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The Four-handed Dice-game.—The account in Raghunandana.—The method of play.—The modern four-handed game.

In the present chapter I propose to deal with the history and practice of the four-handed chess of which I have already given an early account from al-Bērūnī’s India. Considerable reference has been made already to this game in the concluding pages of Chapter I, in connexion with the Cox-Forbes theory of the ancestry of chess, in which it plays an important part. Present opinion, on the other hand, regards the four-handed game as only one of the many modifications of the two-handed chess which have appeared from time to time in Asia. From this point of view, one of the most remarkable features of this variety of chess is its unusual vitality. Al-Bērūnī wrote his description of the game c.1030. The Bengali account which Forbes used is contained in a work written somewhere about 1500. The game—reformed by the abandonment of the dice—is still played in India to-day. Modifications of chess have not as a rule exhibited such powers of life. Special circumstances may give them a certain vogue for a time, but with the removal of these influences the game has generally fallen into complete disuse.

The only clear ancient reference to the present variety that I know in Indian literature occurs in Kalhaṇa’s Rājataraṅgiṇī, a metrical chronicle of the Kings of Kashmīr, which M. A. Stein, the English translator, dates 1148–9 A.D. The passage¹ runs:—

The king, though he had taken two kings (Loṭhana and Vigraharāja), was helpless and perplexed about the attack on the remaining one, just as a player of chess (who has taken two Kings and is perplexed about taking the third).

He had no hidden plan (of game) to give up for its sake (his figures). Yet he did not pay any regard to his antagonists who were taking his horsemen, peons and the rest.

This seems to be a quite satisfactory reference to the highest form of victory possible in this game—chaturājī.

We are fortunate in possessing two descriptions of this four-handed game which Sir William Jones and later writers have designated chaturājī.² The earlier of these—al-Bērūnī’s—has been already cited; the later—Raghunandana’s—was given in translation by both Sir W. Jones and Forbes. Van der Linde gave in the Geschichte (I, Beil., 3–13) the Bengali text and a German version, which Weber had prepared at his suggestion from the three known texts of the slokas in the Tithitattva.³ Weber’s German version has served as the basis of the following translation:—

Yudhisthira having heard of the game of chaturanga applied to Vyasa for instructions concerning it.

Yudhisthira said—

1. Explain, O supereminent in virtue, the game on the eight times eight board. Tell me, O my master, how the Chaturājī may be played.

Vyasa said—

2. On a board of eight squares place the red forces in front, the green to the right, the yellow at the back, and the black to the left.

3. To the left of the King (rāja), O Prince, place the Elephant (gaja), then the Horse (aṣwa), then the Boat (naukā), and then four Pawns (vaṭi) in front.

4. Opposite place the Boat in the corner, O son of Kunti; the Horse in the second square, the Elephant in the third.

5. And the King in the fourth. In front of each place a Pawn (vaṭikā). On throwing 5, play Pawn or King; if 4, the Elephant (kuñjara).

6. If 3, the Horse; if 2, then, O Prince, the Boat must move. The King moves one square in every direction.

Four-handed chess. After Raghunandana.

7. The Pawn moves the same, only forwards, and takes what happens to be in either angle in advance; the Elephant moves at pleasure in the four cardinal directions.

8. The Horse (turaṃga) moves aslant, crossing three squares at a time; the Boat moves aslant two squares at a time, O Yudhisthira.

9. Sinhāsana, Chaturājī, Nṛipākṛishṭa, Shaṭpada, Kākakāshṭha, Vṛihannaukā, Naukākṛishṭaprachāraka.

10. The Pawn and Boat take whether they can be taken or not, O Yudhisthira; the King, Elephant, and Horse (hayaṣ) take, but avoid being taken themselves.

11. The player should guard his forces with all possible care; the King, O Prince, is the most important of all.

12. The most important may be lost if the weaker are not protected, O son of Kunti. As the King’s chief piece is the Elephant, all others must be sacrificed to save it.

13. To enable the King to obtain Sinhāsana or Chaturājī all other pieces—even the Elephant—should be sacrificed.

I. SINHĀSANA (A throne).

14. If a King enters the square of another King, O Yudhisthira, he is said to have gained a Sinhāsana.

15. If he takes the King when he gains Sinhāsana, he gains a double stake; otherwise it is a single one.

16. If the King, O Prince, mounts his ally’s throne, he gains a Sinhāsana, and takes over the command of both armies.

17. If a King, seeking a Sinhāsana, moves six squares away, he is exposed to danger although he still seems well protected.

