The History of Chess - H. J. R. Murray

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The numbers show the positions of the players.

      The existing board-games of this special type in Southern India and Ceylon are all played on boards with an odd number of squares, so that there is a single central square which serves as point of exit for all four players alike. In Pachīsī on the other hand, each player has his own point of exit, and there seems no reason why a similar arrangement should not have been tried upon a square board. In this case the square would obviously be one with an even number of points, and the four central points would serve as the four points of exit for the four players.

      It is to this more complicated type of race-game that I assign the early Indian game on the ashṭāpada board. I find support for my belief in a peculiarity of the modern Indian chessboard which has no importance for chess and has never been explained in a satisfactory manner. On all native chessboards which I have seen, certain squares are cross-cut precisely as in the games of Pachīsī and Gavalata. Native books from the time of Nīlakaṇṭ·ha (17th c.) onwards carefully preserve the marked squares, but attempt no explanation of them. They have even survived the chequering of the board. In their complete form the boards contain no less than 16 cross-cut squares—a1, a4, a5, a8, d1, d4, d5, d8, e1, e4, e5, e8, h1, h4, h5, h8. Other boards omit some of these markings, but do not substitute other cross-cut squares for them. In the chequered boards the markings on the four central squares are not completed.

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      THE MARKINGS ON MODERN INDIAN CHESSBOARDS.

      A. Hyde, ii. 74; Nīlakaṇṭ·ha; Brit. Mus.; Platt Collection.

      B. Weber (v. d. Linde, i. 124, Bombay); Poona; Platt Collection.

      C. Chequered board in Platt Collection.

      D. Weber (v. d. Linde, i. 124, Tanjore).

      E. Delhi.

      F and G. Patiala.

      This peculiarity is not confined to the Indian chessboard. There are markings on the Burmese, Malay, Chinese, and Corean boards, but these do not correspond to the Indian markings, and in some cases are now associated with special features of play. The older Muslim literature of chess makes no reference to the existence of marked squares, but Mr. Falkener possessed a modern Turkish chess cloth in which the squares a4, a5, d1, d8, e1, e8, h4, h5 are marked in one way and d4, d5, e4, e5 in another and more elaborate way.40

      The explanation of these cross-cut squares is, I believe, to be found in the fact that the Indian chessboard is simply the old ashṭāpada board, and preserves its original features, although their purpose has long been forgotten. The ashṭāpada game was, I believe, very similar to the modern gavalata. If two players played, each entered his men at opposite sides of the board; if four, then at each edge. The track ran round the outer edge, then round the inner blocks of 36 and 16 squares, and finished in the centre of the board. The cross-cut squares were citadels, or squares on which a man was immune from capture. As will be seen in the following chapter, this hypothesis provides a simple explanation for the curious fact that the Ceylon game of this type is now called saturankam, i.e. chaturanga.

      The game of chess was invented when some Hindu devised a game of war, and, finding the ashṭāpada board convenient for his purpose, adopted it as his field of battle.41 The fact that he gave his game a new name, chaturanga, shows that his game had no connexion with the game of whose board he availed himself. The meaning of this name is perfectly plain. It is an adjective, compounded from the two words chatur, four, and anga, member, limb, with the literal meaning having four limbs, four-membered, quadripartite. In this original sense it appears in the Rigvēda (X. xcii. 11), in reference to the four-limbed human body, and in the Satapātha Brahmaṇa (XII. iii. 2. 2). It also occurs repeatedly in the Mahābhārata (which existed in its present form by 500 A.D.), in Rāmāyaṇa (which goes back in its oldest form to the 5th c. B.C.), in Kāmandaki’s Nītisāra (dating from the beginning of the Christian era), and in the Atharva Veda-Parisiṣṭas (which are not earlier than 250 A.D.), either in agreement with the word bala, army, or used absolutely as a feminine or neuter substantive, in the sense of army composed of four members, and army generally. It is clear that the word chaturanga became the regular epic name for the army at an early date in Sanskrit. Weber states that the use of the word, as also of the variant chaturañgin, is not only common in Sanskrit, but also in Pali.

