{"id":5413,"date":"2023-02-26T17:55:28","date_gmt":"2023-02-26T12:25:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/museumofmaterialmemory.com\/?p=5413"},"modified":"2023-02-26T17:56:32","modified_gmt":"2023-02-26T12:26:32","slug":"pachisi-sepoys-cowries-my-grandparents-tabletop-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/museumofmaterialmemory.com\/pachisi-sepoys-cowries-my-grandparents-tabletop-story\/","title":{"rendered":"Pachisi, Sepoys, Cowries: My Grandparents\u2019 Tabletop Story"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

TEXT AND PHOTOGRAPHS BY DEEPSHIKA PASPUNURI
<\/strong>Hyderabad, Telangana, India<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cHe was still in medical school when I married him,\u201d my grandmother looks back at her 1966 photographs with a smile, \u201cit was his final year before graduation”.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One year later, my newly-wed maternal grandparents would move into their first home \u2014 a low-rise flat in the Bapatla district of undivided Andhra Pradesh. Just seventeen then, my grandmother would soon discover my grandfather\u2019s sentimental refusal to bin items, which turned their one-bedroom rental into a rubble of family letters, postcards, and tchotchkes. As days passed, my grandfather\u2019s household treasures and his lively backstories became one of their many domestic pastimes. Her favourite, a jewel-coloured pachisi board sewn by his paternal grandmother, still survives today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The Pachisi board sewn by Deepshika’s great-great-grandmother<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Throughout history, pachisi was the \u2018poor man’s chaupar<\/em>\u2019. In 1891, an Englishman called Alfred Collier would even substitute its cowrie shells \u2014 the unofficial currency of lower classes \u2014 with a dice cup and patent it for the United Kingdom as \u2018The Royal Ludo\u2019. Centuries before this British rebrand, Mughal emperor Akbar also revamped the game into his own royal version, dressing the harem as player pawns and turning whole palaces into a life-sized chaupar<\/em> game.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But to my grandmother, whose childhood pachisi grids were scribbled in chalk, my grandfather\u2019s novelty board \u2014 like rubies, emeralds, sapphires, and pearls sewn together \u2014 seemed no less regal. \u201cShe embroidered each bead herself,\u201d she tells me, looking back at the outbursts, meltdowns, and amusement this game brought to my grandparents\u2019 living room 60 years ago. \u201cI guess she\u2019d be your great-great-grandmother\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The same day, we looked through family albums, but it seems no photographs exist of her. Documents of her life haven\u2019t survived either, except an off-handed guess of the decade she was born in \u2014 1910s. A hundred years have passed since, and save my family\u2019s accounts of her quick-paced stitches, this pachisi set is likely her only-surviving biography.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Going by my grandmother\u2019s recollections, my great-great-grandmother made this foldable board sometime during the 1940s. Using a paper guide, the cross-shaped board was measured, cut, and stitched by hand. After this, she would have embellished the front (the playing side) with imitation jewel beads; thousands of them. It\u2019s likely that her life\u2019s work held many ambitious creations like this. But the cloth board she passed on to her grandson \u2014 complete with a sixteen-piece sepoy<\/em> army and cowrie shells \u2014 is all that\u2019s left today.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

During her first decade of marriage, my grandmother tells me that many mornings were spent with their next-door tenants, who gave the pachisi board a new lease on life. Television sets had not yet arrived, she recalls, and tabletop games like this were still an intimate part of daily life. Any visitors \u2014 neighbours, housewives, in-laws, nieces and nephews \u2014 were also quickly turned into foes on my great-great grandmother\u2019s board. \u201cOne of our relatives had such a brilliant throw,\u201d she insists, \u201cnever played a bad roll, it was impossible to win against her!\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Over the next two decades, my grandad\u2019s work in microbiology and his medical licence took the family \u2014 my grandmother and their three kids \u2014 across many small towns in South India. Everywhere they went, new pachisi rivalries were formed, rules were changed at whim, and sepoys mercilessly killed. Growing up, my mother recalls how they would take the pachisi board from my grandfather\u2019s green-coloured almirah <\/em>\u2014 the only place it was ever stored <\/em>. \u201cHe was very careful with objects,\u201d she tells me, \u201cit\u2019s why the set is so well-preserved even after all these years\u201d. <\/p>\n\n\n

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Deepshika’s grandparents<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n

Later in his 40s, my grandfather was offered a promising doctor\u2019s job in Saudi Arabia. But a few years following this, he was diagnosed with late-stage cancer and passed away shortly. Struck by grief, my grandmother confesses she was hardly aware of what was packed into briefcases at the time. Many things were likely left behind. But the cloth board persevered and made its way to their new address in Hyderabad.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Around fifteen years after the tragedy, it would be unfurled again. By then, I was eleven years old. Despite imported ludo boards being all the rage, my summer evenings were spent around the pachisi board with my family, especially by my grandmother and me. Rules were changed by us too, taking as many as eight sepoys<\/em> each. My troops were red and black, leaving her to assemble an army of yellow and green player pieces. Looking back today, my grandmother admits she, nor my grandfather, could\u2019ve known that their tabletop game would be as delightful to us five generations after it was first made.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the kitchen, fresh milk is waiting for her on the stove. I ask my grandmother if she’s heard of ludo before. She pauses to think it over. \u201cNo, I think we\u2019ve always called it pachisi\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Throughout history, pachisi was the \u2018poor man’s chaupar\u2019. But to my grandmother, whose childhood pachisi grids were scribbled in chalk, my grandfather\u2019s novelty board \u2014 like rubies, emeralds, sapphires, and pearls sewn together \u2014 seemed no less regal. \u201cShe embroidered each bead herself,\u201d she tells me, looking back at the outbursts, meltdowns, and amusement this game brought to my grandparents\u2019 living room 60 years ago. \u201cI guess she\u2019d be your great-great-grandmother\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":5428,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,9],"tags":[979,984,987,96,983,35,293,986,981,988,982],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/museumofmaterialmemory.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5413"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/museumofmaterialmemory.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/museumofmaterialmemory.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/museumofmaterialmemory.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/museumofmaterialmemory.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5413"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/museumofmaterialmemory.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5413\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5443,"href":"https:\/\/museumofmaterialmemory.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5413\/revisions\/5443"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/museumofmaterialmemory.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5428"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/museumofmaterialmemory.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5413"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/museumofmaterialmemory.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5413"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/museumofmaterialmemory.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5413"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}