Culture of Sedentary Play in India: The Space Context

This paper by Amit S. Deshmukh examines how sedentary board games in India have shaped and been shaped by physical space, arguing that spatial analysis offers a more useful lens for understanding Indian game culture than purely art-historical or sociological approaches. Drawing on archaeological evidence, Vedic and Mahabharata references, medieval temple graffiti, and Mughal and Rajasthani painting, the author proposes that a game's "space envelope" can be analyzed both tangibly, through measurable requirements such as reach and seating, and intangibly, through the emotional responses the play evokes, framed through the Indian aesthetic concepts of rasa and bhava. Case studies of medieval temples at Doddagaddavalli, Pedgaon, and Hampi (Vijayanagara) show game boards carved into floors across Hoysala, Yadava, and Vijayanagara phases, suggesting temples functioned as public social spaces as well as religious ones. The paper identifies three parameters for assessing games' spatial impact: flexibility, which allowed play in indoor and outdoor settings with improvised materials; scalability, which ranged from two-player contests to events involving over two hundred participants; and semantic perception, linking games to cosmic and spiritual concepts. The author also traces a shift from floor-level play to elevated furniture under European influence in the eighteenth century, and later to plastic, child-oriented, and digital formats that have altered both the portability and the social character of play.