Domain XXIII · PLAY & PASTIME
Play & Pastime
کھیل
Leisure is an art · Ganjifa, shatranj, kabootar
Rootsthe tradition
Circular ganjifa cards hand-painted in lacquer and dealt by suit, shatranj with its slow-moving elephant and counsellor, kabootar-baazi flown by whistle, chaupar cloth, pachisi cowries.
The ideawhat it values
Games were made with the patience given to anything else at court: hand-painted discs lacquered until they resist the thumb, a board divided and stocked with pieces ranked like an actual army, birds flown to a vocabulary of signals and wagers. The rules were as elaborate as the objects. Calling any of it a pastime undersells the craft.
Plateswhat the record looks like
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The groundin the Atlas
The tree names 27 topics here, under Popular & Folk Culture. A branch carries more than one domain, so read it as the ground rather than the boundary.
Writtenwhere the archive stands
Nothing written here yet. The tree already names 27 topics on this ground, so the gap is one of writing rather than of scope — and saying so is more use than filling the page.