Arjun Poudel
Can the ancient Nepali game of Bagh-chal be called a classic? The term ‘classic’ is encountered by most Nepali readers in marketing and advertising discourses, in which cosmetics like perfumes, after-shave lotions and lipsticks, besides other commodities, are commonly branded and promoted as ‘classics’. However, there is also an academic or scholarly use of the term and among such professionals, it has remained a term of aesthetic appraisal. If an artistic work or artifact has endured for a long time and still continues to attract interest and attention of the elites and the learned ones, it is commonly considered a classic. The Ramayana and The Mahabharata are best known among Sanskrit classics, just as Homer, Plato and Sophocles are classic authors of the Greek antiquity.
In this essay, I use the term ‘classic’ in the latter of the above two senses. The problem here remains that bagh-chal has managed to attract hardly any learned attention over the ages. There are scarcely any writings available on the subject, neither from the academics nor from any enthusiast of the game, excepting the brief instructions found here and there on the Internet. In this respect, bagh-chal compares very poorly with its cousin, the game of chess, which is also of Southasian origin, but has remained the subject of countless publications. Major Western countries also have numerous institutions and associations dedicated to the pursuit of chess. Above all, there are people who identify themselves as professional chess players or instructors; bagh-chal does not have such adherents.
In what sense(s), then, can bagh-chal be considered a classic, if at all? First of all, it has been played in Nepal since time immemorial. The game of chess is supposed to have originated during the reign of the Gupta emperors in India, if not earlier. Bagh-chal, being a much simpler game whose accessories can be improvised anywhere or anytime two players feel like playing it, can be said to have begun much earlier. The legend has it that Lord Buddha himself was an avid player of the game (Basnyat). Clearly, then, the game has endured millennia, to say the least.
Even those who grant this fact about bagh-chal may advance an objection that goes something like this: “A game of bagh-chal, however ancient it may be, is just that, a game. It is not a work but a mere pastime and a play to be indulged in during a leisure time. The players just resort to a make-believe assumption that certain lifeless things are tigers and goats. How can one call it a classic, if it is not even a work and has no use one can think of?”
It is not that a game or a play cannot be considered a classic. Shakespeare’s King Lear is a mere play and all of his plays had been banned by the Puritans in the mid-1600s, allegedly because they served no use or purpose at all. Despite this, King Lear has not just endured and thrived as an English classic for several hundred years but is certain to remain one for any conceivable period of time. It is only after the rise of industrial capitalism that artifacts like King Lear and Sophocles’ Oedipus the King have come to be thought of as works. Chess is likewise a classic because for more than 1500 years it engaged courtiers at the courts of different emperors from the Persian shahs to Louis XIV and later. Since the beginning of industrialism, as we know very well, it has come down the royal court to the drawing rooms of ordinary people.
I go further and argue that bagh-chal is not just a classic game but a classic work too. This assertion immediately raises two further questions. First, what use is bagh-chal? If it is indeed a work, then it must have some use – that is to say, there must be an end or a goal that bagh-chal serves or towards which it works. Secondly, there is the question of whose work it is, or whose hand lies behind the origin and evolution of bagh-chal.
I will take the second—and to my mind the easier—question first. Bagh-chal, as it is now recognized all over the world, is a game of Nepali origin. I mentioned this fact in an earlier essay that I wrote for The Gorkha Times. I repeat it here because it bears repetition, lest bagh-chal suffers the same fate as that of Nepal’s once-thriving garment industry, or that of our once-vibrant (and now almost dead) carpet industry. Along with our vegetable-ghee industry, these two industries were massacred by the machine-made carpets and garments forged by our southern neighbor that first labeled them as Nepal-made handicrafts and sent them to the overseas markets. If we fail to disseminate the facts about bagh-chal, it is imminent that this too will be claimed one day as a game of Indian origin, just as Kalapani has now been claimed as a part of the Indian Territory.
When Nepal opened itself to the rest of the world in the 1950s, we started receiving western tourists in hordes, who were destined for the mountains, the birthplace of Lord Buddha in Lumbini and the ancient cities located in the Kathmandu Valley. Catering to this mass of tourists, there came out innumerable travelers’ guidebooks in all major Western languages. Nearly every one of such books noted how Nepalese could be seen squatting on the floor and playing bagh-chal at almost every square and intersection of the three major cities of Kathmandu, Patan and Bhaktapur. They rarely failed to mention the bagh-chal pieces and the board drawn on a slate as highly prized items that visitors could buy at the numerous curio shops in those cities.
In a word, bagh-chal is and has remained an important work of the collective genius of Nepali people. As a product not so much of this or that individual’s efforts, but of the historical and collective practice of us Nepalese, bagh-chal compares well with the Nepali language. Both have evolved over hundreds of years and have variations in their respective forms that are in use in different parts of the country.
Bagh-chal’s resemblance with the Nepali language brings us closer to an answer to the first question above – the one about the use and purpose that bagh-chal can be said to serve or to have served. Clearly, bagh-chal’s most pervasive role among the millions of Nepalese who regularly practice it is to bring families and neighbors together during a time of leisure and rest. It is during such a family ritual that this author first learnt to draw the bagh-chal board and then to play the game. Leaving my grandmother in charge of the kitchen and my two younger sisters, my mother would often take me along with my brother and elder sisters on a trip to collect fodder-grass from our family farm. Being the youngest in the group, I was assigned to remove the seasonal grass in one corner of a big plot that was being readied for the plantation of paddy. I would then stamp my feet on the dusty surface to make it plain, hard and sleek. Finally, I would use my sickle (or scythe) to carefully draw the square shape, the diagonals and the remaining lines of the bagh-chal board.
When the others in the party had collected enough grass to feed the few cattle in our small shade for a couple of days, they would come to the corner of the plot on which I had been working all along. Some of us would sit on the dikes that flanked two sides of the bagh-chal board I had just prepared and others would sit on the bundle of grass thus far collected. We would often use pieces of rock, corn seed, pieces of corn cob or some such things to make tigers and goats. After two, three or sometimes four matches among ourselves, we would heed homeward for the lunch being prepared by my grandmother.
Unlike card games and the rolling of dice(s), bagh-chal is a rational game, rather than a game of chance. Because chess also is a rational game and because the Westerners have always considered chance to be something irrational, they were happy to import chess from the Persians in the first millennium. Therefore, bagh-chal too can fruitfully be used during school geometry and other lessons, although parents and guardians may not be as comfortable with their children being taught with dice (die) and playing cards. In an important document of German idealism titled “The Oldest Systematic Program of German Idealism,” and attributed to G.W.F. Hegel, Friedrich Holderlin and F.W.J. Schelling, poetry is called “The teacher of mankind” (Bowie 334). I see no reason why we cannot call bagh-chal “the teacher of the Nepalese people.”
References:
Basnyat, Sandhya. “Bagh Chal in the Alps.” The Nepali Times (January 17-23, 2003). Print.
Bowie, Andrew. Aesthetics and Subjectivity: From Kant to Nietzsche. 2nd ed. Manchester (UK): Manchester UP, 2003. Print.
[Previously a lecturer at TU and Apex College, Arjun Poudel currently lives and works in Boston, USA.]