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Rich and colourful hand-painted sets of
ganjifa cards in different shapes and sizes, which were played till the end of 19th century, continue to be made today,
writes B. N. Goswamy IT was close to 60 years ago that Rudolf von Leyden — Austria-born, Mumbai-based scholar, artist and art critic — wrote an article on ganjifa, the playing cards of India, in an early issue of the Marg magazine. I had not read the article nor did I know anything about these playing cards. But, many years later, they suddenly appeared on the horizon for me when I visited the Deutsches Spielkarten Museum at Leinfelden near Stuttgart: a museum exclusively of playing cards from all over the world.
There they were, rich and colourful hand-painted sets from India of different shapes and sizes and quality, nearly all of them captioned as ganjifa, and nearly all of them a gift to that museum from Rudolf von Leyden. On sale at the counter of the museum was also von Leyden’s book Indische Spielkarten, which has acquired the status of a classic by now. I felt a sense of excitement, even if assailed at the same time by the feelings of guilt that come from ignorance. Shortly afterwards, upon returning to India, I went and bought an inexpensive set for myself from the Orissa emporium. It was sold to me as a ganjappa set: clearly Oriya version of the word ganjifa. The price did not set me back by much; the sense of guilt diminished a little. And I decided to know a little more about what I had seen, and now acquired. There is some uncertainty about the origin of playing cards in India, I discovered. While games of all kinds were known and played in ancient India, and there might have been some early version of playing cards here too (a Bengal king is said to have got playing cards made in the eighth century), the view most widely held is that the playing cards we speak of here — ganjifa — were an import from the Islamic world. The word itself comes almost certainly from Persian in which ‘ganj’ means a treasure or store, and ‘ganjifa’, a pack of cards. As early as the 16th century, that great chronicler at the Akbari court, Abu’l Fazl, spoke in his Ain-i-Akbari of the game in some detail. The ganjifa, then, consisted of 96 cards in eight suits of 12 cards each: two court or figure cards and 10 numeral or pip cards. The names of the suits tell one something of why the whole game might have been called ganjifa, for they were, respectively, ghulam (servant), taj (crown), shamsher (sword), ashrafi (gold coin), chang (harp), barat (document), tanka (silver coin), and qimash (merchandise). Riches of different kinds can be seen represented by these: thus, royal household, treasury, armoury, gold mint, women’s quarters (zenana), administration, silver mint, and stores. It all sounds very regal, very treasure-oriented. It is more than likely that the cards Abu’l Fazl speaks of were, even in physical terms, of a kingly nature: made of precious materials like ivory or mother-of-pearl or tortoise shell, encrusted with jewels sometimes, and exquisitely painted. The ‘Mughal ganjifa’ as it came to be known was a true work of art, judging from the few cards that haves survived. But different from, although not unrelated to, the courtly ganjifa cards were those in use at the level of the common folk. These were made of humbler materials: wood, paper or papier-m`E2ch`E9, and not embellished, except with paintings. In common use were cards that were circular in shape, as opposed to the rectangular ones most in vogue at the courtly level. What is even more interesting however is the fact that the ‘Hindu’ version of the Mughal ganjifa had different images, and different symbols on the number cards. The set most commonly used in that section of the society was the dashavatara, referring to the 10 incarnations of Vishnu, and consisted most often of 120 cards spread over 10 suits. While the ‘court card’ carried the image of one of the incarnations, the number cards would carry a symbol associated with the incarnation. Thus, a court card of a suit might have a graphic rendering of Matsya, the Fish Incarnation, with the Lord rescuing the Vedas, the number cards would have tiny images of fish in appropriate numbers: the Varaha or the Boar incarnation would, in an image, be shown destroying the demon Hiranyaksha, while the number cards would have small images of a boar in appropriate numbers, and so on. All this, however, is about a game that hardly anyone now knows or remembers how to play. Till the end of the 19th century, it seems the game was alive and well — in Maharashtra, ganjifa sets used to form a part of the trousseau of Brahmin brides — but with the arrival of the cards that the ‘sahibs’ used to play with, everything began to change. ‘French sets", as they were called, came into vogue, sets consisting of 52 cards, and everything in printed form. At this point of time, however, almost as a last throw of the dice, the makers of ganjifa cards changed course, now producing sets that carried traditional images but putting them on suits that featured, following western modes, spades and hearts and diamonds and clubs. The game had been turned on its head, as it were, before dying out. Surprisingly, however, ganjifa cards continue to be made even today. For not only are they redolent of times past — even if one sees them as curiosities — but also because some of them truly are works of art. There are families that have been engaged in making ganjifa cards for generations, and they have not given up. At Sawantwadi in Maharashtra, at Raghurajpur near Puri in Orissa, at Nirmal in Andhra Pradesh, one can still see men and children poring over low desks, brushes in hand, circular discs waiting to be painted on the desks in front of them. Survival is not easy, but there is grit and commitment. What is it that the poet said? Apni himmat hai ki ham ab bhi jiye jaate hain. It is our courage that keeps us afloat, in other words.
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I
had, till then, never even heard of a museum of that kind, and did not
discover till much later how many collections there are of playing
cards, and how extensive they are, in repositories of learning —
libraries and museums — all over the world, from Austria to Japan,
from Belgium to Cincinnati. But as I moved from showcase to showcase,
and from shelf to shelf in that museum, I was arrested by the sight of
a whole section devoted only to India.