Long before backlit screens took over playtime, games used to be a quick shot of happiness. Whether played indoors or outside, ‘fun’ used to be the main aim of the proceedings. With the alarms sounding over social isolation and health problems in an increasingly sedentary younger generation in India, traditional games have started coming back in fits and starts through novelty display events.
“Children don’t have exposure to group activity outside the classroom anymore,” says Allirani Balaji, chairperson, District Interact Committee, Rotary International District 3000. “Traditional games played in Tamil Nadu encouraged participation irrespective of age. We want to remind people that these are eco-friendly and easy ways of playing that develop sensory, mathematical and social skills.”
The Rotary International District 3000 has been organising sessions featuring traditional games of Tamil Nadu since 2016, for schoolchildren in Tiruchi and Pudukottai. As these events show, nearly 40 games that were once the building blocks of childhood and a reflection of the State’s agrarian and folkloric heritage, have vanished completely.
Making toys
Ironically, nostalgic grown-ups seem to be the best source of information about games that have disappeared over the years in the State. “Village children were the last to be exposed to toy stores in Tamil Nadu. So they were usually experts at fashioning their own playthings from seeds, pottery sherds, sticks and even pebbles,” says K Sathish Kumar, assistant professor, Department of Tamil, Kalai Kaviri College of Fine Arts in Tiruchi.
Most common among these were the pambaram (spinning top) that would be hewed out of the wood of the manjanathi tree and affixed with a long nail, and the panthu (ball) made of old rolled cloth. The hard kumutti kaai would usually stand in for the rubber ball in most villages.
Recalling his own childhood in Kokkampatti village, Suresh Kumar says, “Tamarind seeds ( puliya muthu ) were like gold to us, because we’d win them as prizes in a variety of games and barter them for salt or sweetmeats at the grocer’s shop. The seeds would be boiled and used as a tangy snack by villagers as they walked from one place to another. Those who couldn’t afford small cowrie shells for their pallankuzhi (a ‘count-and-capture’ game with North African roots) would substitute them with tamarind seeds.”
Ready to play
The rough and ready style of traditional games differs markedly from that of the over-hyped technology toys and gadgets of today. “From the 1970s up to 1995, children had access to playing without store-bought equipment,” says Sathish Kumar. “Wet mud, particularly after a day’s rain, was the basic requirement for many games. Now, with the boom in construction, there are no playgrounds left for the children. And mud has become ‘dirty’. We used coconut shells to make idlis with wet mud, and also create pots and pans with clayey soil. You won’t be allowed to play like this due to hygiene concerns these days,” he says.
Games involve a certain amount of role-play to promote creativity and imagination.
The kootanchoru was a rite of passage for most Tamil children, where a group of kids would contribute ingredients for a one-pot meal that they would cook on a small fire built with sulli (twigs). “The resulting dish may have been barely edible, but the experience of doing something together was precious,” says Sathish Kumar. “Traditional games seem to emphasise on group rather than individual happiness.”
Heritage
The slow erasure of traditional games cannot negate their long history, and their commonalities with other cultures of the world. Nearly every society, for instance, has a version of hopscotch ( nondi in Tamil), marbles ( goli-gundu ), leap-frog ( patcha kudhirai ) and hide-and-seek ( kannamoochi ).
“Games like Kabaddi are thought to have south Indian origins,” says Sathish Kumar. “It was a means of dramatising (and preventing) cattle theft between villages in Tamil Nadu,” he says. “Groups of villagers would patrol the borders in the night, loudly chanting sadu-gudu as an alarm. Anyone who was found stealing cattle would be surrounded immediately by the group and held within the boundary of the village. The game tacitly promotes solidarity among neighbourhoods.”
Long before cricket became the world’s leading sport, children in Tamil Nadu were playing kitti-pul , also known as gilli-danda . Designed for teams of four or more players, it involves the striking of a small wooden piece with a longer stick from a starting circle. One team ‘bats’, while the other ‘fields’.
“ Kitti-pul was not about winning prizes,” says T Nedunchezhian, associate professor in the Department of Tamil, St Joseph’s College, Tiruchi. “It was about improving hand-eye coordination, and getting a lot of time to run around in the playground with friends.”
Growing up in the 1960s, he still remembers the nonsense rhymes that would accompany some of the games. “I prefer to think of them as an early form of Tamil rap music,” he says.
As more parents opt to send their children to summer camps offering courses in robotics, chess, skating or tennis, the days of frolicking in the village pond or river have gone away, as have the water bodies themselves. Swimming these days is done in the sterile confines of hotel or stadium pools.
“Water sports were a big part of our childhood, and many of the older adolescent boys would show off their lung power by staying underwater for long periods,” says Nedunchezhian. “Boys and girls alike were expert in swimming.”
Traditional games had a tactile quality of engagement that is missing in today’s electronic playthings, says Suresh Kumar. “There are Tamil games for every age, from infancy to maturity and old age. In infancy, we have the game called paruppu kadayarathu (mashing the pulses), where the child seated on the lap of its mother or grandmother, learns not just about the different dishes and ingredients that make up a meal, but also the lesson to share it with other members of the family. At the end, the child is tickled, and thus a bond of physical contact is born,” he says.
As social organisations strive to bring back the joys of a more innocent age, traditional games live on, in the minds of those who once played them.
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Big fans of the fan
After the Tamil month of Chithirai, the ice apple season would lead to the most important game for kids in the State -- making pinwheel fans out of palm leaves. Nearly every home and vehicle in the villages would have a few of these cheery fans on display.
