Indian games to be researched in SA

Traditional Indian games like kabaddi and kho-kho, which are hardly known here, will come under the spotlight as a research project being undertaken an Indian South African school principal.

"These games were thriving when the first settlers from India came to work here on sugar cane plantations as indentured labourers, but they are virtually unknown to the latest generation of Indian South Africans," said principal Danny Pillay, who has appealed to India for help in the project.

"Local Indian historians have provided valuable information, but we need to get help from people in India with this research project, which has been commissioned by the sports ministry and the department of sports science at the University of Durban-Westville," said Pillay.

"We have lost out about 50 years of research, because when I go to the younger generation here and ask if they have heard of games like kho-kho and kabaddi, they don't know what I'm talking about.

"This is because we did not record our history and the rules to the games. The children have only seen games like kabaddi in Indian movies they see here," Pillay said.

Two teams of about 10 players each play kabaddi. The teams play in a small, enclosed area and a line is drawn between rival sides. A team member crosses the line chanting "kabaddi kabaddi" and has to tag the members of the opposing team without losing his breath.

Kho-kho consists of a 6-10 member team. One team sits in a row with alternate members facing the same direction, and a member of the other team comes in who has to be tagged. The chaser keeps interchanging places with his/her seated team-mates in an effort to catch the rival team member.

Pillay said he had written to educational institutions in India where physical education is taught, but had not received any replies yet.

"They are the ones that I am sure will have records of these games and their rules, as they still actively played in India. The research's aim is to teach it again to children in some schools as part of a national project to revive indigenous games in South Africa."

The closest that Pillay has come to the survival of the games in South Africa is at Tongaat on the country's north coast, where a group of elderly people still play some of them, albeit irregularly.

"An old gentleman from Tongaat called me to say that there is a game called dayam that they play, which is an Indian version of what the West calls ludo. There are also a number of other games with Indian influences. The challenge for me now is to convert this information to definite rules for the game."

In an attempt to preserve the oral traditions of the games, all contributors are to be videotaped and the tapes stored in special archives.

"We will go to old age homes across South Africa to conduct interviews and record them on video. Interpreters will be used for those old folk who speak only Urdu, Tamil, Gujarati or Telugu, since I understand just Hindi."

Pillay's study is supported through some funding from the Sports Commission of South Africa, which wants to use traditional Indian games as part of an annual competition for children across all cultures. But the money is only enough for local travel, so a visit to India is presently out of the question.

--Indo-Asian News Service