Ganjifa Cards: Ancient India's Favorite Game

Few days back, I got the chance to visit an exhibition in Pragati Maidain in Delhi. It was an all states art and craft fair where people from different states were exhibiting their art forms. While roaming, I saw some beautiful miniature paintings in the Orissa stall. When I enquired about the painting he told “Madam, these are Ganjifa playing cards”. He explained me that Ganjifa is actually a very old art form of paintings and playing cards. Further told me how some of the families in Orissa and Maharashtra are trying to revive this dying ancient Indian game.




Ganjifa Cards



Painting in Ganjifa Card

History:
Ganjifa’ is the name given to an ancient Indian card game which originated in Persia (modern Iran) and became popular in India under the Mogul emperors in the 16th century. The first known reference is in the diary of Emperor Babur in 1527. The game used to be the favorite pastimes of ancient India, it first became popular at court, in the form of lavish sets of precious stone – inlaid ivory or tortoise shell.  It later spread to the general public, whereupon cheaper sets would be made from materials such as wood, palm leaf, or pasteboard.



Technique to Prepare Cards:
The techniques, processing, designing of ganjifa cards varied from user to user. Artists involved in making Cards for the rich and wealthy used expensive materials. They used to craft on lac wafers, tortoise shells, ivory, engraved brass discs, mother of pearl and decorated with precious stones and metals.

Artists Preparing Ganjifa Cards

Detailed Work on Ganjifa Cards

Common people made the cards using leather, paper, stylographed palm leaves, fish scales and paper machete. Colors were made by hand and they were rich in natural minerals and vegetable dyes. The artists grinded and mixed these natural colors by hand themselves. They used fine brushes including the squirrel hair brushes suitable to the Ganjifa painting technique to paint the cards.

Perception Behind the games:
In Maharashtra and Orissa, Ganjifa was a favorite pastime for Brahmins. Old people are still seen playing Dashavatara Ganjifa near Puri Temples, mainly with 16-suited 192 card decks. The main purpose of the game was to teach, learn and tell stories from our ancient scriptures and holy books. Style was set to stories and shlokas from the Hindu Puranas, stories from the Ramayana, the chapters from Mahabharata and many more scriptures. One of the greatest benefits was that besides a memory test, the game provided a good retention of traditional knowledge.

How to Play with Ganjifa Cards:
Ganjifa cards were circular and traditionally hand-made by local artisans. The standard playing cards of India are usually a set each of 96 cards of Mughal Ganjifa and of 120 or 144 cards of Dashavatara Ganjifa.  The structure and the rules of both the games are the same except that in Dashavatara, the ten incarnations of Lord Vishnu are depicted.


Mughal Ganjifa:. The present game of Mughal Ganjifa was introduced by Akbar. The Mughal ganjifa carried eight suited ganjifa pack and had 96 beautiful cards in eight suits of 12 cards each. The twelve cards in each suit comprised of two court or figure cards and 10 numeral or pip cards.

Mughal Ganjifa Cards

Dashavatara Ganjifa :The Hindu Dashavatara (10 incarnations) were different in their composition and construction. In the first order the number of suits and cards were more which made the game complicated . The figures and the suit signs were common to the Hindu players. Each pack of ganjifa carried 10 suits, which displayed one of the incarnations of Vishnu.

Dashavatara Ganjifa Cards

For example in the Mughal Ganjifa set Taj, Safed, Samsher and Ghulam are strong suits while Chang, Surkh, Barat and Qimash are weak suits.  The sequence of each suit is arranged as Raja, Pradhan and serial number ace to ten for strong suits and ten to ace for weak suits.  Each time the trick is to win the round by placing the highest denomination.  Therefore it is beneficial for a player to remember all the symbols and cards played.  By the end of the game, which is played in anti-clock-wise direction, the player who amasses the maximum number of cards is the winner.  Similarly the game can be played with the Dashavatar set, Ashtadikpala, Ramayana and Navagraha. 



Ganjifa Cards

Unlike Chess or Parchisi (Dice), Ganjifa is now close to extinction. Few people know how to play the game and fewer are the artists who make them Orissa is one of the last remaining pockets of this diminishing community.



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