A Note on Sufi Snakes and Ladders

Among the diverse treasures of the Royal Asiatic Society are two early nineteenth century paper playing boards for the north Indian game of gyan caupar, the 'Chaupar of Knowledge (Gnosis)'. This once popular game, played with dice or cowry shells, leads its players gradually up the board from hellish states or earthly vices to higher virtues and ultimately to heaven or liberation. It is known in various Jain and Hindu (mainly Vaisnava) versions of the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries and a small handful of nineteenth century Muslim (or Sufi) examples. By the 1890s it also gave rise, in a simplified and denatured form, to the English children's game of Snakes and Ladders.(1) One of the Society's boards is an ingenious 124-square version of the Vaisnava form of gyan caupar, unique in its design and philosophical conception,(2) whose inventor has been identified as the Brahmin scholar Thiruvenkatacharya Shastri.(3) The Society's other board is a rare example of the 100-square Muslim form of gyan caupar (Fig. 1), inscribed with Persian and Arabic square names that are loosely based around Sufi terms for the stages of the mystical path. I am here concerned with this form of the game and in particular with an expanded variant form of it that has recently come to light.