page_title: Ganjifa
section_title: Early history in India
hierarchical_section_title: Ganjifa / History / Early history in India
caption_attribution_description: English: Mughal Ganjifa Playing Cards, Early 19th century, complete set, courtesy of the Wovensouls collection
context_page_description: Ganjifa, Ganjapa or Gânjaphâ, is a card game and type of playing cards that are most associated with Persia and India. After Ganjifa cards fell out of use in Iran before the twentieth century, India became the last country to produce them. The form prevalent in Odisha is Ganjapa.
context_section_description: Rudolf von Leyden suggested that the Ganjifa cards may have been brought by the first Mughals from their ancestral homeland in Inner Asia. A key reference comes from an early 16th-century biography of Bâbur, the founder of the Mughal dynasty. In his work the Baburnama, Babur notes in the year 933H (1527) that he had a pack of Ganjifa cards sent to Shah Hassan. This took place in the month of Ramzan, on the night he left Agra to travel to nearby Fatehpur Sikri (Uttar Pradesh, India). The earliest surviving rules date to around 1600 in India. When Edward Terry visited India in the first quarter of the seventeenth century, he saw ganjifa cards often. Modern ganjifa is usually round but rectangular cards were more common during the 18th-century and from records Persian ganjifeh was always rectangular. Its circular shape must have been an Indian innovation.
  While Mughal ganjifa had the same suits and ranks as Safavid ganjifeh, a 10-suited deck, the Dashavatara Ganjifa, was created to appeal to Hindus in the seventeenth century. Some historical decks have had more than 30 suits.
caption: Mughal Ganjifa Playing Cards, Early 19th century, courtesy of the Wovensouls collection
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