II. CHATURĀJĪ (The four Kings).

18. If you still keep your own King, and take the other Kings, you obtain Chaturājī.

19. If your own King slays the others in obtaining Chaturājī, you gain a double stake; otherwise it is a single one.

20. If the King slays the other Kings on their own squares, his stakes are fourfold.

21. If, at the same time, Sinhāsana and Chaturājī are both possible, the latter deserves the preference.

III. NṚIPĀKṚISHṬA (Exchange of Kings).

22. If you have two Kings in your hand, and your own King is still there, the King who is taken by the enemy is taken back again.

23. If you have not the two Kings in your hand although the enemy has the other, the King must kill a King at his own risk.

24. If a King marches out through the nṛipākṛishṭa, he must be killed for death or life. There is no rescue afterwards.

IV. SHAṬPADA (The move of six squares).

25. If a Pawn reaches the edge excepting in the corner and the King’s square, he assumes the power of the square, and this procedure is called the Shaṭpada.

26. If Chaturājī and Shaṭpada are both obtainable, O Prince, Chaṭpada naturally has the preference.

27. If the Pawn’s Shaṭpada is marked with King or Elephant (hasti), it cannot assume it.

28. If the Pawn stands through ten (?i.e. for many moves) on the seventh square, the weak forces opposite can be slain at pleasure.

29. O son of Kunti, if the player has three Pawns left, according to Gotama, he cannot take Shaṭpada.

30. If, on the contrary, he has beside the Boat only one Pawn, it is called gāḍhā, and no square matters to him.

V. KĀKAKĀSHṬHA (A draw).

31. If there are no forces left upon the board it is called Kākakāshṭha. So say all the Rākshasas. It is a drawn game.

32. If there be a fifth King created by the Shaṭpada of a Pawn, and he is taken, it is a misfortune. He will then slay as he moves the moveable forces. (Meaning doubtful.)

33. If this happens a second time the victor slays the hostile forces.

34. If, O Prince, Kākakāshṭha and Sinhāsana happen together, the latter preponderates, and no account is taken of the other.

VI. VṚIHANNAUKĀ (The Boat’s triumph).

35. If a square is occupied, and on the four squares behind it the four Boats are collected, he who causes this to happen by his Boat obtains all four ships.

36. The gaining of the four Boats is called Vṛihannaukā.

VII. NAUKĀKṚISHṬA (The exchange of Boats).

(There is a gap here.)

… Never place an Elephant opposite another Elephant.

37. That would be very dangerous. If, however, there is no other square, then, O Prince, Gotama says the Elephant (hasti) may be placed opposite the Elephant.

38. If you can take two Elephants (gaja), slay that to the left.

This description is rather fuller than that given by al-Bērūnī, but in the main the two accounts appear to be consistent with one another. It is, however, defective towards the end; and the rules that define the circumstances under which the exchange of Boats was permitted are wanting. The last 2 ṣlokas seem to be out of place, and Weber moved them to the close of the opening portion, following ṣloka 11, while Falkener has attempted a more extensive rearrangement of the poem.⁴

So far as the names, positions, and moves of the pieces, and the interpretation of the throws of the dice go, the two accounts are in agreement, except that the Bengali text substitutes a Boat for the Rook or Chariot, and al-Bērūnī contemplates the use of a cubical die in the place of the oblong die of the poem.⁵ The cubical die is, however, only a substitute for the oblong die, since the other throws (the 1 and 6) are made equivalent to two of the throws of the oblong die. The change, of course, disturbs the chances of the game (if a dice-game throughout) by leading to a more frequent use of the King, Pawn and Elephant, with a consequent shortening of the game.

It is probable that the replacement of the Rook or Chariot by the Boat was confined to Bengal, where the same change has been made in the nomenclature of the two-handed game. It is most probably the result of an attempt to discover a meaning for the Muslim chess term rukh, which had been introduced into Northern India in consequence of the Muhammadan conquest. The original meaning of the word rukh was not generally known either by the Persian or by the Arabic grammarians, and many popular etymologies were current among them. The Hindu in Bengal associated it with the Sanskrit roka, a boat or ship, and carved the chess-piece accordingly. Once carved so, it is easy to see how, with the loose nomenclature used in our Indian authorities, it became usual to employ the more ordinary term, nauka, for the boat in Bengali.

It will be seen in the sequel that the Boat has replaced the Rook in Russian, Siamese, Annamese, and Javan, probably in most of these cases independently. If this explanation of the origin of this term in Bengali is correct, it is another argument for the late date of the passage in the Tithitattva, since it puts the appearance of the Boat at a date subsequent to the Muslim invasion of India.

