Discovering Dadu: A Ludemic Enigma from South Asia

Dadu is a traditional board game exclusively played within the Muslim Dawoodi Bohra community in South Asia. Most households have their own hand-stitched cloth board, together with a set of wood-turned playing pieces and cowrie shells for dice. Though formally a two-player game, it is commonly played in large teams during family gatherings. Non-community members rarely take part and the game remains virtually unknown to outsiders. Descriptions of the game are absent from the scholarly literature and it does not find mention in any of the major game encyclopedias. Surviving boards and communal memory trace the game back to the early 20th century, but the hybrid nature of the game and the origin of the Dawoodi Bohra community in Yemen suggest that it may go back several centuries further. The present article uses ludemic theory to analyze the constituent elements of the game and demonstrate their affinity with elements in other games both inside and outside South Asia. The findings are contextualized within the wider history of the Dawoodi Bohra community, suggesting that Dadu may have resulted from the adaptation of a West Asian Tab game to a South Asian single track race game. A detailed set of rules gathered from interviews with members of the Dawoodi Bohra community is appended to the article.