Veteran mahjong players and teachers share their views on Bombay’s current craze for the game

Mulla, Golvala, Delna Sanghvi and Persis Billimoria at the board last week. Pics/Delna Sanghvi & Ashish Raje

Five brief words triggered this column. “Before it was a ‘thing’,” wrote my friend Delna Sanghvi, under a charming mid-1980s display picture on her phone. It showed her mother around a mahjong table with friends. What is exceptional is the fact that they still sit intently at the game they gathered around 45 years ago.  

They are among the city’s mahjong players from the 1970s. Taking genuine delight in the game before it became the fad wrapped in frenzy that it is presently. Ahead of meeting three such groups bonding “over chai and magic tiles”, as one of them puts it, I explore the trajectory of the game. 

One source is the book, Mumbai Style Mahjongg, by Sushila Singh, who originally taught and popularised it in the city. A page here is tellingly titled “Mahjong should be played respectfully, with courtesy and etiquette”. While many feel the game is 75 per cent luck and 25 per cent skill, Singh says, “Even with poor basic tiles, you can play with rigorous control, preventing others from winning.” 

The Chinese inventor of the game, Chen Yumen (sometimes called Zheng Yao and Yanglou) from Ningbo, was a third-ranked administrative official who played paper cards for entertainment. He restructured these in 1864 — the arrival of mahjong. 

Mao banned the game as a bourgeois pastime like gambling, symbolising capitalist corruption. Players, especially the 20th-century Chinese elite, conducted clandestine games. That was when the Japanese took up mahjong seriously. The ban in China lifted at the end of the Cultural Revolution and mahjong experienced a resurgence from the 1970s.

Mid-1980s photo of Mehroo Golvala, Persis Billimoria, Nergish Mulla, Purviz Billimoria, and Amina Merchant playing 

While Joseph Park Babcock is largely credited for introducing the game to the United States in the 1920s, Chinese Americans were already playing it in the 1800s. Babcock trademarked the spelling Mah-jongg, incorporating a hyphen and extra “g” in it. 

How did a street game from the pavements of Peking, Shanghai, and Chengdu reach Bombay, Pune, Delhi, and Chennai? Mahjong’s Indian antecedents are colonial; the British Army brought it to cantonment towns. In Pune, Rekha Krishan is a prominent old hand at the game, teaching this version.  

A veteran teacher in Mumbai, Nita Kapadia........

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