Indians’ love for Ludo endures amid Covid | Economic Times

Hyder Jung Hearsey was a colourful figure in the East India Company years. The son of a British officer and his Indian mistress, he fought with both Marathas and British, married the daughter of a deposed Prince of Cambay, had several other wives, earned a jagir near Bareilly and took part in map making expeditions in the Himalayas.Along the way, according to Richard Holmes, in Sahib, his history of British soldiers in India, Hearsey found time to have “a board for the game of Pacheesi (Indian Ludo) tattooed on his stomach so that his wives could enjoy a game while he relaxed or, indeed, recovered.” This is an even more intimate identification of Ludo with Indian history than the other famous example of the Mughal emperor Akbar playing the game with women from his harem as live tokens on boards inlaid into the floors of his palaces in Agra and Fatehpur Sikri.Ludo’s recent appearance in an appeal to the Bombay High Court over the question of whether it was a game of skill or chance underlines it’s enduring role in Indian culture. It falls into a category known as cross-and-circle games, where the aim is to race to finish a circuit of the board. These have been found across the world, but Ludo is clearly descended from the most common Indian variation of these, known as Pacheesi, for the highest score of 25 points that could be thrown with cowrie shells or numbered sticks used to control play.Dice take their place today, and their use might seem clearly to identify Ludo as a game of chance. That is what a Maharashtra Navnirman Sena politician asserts, adding that people now use online versions to play for real money. But a lower court magistrate rejected this case, declaring Ludo a game of skill, presumably because the point of the game is to manage your chances, deciding how to advance your tokens in answer to what the dice brings you, and thus achieve a win.If Ludo was only a game of chance it would appeal to the smaller group of those addicted to the thrill of taking pure chances; most people prefer the element of control that comes with choosing how to play their tokens. At the same time, it isn’t only about skill, like chess, which may have evolved from Pacheesi, perhaps because, as Trevor Donovan suggests in It’s All a Game, his history of board games, religious leaders were suspicious of the chance element, and pushed it towards pure strategy. Buddhism in particular, which preaches escaping the ties of the world, may have disdained a game that mimics the challenges of life.Whatever the reservations of some, there’s little doubting the wider popularity of the game. In RG Singh, HS Dharmendra and CR Dileep Kumar’s beautifully illustrated guide to traditional Indian board games, they point to the ubiquitous appearance of Pacheesi boards scratched into the stones of both big temples and small village shrines, centres for local life where people would gather and play: “Sometimes it appears that some games emulate sacred temple rituals in the ritual of play.” Circling the board could represent the parikrama or ritual circling of a shrine.Singh and his co-authors suggest games were spread across India by “traveling guilds of craftsmen, secular bards and religious minstrels, invading armies (whose soldiers took back memories of games played on figures drawn on sand) sailors and merchants…” The last were particular enthusiasts for games that sharpened skills at estimating chances and taking risks, and adding monetary stakes was a natural extension. The importance of gambling in merchant communities is well documented, most famously and in this season, with the rain gamblers of Bombay, who wagered on the levels noted in the Meteorological Department’s rain gauges.Playing Pacheesi seems almost universal across communities in India. Both men and women play, and it is one children’s game that remains popular with adults. It has gone abroad with Indians, like the soldiers during World War II who, as Ghee Bowman notes in his book The Indian Contingent, received Pacheesi and carrom boards from the Indian Comforts Fund, set up in 1939 to support Indian soldiers abroad. It has featured in films, like Anurag Basu’s Ludo, released on Netflix last year for Diwali.Most remarkably, Ludo has bridged the digital divide through the LudoKing app launched in 2016. It rapidly became one of the most downloaded apps, becoming the first Indian gaming app to pass 500 million downloads. It was popular in places like Mumbai’s trains, where commuters, who used to play cards precariously balanced on a briefcase with rubberbands to hold the deck, found huddling over a phone much easier. Lockdown didn’t change this, it just opened up a huge home market. The MNS politician who complained to the High Court might have considered this long history and current popularity before trying to crack down on India’s love for Ludo.