LITMIR.BIZ

      A still later allusion to chess occurs, as Weber pointed out,⁷ in Halāyudha’s commentary on Pingala’s Chandaḥsutra, which belongs to the end of the tenth century. Halāyudha is discussing the form of certain metres, and incidentally instructs the reader to

      draw a table of 64 squares (koshṭhāgara) as in the game of chaturanga.

      These passages include all the known references to chess in Indian literature prior to the year 1000. We cannot claim that they establish much beyond the existence of the game, or that we have travelled far from the ‘impenetrable darkness’ of the earlier period. We can, perhaps, form some opinion of the spread and popularity of the game in India from these allusions. We find chess specially connected with the North-West of India, and the upper basin of the Ganges; we find it sufficiently well known in the 7th c. in this region for it to furnish comparisons to the poets and romancers of the time, and so well known in Kashmīr in the 9th c. that not only did poets employ similes derived from its special features, but that the ingenious also devised complicated and difficult puzzles which depended for their solution upon a practical knowledge of chess. The commentator on these puzzles shows that in the 11th c. the game was known in Guzerat, so that by that time we can safely assert that a knowledge of the game was common to all Northern India. The same century may have seen chess practised in the Deccan, if Dr. Bühler’s statement that the Mānasollāsa of the Ṣālukya (Solanki) Prince Someṣvara mentions chess among his recreations can be proved to be accurately translated.⁸ It is not clear whether chess had reached the South of the peninsula in the year 900, for the Arabic traveller, Abū Zaid as-Sīrāfī,⁹ when describing the gambling habits of the inhabitants of the coast opposite Ceylon, only alludes to nard and cock-fighting among their recreations. If, however, the date assigned to the Sinhalese commentator to the Brahma-jāla Sutta is correct, chess cannot have been much later in reaching the South of India and Ceylon.

      The oldest foreign references to the practice of chess in India occur in Arabic works. Two of these are of great importance, for in place of the usual Arabic legends of the invention of chess which will be discussed in a later chapter, they give us more or less detailed accounts of the game as it was played in India at the time these works were compiled.

      The earlier of these is a short note which probably formed part of the lost chess work of the Arabic master al-‘Adlī, who was at the height of his fame about 840 A.D. The note is preserved in two later MSS. based in part upon al-‘Adlī’s work, of which I have made great use in my chapters on the Muslim chess. In AH (f 24 a = C f 33a) the note concludes the section on derivative games which is introduced by the rubric ‘Al-‘Adlī has said’, which throughout the MS. precedes extracts from this writer. In H (f 20)¹⁰ the note is given in a much condensed form, but again concludes the same section from al-‘Adlī’s book. The passage in AH runs as follows:

      And this form is the form of chess which the Persians took from the Indians, and which we took from the Persians. The Persians altered some of the rules, as is agreed. It is universally acknowledged that three things were produced from India, in which no other country anticipated it, and the like of which existed nowhere else: the book Kalīla wa Dimna, the nine cyphers with which one can count to infinity, and chess. The Indian claim to Astrology and Medicine is disputed by the Persians and Greeks.

      Of the Indian rules of chess, one is observed by the people of Ḥijāz, and is called by them the Medinese Victory. If there be with the Kings two pieces, and the King can take a piece, then which ever first takes, so that the other is left with nothing, wins: for the other side will have been left at a particular time destitute of comrades. This is an Indian rule according to which the people of Medina play.

      Another Indian rule is that when the King cannot find a square into which to move, and the other King has nothing wherewith to checkmate him, the first has won. But this is not a Persian rule.¹¹

      Another Indian rule is that the Elephant is placed in the corner, and omits one square in a straight line to jump into the second in a straight line. And this it does in all the squares of the board. Each Elephant has 16 squares, and the company of Elephants can get into all the squares without collision. But in the form of chess which we have taken from the Persians, and which is played now, the Elephants have only half the board, and each Elephant has 8 squares. The number of squares has been reduced because they go slantwise.

      An Indian was asked why they put the Elephant in the corner, and replied that the Commander of an army in which there are elephants must, owing to his importance, be given the place of commander of either the right or left wing. The Persians, however, think that he should be put next the King, being required for pursuit or flight. The Rooks, he said, are horses in … (a lacuna, after which the writer goes on to praise the horse and falcon, and discusses the relative precedence of the kings of Babylon, India, China)…. The value of the Indian Elephant is the same as that of the Firzān (counsellor, the mediaeval Queen).

      The second account is to be found in al-Bērūnī’s India. The author, Abū’r-Raiḥān Muḥammad b. Aḥmad al-Bērūnī, was born at Khiva in Khwārizm in 362/973 and lived in Hyrcania on the Southern shores of the Caspian. He died at Ghazna 440/1048. He travelled into India but penetrated no farther than the Punjab, and, besides other works of a historical and chronological character, he wrote c.421/1030 an account of the religion, philosophy, literature, chronology, astronomy, customary laws, and astrology of India. His work is an extremely valuable record by a keen inquirer, but unfortunately he appears to have brought away a rather hazy impression of that variety of chess which was peculiar to India. In this, however, he is no worse than the vast majority of observers even in modern times. He says:¹²

      In playing chess they move the Elephant straight on, not to the other sides, one square at a time like the Pawn, and also to the four corners like the Firzān. They say that these five squares—i.e. the one straight forward, and the others at

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