It is a peculiarity of the game that the King is not obliged to move when attacked, and that the King is liable to capture precisely in the same way that every other piece is liable in the ordinary game. Indeed, the whole game seems to have had for its aim the capture of as many prisoners as possible. Al-Bērūnī tells us that every piece had its definite value, and the division of the stakes was governed by the number and value of the pieces taken. The value of the Pawn is 1, of the Rook (Boat) 2, of the Horse 3, of the Elephant 4, of the King 5. If a player preserved his own King and captured the other three, he obtained 54. Al-Bērūnī was unable to explain the reason for this number and regarded it as a mere convention of the game. But it is the exact value of the other three armies when calculated in accordance with his figures, and thus represents the highest score possible, and it may have been obtained in that way. It then agrees with the poem, where this mode of winning is given as the most profitable. The poem only deals with the stakes realized by the capture of the Kings or the taking of their thrones. The victory appears to be estimated in a different way from that described by al-Bērūnī.

The scale in the poem may be summarized thus:—

The game is played by four players allied in pairs. In the poem red and yellow are allies, green and black. The nature of the alliance does not clearly transpire: it can hardly have been very cordial and sincere, when it was equally profitable to capture the ally’s King or an enemy’s King, and a necessity for the gain of the most profitable victory. The poem adds a further inducement to treachery in the privilege that the seizure of the throne of the ally’s King involved the elimination of the ally, and secured the sole conduct of the two armies.

We do not know for certain how the move circulated. The analogy of other four-handed Indian games, Pachīsī, Chaupur, &c., would require the move to go round in a counter-clockwise direction. From the advice in ṣloka 38 to take the Elephant on the left in preference to that on the right, Forbes argued that the move went in the opposite direction, and prima facie his argument seems sound.

When we come to the actual method of play, further difficulties appear. Both accounts speak of the use of dice to determine which of the various men are to be played, but neither account is sufficiently explicit, and while al-Bērūnī speaks of a pair of dice, the poem does not seem to contemplate the use of more than a single die. Nor is it stated anywhere with absolute clearness that the die or dice are to be employed throughout the game, though I think that the continuous use of the dice is implied from al-Bērūnī’s curious disquisition on the Elephant’s move, and I see nothing in the poem inconsistent with the use of a pair of dice. Neither source again has anything to say as to what was done in cases in which the dice gave impossible moves. At the outset no Elephant can move. With two dice such as al-Bērūnī prescribes, the chances are 2 to 19 on the throws 4, 4 or 6, 6, which can only be met by a move of the Elephant, and 11 to 10 on one of the dice giving a 4 or a 6; with a single die the chances are 1 to 3. Did the player lose his turn, or could he throw again? And when the game had been some time in progress, many throws must have been quite impossible to use. A player loses his Horse, for instance, and the throw of 3 is useless. Did the game as it went on resolve itself more and more into a long and wearisome succession of shakes of the dice-box with moves upon the board at greater and greater intervals, and, if so, what were the elements of vitality that kept the dice-game alive for at least 500 years?

To these questions there is no certain answer possible. The various solutions that have been suggested will be briefly discussed in the Appendix to this chapter. It is not a difficult matter to construct a playable game of chance out of what we know by framing a code of laws to meet all the cases which the two accounts leave uncertain. But it would be a hard matter to prove that any such conjecture had accurately reproduced the original game; while the existing four-handed Indian game affords but little help, for the game is no longer played with dice, and it is to the use of the dice that all the uncertainty is due.

The rules of pawn-promotion (the skaṭpada) are rather vague. It is clear that the Pawn could only be promoted at the edge opposite to that from which it started to move, for otherwise there would be no reason for the exact term shaṭpada (six steps). Promotion is not allowed on the squares originally occupied by King or Elephant (27); these are two of the marginal marked squares, and in the ordinary game promotion is facilitated, not prohibited, on these squares. No Pawn can be promoted until a Pawn has been lost (29), and probably also, though not explicitly stated, until the masterpiece of the file has been lost. Probably in such a case it is debarred from moving to the 8th rank. Promotion is to the rank of the master-piece of the file (25). But when a player has lost all his superior men save his Boat and one Pawn he may promote this Pawn on any square of the opposite edge to the rank of any piece, King included (30, 32).

