The History of Chess. H. J. R. Murray
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
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,