about us events congress_2005 contact us membership corporate partners media congress 2008
south asian women's leadership forum
     
 
Puchase your "don't call me auntieTM" t-shirt today! Proceeds benefit SAWLF's scholarship for South Asian women. $15. To order, please e-mail: sharetheexperience
@southasianwomen.org

SAVE-THE-DATE! Congress 2006 will be held on Saturday, February 25, 2006

Two dynamic business leaders will be the principal speakers at Congress 2006 presented by the South Asian Women’s Leadership Forum on Saturday, February 25, 2006 in Manhattan. SAWLF is pleased to announce that Ms. Indra Nooyi, president and CFO for PepsiCo., Inc. will participate in an interactive segment with Ms. Meena Mansharamani, vice president for strategic initiatives at Pepsi-Cola North America.

This special segment will bring together two, leading-edge professionals for an engaging discussion that will highlight winning business strategies and practices as well as their individual experiences of challenge and achievement at one of the world’s best known and established consumer brands.

SAWLF Second Annual Congress 2006
Saturday, February 25, 2006
10:00 AM to 7:30 PM
PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP
300 Madison Avenue (SW Corner of 42nd Street)
New York, NY 10017

Anita Itty joins South Asian Women's Leadership Forum as contributing essayist. Each quarter, Ms. Itty will write on topics of leadership, identity, business & culture.

SAWLF is committed to the advancement of South Asian women in the workplace. In the June 2004 issue of Working Mother magazine, SAWLF's National Director is featured in Can We Talk? A candid conversation about race and career by Caroline Howard

Recent SAWLF Events:
JoinSAWLFat the Working Mother Best Companies for Women of Color Multicultural Conference, July 20-21, 2005 in New York City. SAWLF will host an interactive session for conference attendees from 5 - 6 PM on July 20. in Central Park West, Sheraton New York & Towers.

Asia Society & SAWLF present a season of special events highlighting Asian and Asian-American women business leaders, including:"Trailblazers: Asian Women Entrepreneurs" on May 4, 2005.

Special guest speakers include Shoba Purushothaman, CEO and Co-Founder, The NewsMarket and Geeta Anand, Senior Special Writer, Wall Street Journal.

Geeta Anand, Senior Special Writer, Wall Street Journal

Additional speakers to be announced. To register on-line, click here

SAWLF presents its inaugural Congress 2005 on Saturday, February 26, 2005 in Manhattan. Sara Mathew, Senior Vice President & Chief Financial Officer, The Dun & Bradstreet Corporation and Zeyba Rahman, Chairperson, World Music Institute and Producing Partner, Jungli Billi Productions will deliver the keynote address. Additional special guests and participants to be announced. To register on-line, click here

In December 2004, SAWLF presents Behind the Scenes:Women In Film Series at the South Asian International Film Festival (SAIFF) December 1 - 5, 2004 in New York City. SAWLF is proud to sponsor a selection of films: Meenaxi (2004); What r We Doin' Here & Ladies Special. For additional information, visit SAIFF

"Getting Real Success", Join SAWLF on October 19, 2004 as we explore the complexity of defining and achieving success amid converging personal and professional goals and demands with Subha Barry, First Vice President of Multicultural and Diversified Business Development for Merrill Lynch & Co., Inc.; Jeanine Prime, Director of Research for Catalyst; and Jyoti Chopra, head of South Asian business in Merrill Lynch Global Private Client’s Multicultural and Diversified Business Development Group. Additional speakers to be confirmed. To register, click here

Join the SAWLF table on Saturday, October 16, 2004 for Celebrating Women's Lives, the annual SAKHI Benefit Gala at Chelsea Piers. This special event features actress Nandita Das & the Vagina Monologues' Eve Ensler. For ticket information, please contact SAWLF

Join SAWLF on Sunday, September 19, 2004 for a special performance and reception with the UK comedy sensation, Shazia Mirza and THE LAST TEMPTATION OF SHAZIA. Click here to register. This event is made possible by the generous support of Western Union.

Join SAWLF at the Working Mother Best Companies for Women of Color Multicultural Conference, July 20-21, 2004 in New York City.

   

 



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

 

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this essay are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of South Asian Women's Leadership Forum.

 
terms of use
privacy policy