailasa for his own (and our) entertainment. There, he gently coaxes Shiva and Parvati to play a game of dice. In the first round, Parvati loses to Shiva and has to give up the ornaments she had staked to him. In the second round though, Parvati wins, but Shiva refuses to give up the things he had staked -- his crescent moon, his necklace, and his pair of earrings. Both Narada and Bhringi, Shiva’s attendant, support Shiva, extolling his many virtues and arguing that he is, in fact, impossible to defeat. Parvati is furious at this point, tells Narada to be quiet, and even curses Bhringi for his impertinence. Then, she angrily takes away not just Shiva’s crescent moon, but his ornamental snakes and even his elephant-hide garment. The embarrassed Shiva requests her for his clothes back, but she laughs and refuses. He even tries to subject Parvati to the blaze of his third eye, but it appears to have no effect at all. Ultimately, Shiva goes away in a huff, and Parvati, who misses him, follows him in disguise to woo him back, and rather successfully, too.

If games can get the famously loving divine couple fighting, what does that say about us mere mortals? So, let us hope for victory, but more importantly, for sportsmanship and cheerful losers!