Short answers to the questions people ask most. Each one comes from a book, and the page is given.
Ganjifa is a trick-taking card game played with a pack of 96 cards in eight suits. Each suit has twelve cards: two court cards, a king and a minister, and ten numbered cards. It is usually played by three people, and for over four hundred years it was one of India's classic card games.
Ganjifa: The Playing Cards of India, von Leyden (1981), pp. 15, 26, 40
Read the full storyYes by history, if not by birth: ganjifa came to India from Iran and Central Asia, and India is where it grew up and lasted. In Iran a stricter shah suppressed it in the 1600s and it vanished there. In India it kept going, and most of the growth of the game and its cards happened there.
Ganjifa: The Playing Cards of India, von Leyden (1981), pp. 8, 11
Read the full storyA Mughal ganjifa pack has 96 cards: eight suits of twelve. A Dashavatar pack has ten suits built on the same plan, which makes 120 cards. Some packs were far bigger. In Mysore, the ruler Krishnaraja III Odeyar made card games with packs of up to 360 cards.
Ganjifa: The Playing Cards of India, von Leyden (1981), pp. 15, 21–22
Read the full storyNo reason is recorded in von Leyden's book. He does say that Indian cards had round or rectangular faces, so not every pack was round. A circular card from Mysore of the early 1800s survives, and when French and English cards were copied in India, Indian makers sometimes made them round too.
Ganjifa: The Playing Cards of India, von Leyden (1981), pp. 12, 16–17, 28
Read the full storyThe eight suits are taj (crown), safed (silver coin), shamsher (sword), ghulam (servant), chang (harp), surkh (gold coin), barat (document) and qimash (cloth and goods). The first four are the strong group, called bishbar, and the last four are the weak group, called kambar. The suits have stayed almost the same since a poem named them in 1514–15.
Ganjifa: The Playing Cards of India, von Leyden (1981), pp. 16–20
Read the full storyRulers and their courts played ganjifa first, and later ordinary people played it too. In 1527 the emperor Babur sent ganjifa cards to a ruler in Sind who had asked for them. In 1545 twelve players at a royal party held 20 cards each. Akbar's painted court pack became the model for later Mughal packs.
Ganjifa: The Playing Cards of India, von Leyden (1981), pp. 11, 13, 14
Read the full storyDashavatar ganjifa is a Hindu version of ganjifa with ten suits, one for each of Vishnu's ten incarnations. It has nearly the same structure and rules as the Mughal pack. It was the popular Hindu card game in Bengal, Orissa, Nepal, Rajasthan and several other regions, and sources from Maharashtra point to the Deccan as its home.
Ganjifa: The Playing Cards of India, von Leyden (1981), pp. 14, 21–22
Read the full storyGanjappa, also written ganjipa, is the Odisha form of the word ganjifa. Odisha's eight-suited packs keep the Mughal suit names and signs but put Hindu gods and heroes on the court cards, and some packs grew to twelve, sixteen or twenty suits. Until very recently, Sonepur made a twelve-suited Ramayana ganjappa.
Ganjifa: The Playing Cards of India, von Leyden (1981), pp. 20, 22, 25
Read the full storyOnly in a few places, according to von Leyden's book of 1981. Once cheap printed cards arrived from Europe, the old games died out and the chitrakars, the card painters, lost their market. Brahmins still played Dashavatar in small temple halls at Puri, and Odisha's larger packs were still in use. You can play the Mughal game today in the free Ganjifa app.
Ganjifa: The Playing Cards of India, von Leyden (1981), pp. 15, 21–22
Play the free Ganjifa appYou can play ganjifa in the free Ganjifa app, on the web or on Android from Google Play. It plays the Mughal game. For real painted cards, the book reports that cards with western suit signs but Indian figures were still on sale in shops in Puri when it was written.
Ganjifa: The Playing Cards of India, von Leyden (1981), p. 28
Play the free Ganjifa app