Cockfights were a popular sport in India and other parts of the world in the late eighteenth-century. In 1786, the then Governor-General of India Warren Hastings commissioned German-born artist Johann Zoffany to paint the historic cockfight that had many British East India Company employees and Indian royalties in attendance. Several versions of the painting have thus been made and depicted in various mediums over the course of more than two centuries, including Satyajit Ray's Shatranj Ke Khilari.