Pint of View is in Kolkata at last. 🍺

About the Lecture

So, Who Invented Ludo: The Indian games behind Ludo, Snakes & Ladders and their colonial afterlife

In 1891, Alfred Collier patented a game that he called the Royal Game of Ludo and around the same time, Frederick Henry Ayres, another British toymaker, patented the game of Snakes and Ladders. Both of these are boardgames that made a huge impact in colonial and post-independence India, South Asian countries and also globally.

What is not usually recognized is that both of these were originally played in India centuries before the patents were registered. So, we have an ‘inventions’ of a game already existing for many centuries in the Indian subcontinent. Hamilton’s game was titled Parcheesi, a name closer to the Indian original, Pachisi (which derives from the word for twenty-five in many North Indian languages).

Pachisi is also widely popular as Chaupar and has had a long tradition of play in the Indian Subcontinent. Snakes and Ladders, too, has a long and rich history and it was played long before in the Indian Subcontinent as Gyan Chaupar and Moksha Pata, both pedagogic gameboards designed to instruct the players in the ways of Karma.

This lecture aims to ‘replay’ these common boardgames by examining the fissures of transmission and the process of travel of these games from India to Europe. Often trivialised as children’s pastimes, boardgames usually fall below the purview of Cultural Studies, Performance Studies and even the much more recent Game Studies. As such, the boardgame, as it were, is rendered subaltern both in the academic system and by the colonial apparatus of the British Raj. What is necessary now is to unpack the hitherto suppressed colonial logic that has reshaped and re-disseminated notions of leisure, culture and identity.

About the Speaker

Dr Souvik Mukherjee is associate professor in Cultural Studies at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences Calcutta, India.

Souvik’s research looks at videogames as storytelling media through a broad spectrum of topics in Game Studies ranging from postcolonialism, identity and temporality in videogames to videogame cultures in South-East Asia.

Souvik is the author of four monographs, Videogames and Storytelling: Reading Games and Playing Books (Palgrave Macmillan 2015), Videogames and Postcolonialism: Empire Plays Back (Springer UK 2017), Videogames in the Indian Subcontinent: Development, Culture(s) and Representations (Bloomsbury India 2022) and Indian Boardgames, Colonial Avatars: Transculturation, Colonialism and Boardgames (De Gruyter 2025). Souvik has been named a Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) Distinguished Scholar in 2019 and a Higher Education Video Game Alliance (HEVGA) fellow in 2022.

Event Details

📅 Saturday, 24 October

🕓 4 PM – 6 PM

📍 Conversation Room, Chowringhee Road, Kolkata

🍻 Enjoy a complimentary Geist beer on the house

Seating strictly on first come first served basis.

About Pint of View

Pint of View is India's Largest Lecture Community. We brought the lecture in bar format to India and are now expanding across the globe with chapters in 14 cities worldwide. Here, big ideas meet intimate spaces, and you walk in curious and walk out with a sharper lens on the world.

Book now and develop your own pint of view. 🍻