Bagh Chal: An Essay on Game Studies

Arjun Poudel

This essay introduces bagh chal as a Nepalese cultural genre. I use the phrase ‘cultural genre’ broadly to include kinds or genres of work as well as of play. For example, mourning, apology (defense), testimony etc. —especially when done in public—are genres of work. On the other hand, bagh chal is a kind of game or play like drama, chess, hide-and-seek etc. 

My aim here is not to discuss how the game is played and what its rules are; such information can easily  be obtained from the Internet in plenty. Bagh chal is known today as a game of Nepalese origin pretty much all over the world. The Wikipedia mentions this fact in the very first sentence of its entry on the subject. Way back in 2003, The Nepali Times carried a news report titled “Bagh chal in the Alps” about a tournament held in the Swiss city of Bern. In Nepal herself, however, one looks in vain at the wide swath of media and academia for any discussion of the game, let alone public training or organized practice at any level of the society.

My aim, therefore, is to draw scholarly attention to what an important part of the Nepalese heritage this game is and why concerted efforts are needed to make it a more visible part of our public life. In addition, I will demonstrate how this game represents Nepali genius at its best – in a way Gautam Buddha represents the Nepali genius of 2600 years ago and the Changunarayan Temple that of the fourth century CE. I will do so mainly by comparing bagh chal with chess, another game that originated in South Asia and remains much more well-known around the world today. Before proceeding with the introduction, however, a few words about the phrase ‘Game Studies’.

Game Studies is an academic discipline that is more widely known as ‘game theory’, which I think is a misnomer. It became a popular approach in many academic as well as policy (or think-tank) disciplines in the West after the Second World War. Like many other so-called theories, I consider ‘game theory’ to be a misnomer because the term ‘theory’ comes from the Greek term ‘theoria’ and the ancient Greeks, including Plato and Aristotle, reserved it only for contemplation, which they took to be the highest level of disciplined endeavors above and beyond any other discipline, academic or otherwise. The Greeks never qualified theoria by any other term, as is the case when we use phrases like ‘game theory,’ ‘literary theory’ or ‘probability theory.’ Hence the phrase ‘Game Studies’ in my subtitle above.

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In The Republic, we find Plato dividing human disciplines into two categories, namely mental/ intellectual disciplines that he called mousike, and physical or bodily disciplines, which were named athletike or gymnastike. From this point of view, board games like chess and bagh chal would clearly fall under the first category and can be said to have something in common with Euclidean geometry. While historians have recorded a lot about scientific disciplines like astronomy, geometry and arithmetic as well as about cultural disciplines like athletics, lyric poetry and tragedy, no evidence has yet been found of board games being practiced in the Greek antiquity.

Historical records about these two games in their original homeland of Southasia (I follow here Himal Southasian’s style of referring to the subcontinent) are even harder to come by if we look past the common era. Unlike dice-rolling that remained popular throughout the Mahabharat era, in chess (then called ‘chaturanga’ and later modified into ‘shatranja’ by the Persians) and bagh chal money is not usually put at stake. It is purely for aesthetic pleasure and intellectual satisfaction that people resort to these games.

If we compare the relative sophistication of these two games, bagh chal is much easier to learn and practice than chess. The accessories of chess are not easy to improvise, while bagh chal pieces can be made from beans, corn seeds, pieces of rock or pretty much anything handy. The chessboard consists of sixty-four squares that are alternately colored and therefore it has to be especially made for the very purpose of the game. Not so with bagh chal, because its board is easily drawn on any kind of surface by any kind of pointed tool. Readily available or derivable accessories means that bagh chal has remained a part of popular culture, while chess is a much more elitist practice.

The biggest difference between the two games becomes obvious in the course of playing the games themselves. The boards of each game consist of a network of positions and paths of movement. Different types of chess pieces are constrained from moving in certain directions or trajectories. The distance that a piece can traverse in a single step also varies depending on whether the piece is a pawn, knight, rook, bishop, queen, or king. All this means that learning the game of chess can take several days and one may remain just a novice even after months of intense practice.

What makes bagh chal a lot simpler is, first of all, the fact that movement between any two points or nodes on the board is allowed only if the points are connected by a line. Secondly, as far as the trajectory of movement and the distance traversed are concerned, the same rules apply uniformly to both tigers and goats. In other words, all bagh chal pieces can move to the adjoining point only, and it is only when tigers are eating (or taking out) goats that they leap over a goat and move to a third point on the line. Thirdly, the positions on a bagh chal board number 25 only, while in chess there are 64 positions. While the square-shaped boxes are irrelevant in bagh chal (because it is the points that count as positions), it is, on the contrary, the points that are irrelevant in the game of chess, which treats the square-shaped boxes as positions

The foregoing account leaves no doubt that bagh chal employs purer mathematics than chess does. In other words, a bagh chal board exemplifies a more well-defined mathematical object or artifact, i.e. a net or network because “Mathematically speaking, a network means any system of interconnected points” (Schwartzman 144). The branch of mathematics that studies such networks of paths and positions is called network topology, which came to be established as a discipline early in the last century. Without the emergence of network topology, the rise of the mathematical discipline of game studies or ‘game theory’ would be unimaginable.

The earlier mentioned Wikipedia essay defines bagh chal as a “strategic, two-person game.” Chess can also be defined in exactly these terms. The essential difference between the two is that chess is symmetrical while bagh chal is not. Bagh chal, in other words, is an asymmetrical game. Unlike in chess, the number of bagh chal pieces that each person controls are different, I.e. four tiger pieces by one and twenty goat pieces by the other. Additionally, the odd number of positions available on a bagh chal board also makes the board an asymmetrical figure, although it is symmetrical like the chess board if we view it as a shape rather than a configuration of points.

If the ancient Greeks of Plato’s time had played chess and bagh chal, they would call the chessboard a 64-square and the bagh chal board a 20-square. Obviously, the chessboard is a square consisting of 64 squares of the same size and bagh chal board is a square of 20 smaller ones of the same size. The Greeks would consider these to be games of reason or rationality par excellence, because they had a highly advanced geometry as well as arithmetic. As is evident in Plato’s dialogue Meno, the Greek sense of reality derived from the findings of these two mathematical disciplines, so much so that they considered a good man to be defined by a 4-square. As for a unit-square or a 1-square, it didn’t receive much importance for the reason that what we call ‘number one’ today and designate by the symbol 1 didn’t count as a number for the Greeks.

References:

Basnyat, Sandhya. “Bagh Chal in the Alps.” The Nepali Times. 128 (17 Jan 2003 – 23 Jan 2003).

Swartzman, Steven. The Words of Mathematics: An Etymological Dictionary of Mathematical Words in English. Washington DC: MAA, 1994. Print.

[Previously a lecturer at TU and Apex College, Arjun Poudel currently lives and works in Boston, USA.]