L21: Folk Games of Goa (1)

Good morning, everyone! Welcome to Unit III. We have a new unit, a new energy, and — I promise — some surprises. Let me just briefly orient you: we have completed Unit I on historical and architectural heritage, and Unit II on flora, fauna, performing arts, and culinary heritage. Unit III is titled Folk Games, Trades, and Occupations. We are going to spend ten lectures looking at the everyday economic and recreational life of traditional Goa — and we are going to discover that these everyday practices are as culturally significant as any temple or Tiatr performance. Today is Lecture 21: Folk Games of Goa — Part One. [INTRODUCTION — 0 to 10 minutes] I want to start with something that you might initially consider trivial: games. Children's games. Games played in village fields and courtyards and beaches. Games that your parents or grandparents played. Why are games heritage? Think about this. A game encodes knowledge. It teaches spatial awareness, strategic thinking, physical coordination, social negotiation. A game creates community — it requires other players, it creates relationships, it generates shared memory. A game transmits values — some games teach cooperation, others teach competition, some teach observation of nature, some teach endurance. Games also have a geography — some games are played at the beach, some in rice fields after harvest, some in narrow village lanes. The game fits its environment. And when the environment changes — when the open field becomes a building, when the children move to a city, when the mobile phone replaces physical play — the game disappears, and with it everything it carried. Goa has a remarkable corpus of traditional folk games. Many of them are unknown outside Goa, and some are unknown to young Goans in cities. They come in multiple categories: outdoor physical games, board and strategy games, water games, animal games, and seasonal games tied to festivals. Let me introduce you to several today. [CORE CONTENT — 10 to 40 minutes] Let us begin with the most widely known category: outdoor physical games. Gilli-Danda — also called Chinni Dandu in Konkani — is played across India but has its own Goan variant. The game uses two sticks: a long danda and a short gilli. The gilli is placed in a notch carved in the ground. The player strikes the gilli with the danda to send it flying, then hits it again in mid-air, trying to send it as far as possible. The opposing team must catch the gilli before it lands. This game develops hand-eye coordination, bat-and-ball skills, and spatial judgment. It was the precursor to cricket in many village settings — children who learned to hit a Gilli-Danda with precision had a head start on cricket batting. Gilli-Danda is played outdoors, needs no manufactured equipment — two sticks found by a child are enough — and can be played by groups of varying size. Its decline correlates exactly with the rise of manufactured plastic toys and electronic games. Vito Phekne — stone throwing at a target — is a game of accuracy. A flat stone or a cylindrical stone called a Vito is set up at a distance, often with prizes — stones, coins, or fruit — balanced on top of it. Players take turns throwing stones to knock down the target. This game appears across South Asian cultures but in Goa it has specific festival associations. It is played at certain village fairs and at Shigmo gatherings. The skill involved is considerable — it requires consistent arm strength, distance judgment, and release technique. It is also a game that boys and men played in the evening after agricultural work — a simple physical release after a hard day. Lagori — also called Saat Takolyanche Khell in Goa — is a team game in which a stack of flat stones is set up in the centre, and one team tries to rebuild the stack after the opposing team has knocked it down with a ball, while the opposing team throws the ball to eliminate rebuilders. This game requires physical agility, teamwork, communication, and strategy. It is one of the most complex folk games in the Goan inventory, and it has experienced a small revival through school-level folk games competitions. Khamba Kapdne — or Blind Man's Buff in the European equivalent — is a game where one blindfolded player tries to catch and identify others by touch. In its Goan version, there are specific chants and taunting songs that the other players sing. These songs are in Konkani and they are themselves oral heritage — small, amusing poems that children learned from older children, never from any book. The songs mock the blindfolded player gently, giving the game a dramatic and comic quality. Water games are particularly important in a Goan context. Goa's rivers — the Mandovi, the Zuari, the Sal, the Terekhol — were swimming and bathing spaces for village communities. Traditional swimming games included competitive river crossing, diving for objects thrown into the water, and various catching games in shallow river water. The knowledge of river behaviour — where the current is strong, where there are underwater hazards, how to read the tide — was transmitted through these water games. Boys who grew up swimming in the Mandovi as children developed an intimate knowledge of the river that the adults who fished it had. This embodied river knowledge is now largely lost in urban settings. Fishing games — small children's versions of fishing using bamboo rods and bent pins — were played along river banks and in the shallow waters of estuaries. These were not just games; they were apprenticeships. A child who spent a Sunday afternoon fishing with a homemade rod