The game’s equivalency to Chess was sidelined, and its origins in the shadows.[break]
In an age of X-box and live television, such Nepali games as bagh chaal, dandi biyo, chungi, and langur burja (Crown & Anchor) are waning. Yet, sometimes in a lonely alley in Kathmandu, it’s not unusual to encounter a group of kids hopping around with a chungi or tossing gucchas.
They might even be ecstatically enjoying choidum, khoppi and lukamari (hide and seek).
Dr Dilli Raj Sharma, Professor of Nepali Culture and Archaeology at the Centre for Nepal and Asian Studies (CNAS), says, “Games like bagh chaal and dandi biyo have been played in the hinterlands of Nepal through the ages but their history is hazy.”
He adds, “During the Rana regime, common masses were excluded from all forms of entertainment. The Ranas relished Mogul styles of entertainment, like singing, dancing and hunting. The masses, on the other hand, must have created these games for their own entertainment.”
Sharma further explains that these games have indigenous natures. Although they are played under different names in neighboring countries like India, their techniques make each of them unique.
The accessibility to and the simplicity of these games appears to be the reasons why they haven’t diminished. Their fondness among children has helped them survive the test of time.
They play these games enthusiastically, sharing the techniques with anyone interested.
Bagh Chaal
On a Saturday afternoon in Te Baha near New Road, Kumar Rokka, Dileep Rai, Rit Bahadur Shrestha and Bhim Bahadur were huddled together in a street corner. They were playing this famous Nepali game.
When Bhim Bahadur saw a stranger approaching with a camera, he was irate. “For no obvious reason, we were on TV playing bagh chaal and said to be wasting our time as Maoist cadres yesterday,” he mumbled and left.
The others continued with the game. They had chalked out a bagh chaal board with the remnants of a red brick on the pitched road.
The tigers were bigger stones and goats were denoted by smaller pebbles. Just the way goat herders played it in ancient times.
Although no historical proof exists, bagh chaal is said to have been played first by goatherds. They were on constant lookout for tigers and other predatory animals and played it to pass their time as goats grazed around in the forest.
Times have changed now. The tiger and tree population of Nepal is disappearing and bagh chaal boards can be found in bronze, wood and metal.
The popularity of the game, however, remains the same. It’s played on a square board of five by five grids with intersecting diagonal lines. There are four tigers and 20 goats in the game.
Played in two phases, a tiger captures a goat by jumping over to the goats’ free adjacent positions. In the first phase, the goats are placed on the board by one player and the tigers can move from their positions in the four corners of the board.
Both tigers and goats can move from their positions in the second phase. Goats go first and tigers go second. A tiger can jump only once at one time, and not over another tiger.
Goats, on their part, cannot jump over a goat or a tiger. They can trap a tiger by blocking it from his moving positions and must leave when “eaten” by the tiger.
Dandi Biyo
The name of the game clarifies the equipments required to play it—dandi and biyo. Dandi, or a stick of two feet length, is used to hit a biyo, or a pin of half a foot. The pointed pin is put in a hole of around four inches.
The player needs to fling out the biyo in the hole with the help of the dandi. If the pin is caught by another player, the other is out. Scores can be made by the person holding the dandi by hitting the biyo as far as possible.
This is the simplified version of dandi biyo. But rules vary across Nepal.
Bijaya Poudel, Founding President of Nepal Dandi Biyo Association, says, “We found that the rules of dandi biyo vary from one place to another. In order to give recognition to the game and make it internationally viable, the Association has introduced a rulebook.”
The book includes eighteen different rules for the game. According to it, dandi biyo can be played with a team of five or seven members, with two extra team members in each team.
There are five game officials in the field who include a referee, two linesmen and one scorekeeper and timekeeper. Scores are made by hitting the biyo and going for runs.
Each member of the biyo team can hit the biyo thrice. The biyo team cannot go outside the field. The distance between the player holding the dandi and the biyo is four and a half meters. The Association has also introduced safety helmets for the players.
There is a national team. Poudel says, “We’re determined to establish dandi biyo as the national game of Nepal but the main problem is lack of funds.”
A game similar in nature to dandi biyo but under different names is played in South Asia.
Chungi
“A chungi might be just a bunch of rubber bands tied together but it looks like a still of an exploding monochromatic firecracker; like a chamomile, an aster, a sunflower and a daisy; the rubber bound bouncy hair of little girls; the rudimentary flower kids draw – a tiny circle surrounded by other tiny circles; a tarantula; anything round and plump: tomatoes, apples, persimmons, shrunken pumpkins.
A chungi might look dull and colorless but hidden underneath its blackness are the colors of Nepal and our childhood in it..”
– Weena Pun writing in her undergraduate senior writing portfolio at Stanford University.
It’s a kicker’s game, rooted in the soil of Nepal. For children, chungi is a prized possession played whenever school or time permits. When adults forbid, they can’t help but disobey.
