The Elephant in the Room
Asian games—The Art of Contest at the Asia Society
October 14, 2004 – January 16, 2005
Strange that I who rule the world from the Indus in the East to Andalus in the West cannot manage thirty-two chessment in a space of two cubits by two.
Caliph Al-Mamun
Years ago I read a hauntingly strange short story by the Japanese writer Haruki Murakami called
The Elephant Vanishes. In the story, the narrator tells of his obsession with an old elephant that has quite mysteriously vanished along with its keeper from the elephant-house in his Tokyo suburb. ‘Vanish’ is the operative word here, because escape was an impossibility given the facts of the case: the heavy-duty steel cuff that had been clamped around the elephant’s leg found still locked; the two keys in separate locations that were needed to unlock the cuff still in their sealed safes at the police station and firehouse; and the single exit from the grounds of the elephant-house discovered to be still padlocked from the inside. One is left at the end of the story with a sense of bewilderment, of incomprehension, that something so large could vanish without a trace, and left as fascinated and possessed with the missing behemoth as Murakami’s narrator.
Walking through this marvelous exhibition (for what could be more fun than a show about games and their history) I noted the extraordinary number of games to have survived the centuries that originated in Asia: parcheesi or ludo, chess, backgammon, go, playing cards, dominoes, mahjong, snakes and ladders—as if there was something about
this quadrant of the earth that lent itself in particular to the invention of board games. And Murakami’s story strangely echoed as I walked through the chess part of the show. Chess is what has always interested me in particular—the poetry of sixty-four squares and all the paraphernalia associated with it—chessboards, chess sets and individual chess pieces. A game of war and strategy, and the art to this game of war. A game where nothing is left to chance and the possibilities of play are nearly endless. Studying the old miniatures that depict the game and looking at antique sets, I was as haunted by the missing elephant of the game of chess as Murakami’s narrator was with his vanished elephant. The bishop now sits on the chessboard in place of the original elephant, but in this tale it is not a case of disappearance without a clue, but instead a well-documented transformation. Old elephant pieces survive and illustrated manuscripts describe the checkered past of chess—and the replacement of the elephant by the bishop is entirely traceable both linguistically and historically.
The story is this: chess is believed to have originated in North India and was originally called
chaturanga in Sanskrit. Chaturanga meant ‘four-limbed’, an allusion to the four-part military structure then extant in India—elephants, horsemen, chariots, and infantry. The game then spread to Persia
(chatrang in Persian) and then Mesopotamia (shatranj in Arabic). Sometime after the ninth century, chess was taken by the Arabs to North Africa, Sicily and Spain, from where it spread to Italy, France, England, and the rest of Europe. The
Alfonso Manuscript, a thirteenth century illustrated Spanish treatise on chess, documents the medieval history of the game and the Islamic source of chess in Europe.
Chess was transformed over place and time: new pieces were exchanged for old, properties and powers of the pieces were altered, colors distinguishing sides changed. The king was originally called the
shah, the queen replaced the counselor or the vizir
(farzin and firz in Persian and Arabic), the bishop replaced the elephant, the knight replaced the horse, the rook the chariot
(rukh in Persian and Arabic) and the pawn the foot-soldier. It was in Europe that chess evolved after the fifteenth century into modern (international) chess, the game we play today. The queen was made much more powerful than the
vizir which had been able to move only one square at a time in any diagonal direction. The pawn could now make a two-space opening move and castling was codified. The elephant which could only move two squares diagonally (with a jump over an intervening piece allowed), was replaced by the more powerful bishop which could move diagonally in an unrestricted fashion. Elephants were not found in Europe and the piece was replaced by a political symbol that was perhaps more easily understood—the bishop. The red and green of Islamic-style chess sets (and even older Indian and Burmese sets) were replaced by black and white, and checkered boards of light and dark squares replaced the old uncheckered playing surfaces (old manuscripts depict white squares demarcated with black lines) of cloth and leather.
But it is the elephant that I am haunted by, not the vizir or the horse. The elephant piece was called
pil in Persian, and the Arabic fil or al-fil
(al is the definite article in Arabic) for the piece is directly derived from the Persian word. To this day the bishop piece is called
alfil in Spanish—an enduring linguistic link between the two pieces.
Elephant pieces survive the transformation and the show at the Asia Society has several old elephants from simple Islamic ones in red and green to carved ivory tuskers and elaborately decorated Indian pieces. In old Islamic chess sets, abstract and as modern as anything one could find today in a MOMA design store, elephants are marked by two knobs for tusks.
There is some consolation. Chess spread Eastwards as well—there are variants of the game in China, Japan, Burma, Thailand and Korea—and remarkably, the elephant piece remains in
xiangqi or Chinese chess as well as in sittuyin or Burmese chess. There is some controversy as to whether these Far Eastern chess games are derived from an Indian ancestor or are independent inventions. The show’s curators argue that the inclination to claim national ownership for these games is similar to the old rivalry depicted in
The Explanation of Chess and the Invention of Backgammon, a Persian text that describes the challenge to the Persian court to decipher Indian chess and the invention of backgammon as a retaliatory challenge.
I like to imagine that my missing elephant still exists here on these Far Eastern chessboards—after all
xiangqi is called the ‘elephant game’, and both xiangqi and
sittuyin resemble international chess with similar objectives, pieces and movements. In
xiangqi, pieces are not figural, but are instead discs with characters engraved or painted on the obverse face. And most interesting of all—the
xiang (elephant) moves exactly like the old fil, except for the fact that it cannot jump over intervening pieces.
I left the show with a strange desire—to play on a secular chessboard with elephants flanking king and queen, and with emeralds and rubies distinguishing pieces on either side as in luxurious antique Islamic sets. It is the royal game after all, and what better way to play it than in grand old style.
15th
January, 2005.
Each quarter, Anita Itty writes on topics of leadership, identity, business & culture for SAWLF. Ms. Itty received an MBA from Columbia University and is the 2003-2004 winner of the First Words South Asian Literary Prize. Ms. Itty lives in New York City where she is currently working on a novel.
To contact Anita Itty,
email: aiaddress-sawlf@yahoo.com
Recent contributions from Anita Itty:
Pattern on Pattern, in Red, September 15,
2005
La Vita Nuova, April 15, 2005
The Wall and the Books,
September 15, 2004
On the Shoulders of Giants, June 15, 2004