The four-handed game would appear to have been played chiefly in Bengal, the North-West Provinces, and the Punjab. Sir William Jones’s authority, the Brāhman Rādhakant, told him ‘that the Brahmans of Gaur or Bengal were once celebrated for superior skill in the game, and that his father, together with his spiritual preceptor Jagannāth, now living at Tribeni, had instructed two young Brāhmans in all the rules of it, and had them sent to Jayanagar at the request of the late Raja, who had liberally rewarded them.’⁶

According to Raghunandana the four-handed dice-game was chiefly played on festivals like that of the full moon, when it is occasionally incumbent upon the worshippers to keep watch throughout the night. He states that on these occasions it was customary to relieve the tedium of the night with games of dice, and specially with chaturājī. I know of no living authority who has seen this game so played. None of the modern Indian chess-books which I have consulted mention the game as a living variety of chess, and the two which make any reference to it at all have obtained their knowledge of it from European works, and only include it for its historical interest. The Hindu Ram Chandra Pradan, in reply to questions from v.d. Linde in 1874 (v.d. Linde, i. 79), had never heard of this dice-game and declined to believe in its possibility.

On the other hand, a four-handed game of chess played without dice is still played in India. Ram Chandra Pradan told v. d. Linde that he had often seen this non-dice form played. The opposite players were partners, and chessmen of only two colours were used. It has been seen more recently in the Punjab at Naushahra, near Peshawar. Mr. J. Cresswell, who has recorded the fact,⁷ was shown the game at the conclusion of an ordinary game of chess which he had been watching. Three of the players were Muhammadans, the fourth a Hindu. They used the ordinary chessmen, dividing each colour between the allied players, and using the Farzīus (Counsellors, ‘Queens’) to supply the places of the two extra Kings required. The partners sat opposite one another, the game was played without dice, and there was no wager on the result, nor any value attached to the prisoners taken. He was informed that the game terminated

(1) when one side succeeded in capturing both of the opposing Kings;

(2) when one side succeeded in capturing all the opponent’s men excepting the Kings;

(3) when all four Kings were left bare; in which case the game was drawn.

On this occasion there was no exchange of captured Kings, no attempt to capture the partner’s King, and no promotion of Pawns was necessary. In the Autumn of 1909 I met a young Punjabi from Lahore who was in this country for purposes of education. He told me that shaṭranj was played in Lahore either as a two-handed or as a four-handed game; the two-handed game was the more usual.

Although these modern authorities speak of the use of the ordinary chessmen of the two-handed game being used, special sets for the four-handed game are not unknown. Mr. Falkener possessed a fine set in two colours, in which the Rooks are Boats, and has given a photograph of it in his Games, &c. (facing 119).

The modifications in the method of play which Mr. Cresswell describes appear to be natural ones after the removal of the dice and the abandonment of the method of scoring based upon the numerical values attached to the pieces taken. The game has gained in strategy, and the alliance between the partners is now straightforward. There is no longer any point in capturing the partner’s King, and each side can devote its entire energies to the task of winning without fear of treachery. Rules for Pawn-promotion probably exist, but from the nature of the game they can only seldom come into operation.

This is the game which in the Cox-Forbes theory is the primitive chess. Forbes discovered the seed from which our chess was to spring in the privilege that a player who gained his partner’s throne henceforward secured the sole conduct of the two armies. He considered that this manœuvre was an object of prime importance, and that it would often happen ‘that after some 20 or 30 moves, the contest remained to be concluded between two players only’. Moreover, he finds the use of the dice not only alien to the spirit of the game, but forbidden by the rigid law and religion of the Hindus. It is a small step to imagine that two players often sat down to chaturājī, and played it from the start without using dice at all. To unite the allied armies of red and yellow along one edge, to move the allied armies of black and green from their respective sides to the other edge, to replace two of the Kings by Viziers, are changes which appeared to Forbes with the advantage of the knowledge of the two-handed game, simple, obvious, and natural.

I feel bound to differ. Quite apart from the historical difficulties narrated in Chapter I, which appear to me to be insuperable, the transformation so glibly described seems to me unnatural, unlikely, and incredible. The value of the manœuvre by which the third and fourth players are eliminated seems exaggerated so long as the moves are dictated by dice, and the possibility of its successful accomplishment is much smaller than Forbes imagined. It will take a King seven moves at least to reach his partner’s throne, and he must move right down the front of the two opposing armies, exposed the whole way to attack and possible capture. The probability of seven fives turning up in the first 20 or 30 throws is extremely small. Again, undue weight is laid upon the religious and legal ordinances against the use of dice. Nothing is more certain than the continuous existence of gambling in India from the earliest times, and the two divinities, Siva and Parvati, are often depicted playing a dice-game. The theory of the final transformation I leave, as I believe it condemns itself.