In the Indian ethos, play was never confined to a game board or a playground. It slipped easily into ritual and worship, storytelling and festivals, performance and the home.
Navaratri, and particularly the South Indian tradition of Golu, makes this interplay between play and ritual wonderfully visible. Every Navaratri, the steps go up and the dolls come out of their boxes. Gods and goddesses take their places, and around them, an entire world appears. Musicians and shopkeepers, farmers and animals, weddings and scenes from everyday life, all find a place. Below the steps may be a little landscape: a pond, a hill, plants and seeds, houses, and streets, in miniature.
Although a doll can certainly be a child’s plaything, Navaratri reminds us that it can also tell a story. It can represent a deity or not, and that it can still become a part of a festival display. These are cultural spaces through which the playful impulse can travel, taking on different meanings as it is practised. Worship, storytelling, and play, therefore, occupy the same physical space.
Navaratri is not unique. During Varalakshmi Puja, for instance, the face of the goddess is placed over the ritual pot and elaborately dressed and adorned. In traditions surrounding Krishna, the child god appears in cradles and domestic scenes, dressed and decorated with loving attention. Elsewhere, stories of gods and heroes become performances, enacted by people or brought alive through puppets.
The point is not that these rituals are games. Nor should their devotional and religious significance be reduced to play.
The same impulses we recognise in play are allowed to travel into other parts of life: dressing and decorating, arranging and rearranging, creating characters, constructing miniature landscapes, giving objects personalities, telling stories, and transforming an ordinary physical space into an imagined one. And adults enter this imaginative world just as readily as children, resulting in generations participating in creating and inhabiting these worlds together.
We have become accustomed to putting play into a separate compartment. There is work. There is worship. There is art. There is performance. There is ritual. And then, somewhere quite separately, there is play. Was it always so? If we look for the history of Indian play only in boards, dice, counters, and rules, we may be missing a significant part of the story.
Play wasn’t necessarily restricted to childhood. It permeated life. Nowhere is that easier to see than when Navaratri comes around and boundaries become less important.
Perhaps that is the larger story of play in India. We do not always need a game or a winner, for play has simply found its way into life.
