An elderly woman unties a knot in her sari pallu and reveals to us four worn cowrie shells she has carried for decades. They are not mere shells. To her, they are memories, stories, and games. She tells us how she used to play with her grandchild and today, while she is estranged from the family, she still carries the cowries with her to remember him.
People often talk about the games they played but usually they forget to tell us about the pieces. Yet these pieces harbour numerous stories and provide fascinating insights into the history and cultural moorings of the games.
Perhaps the most important aspect is that every landscape created its own game pieces. Traditional games did not emerge from factories but from the immediate surroundings. Take the game of Pallanguzhi. People living near the coast used cowrie shells, while those further inland used tamarind seeds. Closer to Kerala, manjadi or gundumani seeds were used.
Pebbles, beads, seeds, nuts, sticks, and fragments of pottery were all transformed into elements of play. The games travelled, but the game pieces changed with changing landscapes. People plucked game pieces from the trees and picked them up from the ground.
These game pieces became a lens into the lives of people — their food, culture, economy, agriculture and natural surroundings. Thus, each game piece becomes a miniature cultural exhibit and tells us something about local life. Furthermore, these game pieces were varied and unusual, stimulating multiple senses. The smoothness of a cowrie shell, the roughness of a seed, the coolness of stone — all become part of the experience of play. If you close your eyes and think about these games, what emerges are these strong sensory memories.
But perhaps the most ingenious aspect of traditional play is that if you lost a game piece, you could just pick up another. Very few pieces were specially crafted. Thus, the games were resilient because they depended on ideas rather than manufactured objects.
Why are game pieces called coins in India? In many traditional Indian games, the counters were often actual objects of value or exchange — cowrie shells, seeds, beads, stones, and occasionally metal pieces. Cowrie shells in particular were widely used as a form of currency in parts of India for centuries, especially for small transactions. The boundary between play and everyday life was often blurred. Because of this association, game pieces gradually came to be referred to as coins.
Perhaps that is why they survived for centuries. A traditional counter was never meant to be precious. It was a seed picked from the ground, a shell gathered from the shore, a pebble lifted from a pathway. Yet through play, these ordinary objects acquired extraordinary value. They became carriers of memory, culture, and human connection. Perhaps that is the secret life of counters. They remind us that in traditional games, the simplest objects often told the richest stories.