Eastern Art Online, Yousef Jameel Centre for Islamic and Asian Art

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Snakes and Ladders game

  • Description

    This board for a Sufi Muslim version of the game of gyan chaupar (Snakes and Ladders) is painted on British watermarked paper. With inscriptions in Persian and English, it was made for a British patron.

    Gyan chaupar, ‘the chaupar of divine knowledge’, developed in India several centuries ago as a board game played with dice, which instructed its players in the many stages and pitfalls of the spiritual path: while the ladders bring rapid promotion, the snakes bring equally sudden demotion. The earliest versions, played by Jains and Hindus, were mainly based on the workings of good or bad karma, which impelled the players upward from low, hellish states to the heavenly realms and ultimately to enlightenment. By the eighteenth century this Sufi version had also developed, of which very few examples survive. From ‘non-existence’ (1) and ‘birth’ (2) at bottom left, the player progresses upward to the Throne of God, housed within a Mughal mosque structure. A direct ladder leads to it from fana fi Allah (‘mystical extinction in God’, 84). Most of the snakes are found in the lower half of the board, with names like ‘greed’, ‘envy’, ‘infidelity’. Two disastrous diagonal snakes lurk in the top row, near the end of the game: ‘pride’ (ghurur, 91) demotes the spiritual seeker to ‘anger, violence’ (ghazab, 18), while Shaitan (Satan, 100) plunges him down to ‘lust’ (shahwat, 10). Thus on the very threshold of salvation, the devil waits to lure the seeker astray.

  • Details

    Associated place
    Asia India (place of creation)
    AsiaIndiawest IndiaRajasthan Ajmer district (possible place of creation)
    AsiaIndianorth IndiaNational Capital Territory of Delhi Delhi (possible place of creation)
    EuropeUnited Kingdom England (place of creation)
    Date
    c. 1815
    Artist/maker
    Whatman (established 1740) (manufacturer)
    Material and technique
    ink and watercolour on paper
    Dimensions
    mount 81.4 x 61.1 cm (height x width)
    drawing 71 x 50 cm sight size (height x width)
    Material index
    Technique index
    Object type index
    No. of items
    1
    Credit line
    Purchased, 2007.
    Accession no.
    EA2007.2

This record has been created from historic documentation and may not have been reviewed by a curator. You can 'contact us' about this object for further information.

Location

    • First floor | Room 33 | Mughal India

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