Timeline of snakes and ladders: A Colonial Displacement
Very few now know about Gyan Chaupar or Moskha Pat, once extremely popular in Indian culture with variants in multiple religions, Hindu, Jain, Buddhist and even Sufi. What is now known is a watered down version of the same game - Snakes and Ladders. The moral instruction has now left the gameboard and instead of encountering philosophy in play, players now see it as a children's race game. The game was taken from the colony to the metropole and the karmic instructions were replaced by the Protestant work ethic and then eventually denuded altogther in the present version of Snakes and Ladders.