The Maharajah’s Dream Digitized: Archiving Boardgames in India

Abstract

Boardgames have been a much-neglected aspect of India’s intangible heritage,` despite their fundamental role in shaping societies and cultures and have largely remained invisible within traditional academic discourses and museum archives. In the absence of physical archives and given the ephemeral nature and the multiple mediality of boardgames as artefacts, a digital archive seems to be the way forward in documenting Indian boardgames and their role as cultural artefacts. This article introduces the ‘Digitizing Ancient Indian Boardgames (DAIB)’ project, which seeks to move beyond the limitations (and often absence) of curated physical collections to curate a wide array of ‘ludic artifacts’ ranging from ancient cave etchings to oral traditions that are still in vogue. Through the lens of postcolonial DH and the praxis of jugaad, this DH project examines the challenges of archiving “ephemeral” culture in a resource-constrained environment. It remains cognisant of the fragmentariness of data and the difficulty of creating a cohesive history of play while, nevertheless, offering a scalable model for preserving intangible heritage across the Global South.