A Royal Game Of Cards

Tracing The Ancient Card Game Of Ganjifa, Now Painstakingly Preserved In Sawantwadi, Maharashtra

Is it like rummy?” I ask, trying to make sense of the beautiful cards spread out before me—mythological figures painted in vivid colours with floral and geometric motifs. “Ganjifa is never played with money,” Rajmata rebukes, “the cards have the face of god, and you never gamble with god.”

It’s a balmy February morning and I am with Satwashila Devi Bhonsle, erstwhile queen of Maharashtra’s princely state of Sawantwadi, a two-hour drive from Dabolim. We sit in the courtyard of her impressive, 18thcentury red brick palace. A stately octogenarian, Rajmata, as everyone calls her, is inducting me into an ancient card game. Ganjifa arrived in India over 500 years ago and was popular amongst the rajas before cheaper playing cards from Europe arrived towards the end of the British Raj.

Despite having all but disappeared from the public imagination, traces of Ganjifa still survive in small pockets in Odisha, West Bengal, Andhra, and Mysore, where dedicated communities of artisans strive to keep the cardmaking craft alive. Here in Sawantwadi, a small town set around a man-made lake in the foothills of the Sindhudurg range, under the patient and determined patronage of Rajmata Bhosle, Ganjifa is slowly emerging from obscurity.

“By the 1970s there was just one Ganjifa artist left in Sawantwadi who made one set a year which he sold for 30 rupees,” she tells me. “At the time no one was interested in learning how to make the cards; it is a long and painstaking process with no demand. Most of the traditional artisans had either moved to cities like Bombay or abandoned cardmaking for more lucrative options.”