      What was meant by the four members of the Indian army is perfectly plain from the repeated connexion of the word chaturanga with chariots, elephants, cavalry, and infantry. In Rāmāyana (I. lxxiv. 4), in Mahābhārata (III. 1504. 4), and in Amarakoṣa (III. 8. 21), the army is expressly called hasty-ashwa-rat·ha-padātam, the total or aggregate of elephants, horses, chariots, and foot-soldiers. Macdonell (op. cit., 118) notes that this was the regular composition of the complete Indian army at least as early as the 4th c. B.C., for the Greek accounts of the invasion of N.W. India by Alexander, in 326 B.C., state that the army of Pauras consisted of 30,000 infantry, 4,000 cavalry, 200 elephants, and 300 chariots. The Greek historian Megasthenes, who spent some time at the court of Pāṭaliputra (Patna) about 300 B.C., when speaking of the military administration of the Indian state, says that there were six departments responsible for the management of the elephants, cavalry, chariots, infantry, baggage, and boats.42 The Code of Mann (vii. 185) also speaks of an army of six parts, to which the scholiast Kullūka Bhaṭṭa (16th–17th c.) adds that the six parts are hasty-ashwa-rat·ha-padāti-senapāti-karmakara, or elephants, horses, chariots, foot-soldiers, general, and camp-followers, i.e. the regular army with its commander and that motley following that always attends an Indian army on its march, and yet adds no fighting-strength to it on the day of battle.43 The Nītisāra of Kāmandaki, ‘a work of policy dating probably from the early centuries of our era’ (Macdonell, JRAS., 118), contains an important and instructive chapter (ch. xix) of 62 slokas, which specially treats of the chaturangabala, or army. The chapter states that the army is composed of elephants, chariots, horse, and infantry; it discusses the ground most suitable for the evolutions of each of these members; it estimates a horseman as equal to three foot-soldiers, and the elephant and chariot as each equal to five horsemen. It suggests several arrangements as suitable for use in war, e.g., infantry, horse, chariots, elephants; elephants, horse, chariots, infantry; the horse in the centre, the chariots next, and the elephants on the wings.44

      We are, therefore, entitled to conclude that the fourfold division of the Indian army into chariots, cavalry, elephants, and infantry, was a fact well recognized already before the commencement of our era.45

      The same four elements—chariots, horse, elephants, foot-soldiers—appear as four out of the six different types of force in the board-game chaturanga. The remaining types prefigure individuals, not types of military force. The presence of the King needs no justification. The addition of the Minister or Vizier is in complete agreement with Oriental custom, and the Code of Manu (vii. 65) lays stress upon the dependence of the army on him. The self-consistency of the nomenclature and the exactness with which it reproduces the composition of the Indian army afford the strongest grounds for regarding chess as a conscious and deliberate attempt to represent Indian warfare in a game. That chess is a war-game is a commonplace of Indian, Muslim, and Chinese writers.

      But the parallelism does not end with the name of the game and the chessmen. It extends to the termination of the play. The immediate object of warfare is the overthrow of the enemy, and in early times this object was secured with equal certainty either by the capture or death of the opposing monarch, or by the annihilation of his army. These are exactly reproduced by the two methods of winning in early chess—the checkmate and the baring of the opponent’s King.

      It would be unreasonable to assume that the attempt to carry out the idea of arranging a war-game between Indian armies upon the ashṭāpada was immediately successful in producing the game as it appears in the oldest records, or even a workable game. But the comparative evidence of the Indian and non-Indian forms of chess shows that the period of experiment was practically past before the game had spread from its earliest centre, and that the moves, method of play, and rules were broadly settled as we know them in the oldest records. Still, one or two of the points of difficulty in the development of the

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