The craze for chungi however disappears with adulthood. It becomes a string of dirty rubbers infested with bacteria. Most forsake the game and prefer to slump in their couches. But children play it with the same fervor as the outgrown adults once did. They are the real envoys of this popular game.
Chungis are noticeably seen during winters when parents encourage their young ones to go out in the sun.
To become the first participant of the game, one has to kick the chungi in the air without putting one’s foot down for the longest time. Then the number for winning the game is decided, most often 50 or 100 kicks, played in the pattern of kicking the chungi and putting one’s feet down.
The winner in a game of chungi is the one who can make the biggest score first. It requires concentration and stamina.
You can play it with either legs, and every game ends with a back kick. Your back kick should land the chungi in the distance decided between the players, some 10 or 20 steps away from the player.
Although its origin is unknown, Thai and Burmese wicker ballgames (“Takraw” in Thailand) share similarities with this game. In its earlier form, chungi is said to have resembled a badminton shuttlecock. It was made of a ring of feathers instead of rubbers and weighed down by a metal or a coin.
In due course of time, rubbers replaced feathers, and its shape took a symmetrical round form. Perhaps, the low cost of a chungi, its accessibility and simplicity are the reasons behind its wide acceptance and presence.
Gucchas or Marbles
“Bring in the guchhas,” Swadesh Shakya orders one of his store helpers. After a few minutes, a plastic bowl with a few old gucchas is put on the counter.
“We don’t sell guchhas anymore.
These are just a few ones left from the samples. This is now the age of B10,” he says. Shakya is the owner of Manjushree Stationery Stores at New Road.
The shop has been running for the past 26 years. It’s stacked with colorful toys and stationery. “B10 is a new cartoon character on television. Two years ago, it was Pokemon,” Shakya explains.
He mentions that kids now throng for items embossed with B10. In the store, one can find erasers, pens, little car toys, and plastic draggers engraved with B10 trademarks.
Playing and winning in a game of guccha is considered a matter of prestige among its players. There are bets involved, and the winner often shows off the won collection of guchhas with pride. But few play it nowadays.
“Gucchas have been reduced to showpieces. Even my children grew up without playing them. They went around with their bicycles instead,” says Shakya.
Two gucchas cost a mere one Rupee. In previous years, the price was even less. According to Shakya, gucchas were previously brought in from India, but now China rules the market.
Kids playing gucchas might be a rarity to find these days but some old players remember the game with nostalgia.
Sudip Karki, 26, a resident of Sina Mangal, recalls those winter holidays when he and his friends played guchhas in the fields.
“There were very few houses at that time, and we had a huge playground all to ourselves. We played gucchas whenever we could,” he says.
He mentions kacchi and khal as the two styles of playing guccha. In khal, a small hole is dug in the ground and the gucchas need to enter the hole in odd or even numbers, as decided by the players.
The players stand about one foot away from the hole and throw in the gucchas. If the gucchas enter the hole in the number decided by the player, he wins; and if it doesn’t, the other player wins. The winner gets the gucchas of the other player.
Kachhi, on the other hand, is played by drawing a line on the ground. Players throw in their shooter gucchas, and the player whose shooter lands nearest to the line gets the first shot.
A player can decide whether to shoot first or last. The idea is to shoot out a marble from the line. If a player shoots out a guccha of another player, he gets to shoot once more. The game continues until all the guchhas are out.
“We played these games for money and often got into fights. The person who won the maximum number of gucchas was treated like a king,” says Karki. “Most often, the other kids who had lost their gucchas bought them back from him,” he adds.
Gatta or Pebbles
Gatta is a game of pebbles played mostly by little girls. It requires five pebbles and can be played with any number of players.
Divided into several stages, and in order to win the game, a player needs to overcome each stage without making a mistake.
Each stage is numbered according to the number of pebbles that are to be picked, while one pebble is thrown in the air.
The game begins with the scattering of pebbles, and a player will have a higher chance of winning if they are scattered properly. It’s easier to pick up the gattas if they are huddled together in the number that is to be picked.
If a player is unable to pass a stage, another player gets to play, and she can continue in the same stage later. After crossing the stage of picking up five pebbles, both the left and right hands are used in the game. One hand forms a certain structure (such as an arc) and the other hand is used to pick up the gattas and put them in the structure formed.
These stages are termed as kukur, bagh and paan, among others.
Srijana KC, 23, was brought up in a family with four sisters and remembers playing gatta enthusiastically in her childhood.
“My mother used to throw our gattas, terming them useless stones. But we always retrieved them,” she says.
“My elder sister had a perfect set of smooth gattas and I envied them,” KC adds. Smooth pebbles are easier to play with than uneven ones.
Always in fashion
Be it gattas or guchhas, these unique Nepali games have the innocence of childhood attached to them. Their accessibility and easy rules have kept them alive and popular.
They may not have the international popularity like football and cricket but these games reflect our culture. If these games don’t have the status given to other widely played sports, they at least deserve to be mentioned as traditional Nepali games in cultural discourses.
Denying them as useless indulgence would be unwise.
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