Authors
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Adrija Mukherjee
Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, India
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Souvik Mukherjee
Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, India
Keywords:
Ganjifa, Art, Avatar, Dashavatar, Global South, Playing Cards, Survival, gamevironments
Abstract
The word avatar that is so commonly used in videogames and media today has a well-known Eastern origin in Hindu mythology and loosely translates as reincarnation although the more correct thinking is perhaps re-descent of the gods in various forms to set the world right. The digital game concept has a more tangible, ludic physical version in the Dashavatar cards of India. Depicting the ten avatars of the Indian god, Vishnu, these are commonly circular or rectangular hand-painted cards that have a religious significance and are also works of art that are adaptations of the Persian ganjifa cards that presumably made their way into medieval India in the 15th or 16th centuries. Today, the makers of these cards are few and those who know how to play them are even fewer. The game survives as an art form associated with the narrative folk paintings or the patachitras and is nevertheless struggling to survive even in the artistic communities of the chitrakars who used to paint the cards in different parts of India. This paper looks at how a game is displaced almost entirely by competing ludic practices from Europe and then survives almost entirely as an art form, thus highlighting the important co-dependence of games and art but from a Global South context. In doing so, it focuses on the apparent struggle between the play and the artistic traditions of the card game while addressing how the existence of the cards as play and artistic objects continues to be threatened even as attempts to revive these traditions are underway.
Author Biographies
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Adrija Mukherjee, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, India
Adrija Mukherjee is research assistant in the 'Ancient Indian Boardgames: Preservation, Documentation and Cultural Impact' project at CSSSC. She holds a Masters degree in AIHC and Archaeology from Deccan College Postgraduate and Research Institute, Pune. She has also worked as research assistant with Immersive Trails and with the Archives and Research Centre for Ethnomusicology (ARCE) at the American Institute of Indian Studies (AIIS). She has also interned with the Indian Foundation of Arts (IFA). Her interests lie in inter disciplinary themes such as diaspora, migration, identity displacement etc in perspective of culture such as music, history, oral traditions etc. She aims on working for the vulnerable tribes of India understanding their society, economy and religious tradition from an ethnographic point of view in my themes of interest. She also enjoys preserving documents and objects, life collections of individuals and communities and everything that is fading away in this fast-pacing world in order to make research more accessible to the public. She is deeply interested in boardgame cultures and has recently presented on ganjifa cards at the Spring Seminar, Centre of Excellence in Game Cultures, Tampere University.
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Souvik Mukherjee, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, India
Souvik Mukherjee is associate professor in Cultural Studies at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences Calcutta, India and a pioneering games studies researcher from the Indian Subcontinent. His research looks at a diversity of topics such as videogames and storytelling, videogames as colonial and postcolonial media, gaming cultures in the Indian Subcontinent and currently, Indian boardgames and their colonial avatars. Souvik is the author of three monographs, Videogames and Storytelling: Reading Games and Playing Books (Palgrave Macmillan 2015), Videogames and Postcolonialism: Empire Plays Back (Springer UK 2017) and Videogames in the Indian Subcontinent: Development, Culture(s) and Representations (Bloomsbury India 2022) and is currently working on a book project on Indian board games and colonialism titled Indian Boardgames, Colonial Avatars. He was named a ‘DiGRA Distinguished Scholar’ in 2019 by the Digital Games Research Association and a Higher Education Video Game Alliance (HEVGA) fellow in 2022. He is also an affiliated senior research fellow at the Centre of Excellence, Game Studies at the University of Tampere. His other interests are (the) Digital Humanities and Early Modern Literature. Souvik also curates a boardgame museum.