in a mangrove creek was learning to read the water, to identify fish by their movement, to be patient, to handle disappointment. These skills translated directly into adult occupational competence. Let me now discuss board games and strategy games. Goa has a tradition of board games played in the evening — particularly during the monsoon season when outdoor activity is limited. Pallankuzhi — also called Solitaire or Mankala in different versions — is a board game played on a wooden plank with cups, using seeds or small stones as counters. This game is found across South India and has a version in Goa known in some communities. It is a game of pure strategy and counting — the player who best tracks the distribution of seeds across the cups wins. It was traditionally a game for women and girls — played during the long monsoon evenings. The wooden board itself was often a beautifully carved household object. Bhatukali — the doll game, a Goan children's domestic play tradition — is worth mentioning here because it is a game that teaches social and domestic knowledge. Girls set up miniature kitchens using small clay pots, leaf plates, and pebbles for food, and act out the rituals of meal preparation, hosting, and social occasion. This looks like simple play, but it is an elaborate transmission of domestic and social knowledge — the correct way to set a banana leaf, the sequence of serving at a festival meal, the social protocols of greeting a guest. Bhatukali is not just a game; it is a curriculum. Festival games deserve their own attention. The Shigmo festival generates a range of competitive games — Kabaddi-type games, tug-of-war — called Naad — and various strength and agility competitions. The Divali festival in Goa traditionally included the making and explosion of Phanas — clay lamps and firework devices — and the competitive elaborateness of a family's Phanas display was a source of community pride and rivalry. Kite flying — Patang Udavne — is associated with the transition season between monsoon and winter in Goa. The sky over Goan villages on a November or December morning can be full of kites — hand-made from bamboo and paper, with cutting strings coated in glass paste. The competitive element of kite-cutting — trying to cut the opponent's string with your own — requires extraordinary skill and local knowledge of wind patterns. Goan villages had master kite makers — men who could craft kites of specific flight characteristics for specific wind conditions. Before I move to the activity, let me briefly mention animal-related folk games and sports, which occupy a morally complex category. Cock fighting — Kombdyanche Zauj — was historically practised in Goa, associated with certain Hindu temple festivals and also with Catholic village fairs. Ram fighting in certain Konkani communities, and bullock cart races in the agricultural areas, were traditional competitions. Many of these practices now face legal restrictions and animal welfare objections, and they have declined significantly. But they were, for centuries, part of the competitive and festive life of Goa's agricultural communities. [ACTIVITY AND DISCUSSION — 40 to 55 minutes] For today's activity, I want to do a generational survey. Take out your notebooks. I am going to give you three minutes to list every traditional Goan game you know — games you played yourself, games you heard your parents or grandparents mention. Do not think about whether they are Goan specifically — just write anything traditional. [pause] Now I want to go around the room quickly. Call out one game each — and let us see how many unique games we can list on the board. Each person says one, anyone who has the same one raises their hand. [Board listing exercise — 8 minutes] Look at this list. We have identified — how many? Twenty-three games. Now let me ask: how many of you played these regularly as children? How many of you still play any of them? How many do you think your younger siblings or cousins play? That gradient — the generational decline — is the heritage crisis in concrete, measurable form. Discussion Question 1: Folk games transmit knowledge, values, and ecological awareness in ways that formal schooling does not. If folk games disappear, what is lost? Can school physical education programmes preserve them — or does the school context change the game fundamentally? Discussion Question 2: Some folk games involve elements that contemporary society considers problematic — cock fighting, for example. How should we handle traditional practices that are both cultural heritage and ethically contested? Who has the right to make that judgment? [SUMMARY AND ASSIGNMENT — 55 to 60 minutes] Today we began our survey of Goa's folk games. We covered outdoor physical games — Gilli-Danda, Lagori, Khamba Kapdne. We looked at water games and their role in transmitting ecological knowledge. We explored board games and domestic play. We noted festival games and kite flying, and we touched on the morally complex category of animal sport traditions. Assignment: Research one traditional Goan game that you or your family remembers. Find out: the Konkani name, the rules, the equipment needed, the age group it was played by, the occasion, and whether anyone in your community still plays it. Write a 400-word documentation of this game. This is living heritage documentation. Next lecture — Lecture 22 — Folk Games Part Two. We will go deeper into specific game traditions, look at the competitive folk games events that still survive, and discuss the folk games revival movement in Goan schools and cultural organisations. See you Thursday!