Rajput men playing the game of Puchesee. --Photographer: Impey, Eugene Clutterbuck Medium: Photographic print Date: 1860

A print by Eugene Clutterbuck Impey in the early 1860s showing a group of men from Rajasthan in northern India playing pachisi. This photograph is from the Archaeological Survey of India Collections and was on show at the 1867 Paris Exhibition. Pachisi is a four-handed game played on a cruciform board or (more often) cloth, with six cowries for dice: so named from the highest throw which is twenty-five. A simplified form of this game is known in Europe as ludo. In the 1860s the Government of India issued requests to Residents all over India and Nepal to take photographs of tribes and races. This was part of a larger project for compiling photographs of the people and monuments of India, intiated by the Governor-General, Lord Canning (1856-63). Capt.E.C.Impey of the Bengal Staff Corps was appointed to cover the areas of Delhi, Agra and Rajasthan. The results were published in Impey's 'Delhi, Agra, and Rajpootana', illustrated by eighty photographs (Cundall, Downes, & Co., London, 1865). This photograph is a duplicate of plate 67(a).