Social history is a field that looks at the lived experiences of the past and examines the social, cultural, and economic aspects of the people. One of the challenges is to document the stories of ordinary people who may not have left behind written records or official documents. By relying on oral histories, folklore, material culture, and other sources, one can reconstruct the everyday life and culture of the past and understand the social customs of the times.
While preserving this social history has many advantages — one of the foremost for the purpose of this article and this series — is to preserve and celebrate the childhood and cultural traditions of play in the city of Madras and to foster a sense of identity and belonging.
After over twenty years spent on the study of traditional games, I am more convinced that to truly appreciate them, we need to understand how people used to think, the creative impulses during play, their ability to adapt to space, interactions with their friends, family and so much more.
Sadly, much of history does not document these social interactions. Whatever little we know of social and cultural history and more particularly about our traditional games, is broad strokes. It does not delve deeper into people’s thinking, people’s psyche and people’s very childhood memories.
“My remembrance is that sixty-seventy years ago, much of the recreation and fun was within large undivided families. Games that were popular were the Dayakattam. The kattam (grid) was drawn on the ground. Competition was fierce and noisy. Participation cut across generations and sometimes neighbours would join in.
Others would be active spectators, encouraging oneside or the other. Over weekends, this would be a long session extending to a good 4-5 hours.” These words from an elderly lady, well into her eighties, conjure up images of large family gatherings on lazy unstructured weekends — grey haired grandparents, authoritative uncles, bustling aunts, and a brood of children. Surely the game would be accompanied by copious amounts of hot coffee carefully poured into gleaming steel tumblers with just the right amount of froth, the steam rising lazily and the aroma wafting all around.
Perhaps there would be a mound of bhajis gleaming golden brown and crisp with translucent onions or melting soft potato slices. With the raised voices, the laughter, the mock fights that are all part of such a game would be the ringing sound of the brass long dice rolling on the floor. It was not just the game but the entire spirit of tradition, of families and people coming together in a shared experience that create memories like this that will last a lifetime.
Sadly, days like that are slowly but surely disappearing from our life. With the breakdown of the joint family, the advent of television, rising media penetration shrinking social spaces, our ideas of leisure and pastime have changed. Increasing workloads and more families with two working parents has resulted over the years in adults finding little or no time to play.
In the case of children, the pressure to succeed, to do better than their peers, to be ahead of the curve has resulted in unstructured play becoming an increasingly rare occurrence. To quote a teacher, “There are no backyards anymore, or large verandas.... and the children go from the confinement of the classroom to the confinement of the tuition room or are bundled off to practice another competitive sport.”
With time for games slowly disappearing, traditional games, with their oral tradition of rules and the temporary boards drawn on floors with chalk or soapstone, are also gradually vanishing from our everyday lives. But play is an impulse native to man. Dr Raghavan, in his book, Festivals, Sports and Pastimes of India, says play is not a luxury nor is it something frivolous. It is the very core of our being.
He says the idea of play is ‘one of the bases of civilisation’. He adds, “The spirit of playful competition is, as a social impulse, older than culture itself and pervades all life like a veritable ferment.” And it is with an effort to understand this very basic human impulse of play, that I have been drawn into the world of traditional games. Our Indian traditional games are rooted at a time when life was perhaps simpler in some ways than it is today, where space was never a constraint, time was never a constraint, and structured childhood as we know it today, was non-existent.
These games were simple in essence, easy to play and cut across boundaries of age, background, education, and more. To truly understand our games, we need to delve into the social histories of people but sadly, we no longer have access to the memories of those who have been there before us. What we can do and must do is to document the memories of those who are there with us, of the games they played, of how they played, where they played and what impact those memories had on their lives.
The author is the founder of Kreeda — the organisation that revives traditional games and can be contacted on vinita@kreedagames.com
A collective experience
Through this article and through an entire series called ‘Memories and Madras’, I have tried to delve into the hearts and minds of people, both known faces around the city and senior citizens. The fascinating glimpses into their childhood, the stories they share, their memories of mischief and fun, of doting grandmothers and hours spent playing on the streets or climbing trees have made it a truly wonderful experience.
The memories of play on the Marina Beach, of picnics at Elliot’s Beach, of carrying home truckloads of sand, of visiting neighbours by jumping over the wall, all these give us a glimpse not only into the history of Madras, but also into the childhood of well-known personalities but most importantly the role games played in their lives. It is a walk down memory lane and many of you would probably relate to it. If you have similar memories, do write to me at vinita@kreedagames.com, share them with us, for we would like to document your memories of what you played, where you played and how you played.
Join me on this journey, as I celebrate this city of Madras, through a series of articles in the CE and a video online every day for the month of August, about how people played. After all – Its all in the Game! (Article has excerpts from the book ‘Just Play – Life Lessons from Traditional Games’ also written by the author)
Story by Vinita Sidhartha