Not Just Cricket: Street Games of Bangalore

I have this habit of going off on long circuitous walks on the streets of Bangalore. For someone who still has not seen the insides of a gym, and does not have the healthiest of eating habits, this is probably the only reason I have not yet metamorphosed into Jabba the Hutt.

A decade or so ago, a common sight on Bangalore’s streets and by-lanes in the residential areas used to be kids playing. Cricket, mostly, but there were other games too: Lagori, Buguri, Baccha, Dabba, Lock and Key, Goli, Churchand, etc. These days one hardly sees any kids out on the streets, and even if they are out there playing, it is usually cricket (wearing appropriate IPL jerseys) or if the season is right, football (going by the T-shirts I see, most Bangalorean kids seem to have adopted Manchester United as their home team).

At this point, there are only two directions this post can take – one, I crib and whine about how kids just do not come out and play anymore (digression: guess what the motto of the ill-fated Commonwealth Games at Delhi this year is. Yes, “Come out and play!”) Or two, I don my “peddler of nostalgia” hat and talk about the street games of my childhood. And that is what I shall try to do now.

Lagori

Seven flat stones of varying sizes piled on top of each other, largest at the bottom and the smallest on top, resembling roughly a Chola-style temple gopura (steeple), placed inside a circle (the temple courtyard, perhaps?) occupies the center of the playing area. Center is a loosely used term here, because there really is no boundary or shape defined for the playing area and is dictated by the length and width of the street the game is being played on. As in almost all games, laws of the neighborhood ensure that sometimes a ‘Boundary Out’ rule gets included. So does that mean that in general Lagori has an infinite playing area? No. Just like how places of worship ensure the religious never stray too far, the gopura-shaped structure at the center has a similar grip on the players.

The players are divided into two teams. At any point in time, one team is the ‘throwing’ side and the other is ‘fielding’. Each member from the ‘throwing’ team takes turns (3 at a time) to attempt to knock down the gopura with a rubber ball from a predetermined distance. If he misses the pile and is caught on the first bounce by the ‘fielding’ team, the player loses his turn. (If he grazes the pile without knocking it down and is caught on the full, the entire team loses its turn!) If he succeeds, the goal of the ‘throwing’ team becomes rebuilding the gopura, redrawing the circle around it and screaming ‘Lagori!’ to indicate success (and the team gets one point). Building any structure is never an easy job in India, and the Lagori pile is no different. The aim of the ‘fielding’ team which now has control of the ball is to hit any player of the ‘throwing’ team with it. They do not have it easy either as the rules stipulate one cannot aim while running, hence a series of deft passes need to be executed in order to get a good aim on someone from the opposing team. And if that happens, the ‘fielding’ team becomes the ‘throwing’ team, and thus gets a chance to score some points.

Lagori has a fairly complicated set of rules (the previous paragraph just touches upon the basic structure of the game) and needs quite a few sporting skills – accurate throwing, ability to evade projectiles hurled at you, make short sprints to the gopura, etc. This is unlike most other street games which have a much simpler rule set. It also makes it one of these rare street games which are played not just by small kids, but by boys well into their college-going years.

A related game is Churchand. This translates to ‘broken ball’. The name probably came about because it was played with a ball that had cracked open making it unfit for other games like Lagori or Gully Cricket. It pares the game of Lagori down to its feral minimum. The objective of the game is simple – to hit a player of the opposing team as hard as you can with the (broken) ball. Most of the time, nobody really bothers keeping score. One can always count the marks left on the body later, I guess. The sheer violence that a game of Churchand sometimes devolves into makes me wonder that there might be more to the name of the game than the etymology I have already indicated. Ouch.

Ice-pice / Dabba

The most common variant of hide-and-seek played out in Bangalore neighborhoods used to go by the name Ice-pice. The name is a corruption of ‘I spy’ but has nothing in common with the guessing game of that name. If you hear little kids screaming words like ‘Kooka?’ or ‘Oofi!’, you can be dead sure that a game of Ice-pice is afoot. My favourite though is a chant by those already ‘out’ trying to drive the seeker away from his home base – “Ajji mane kaayongilla, bajji maadkond tinnongilla” Translation? “Don’t wait on your grandma’s house, don’t make and eat Bajjis”. Does not make any sense? That is exactly why it is so charming.

If Ice-pice is the ODI equivalent in hide-and-seek, Dabba is like a test match. Long, freewheeling, sometimes boring, but an unexpected thump on the back which can suddenly bring excitement back into the game. The key difference in Dabba is that there is no home base to the seeker, and to those hiding, no boundaries. This makes it an awesome game to be played in any urban landscape. The best game of Dabba I have played though was at Bugle Rock in Basavanagudi. This was of course back in an era where 80% of the park was not fenced off like it is today.

Baccha

This game was in all likelihood inspired by the old British pastime of bowls. Instead of the large oval bowls, flat stones are used. And instead of a single small jack, each player puts an empty cigarette pack folded in a particular fashion inside a central circle. The objective of the game is to knock these cigarette packs out of the circle and beyond a certain line with your stone. You get to keep the packs you chase out which can be used as currency in future games. The collection of cigarette packs I had racked up as a kid would surely have scandalized my mom, and all credit to her to let me keep it and play this game. One of the most common reasons why kids would stop playing this game was because their mothers were consistently getting rid of all the cigarette packs won, and the kid would have got bored of scouring roads for discarded packs.

Another game that has similar rules is ‘goli’, the well-known Indian game of marbles. It is a slightly tougher game to master as it also uses walls to bounce the marbles off unlike Baccha which is played on a single plane. But this game is great exercise for the fingers, and few activities will make one’s digits as dexterous as a game of marbles can. Ramachandra Guha, in his book Spin and Other Turns, used the popularity of this game in Indian streets to explain the predominance of spinners in Indian cricket. May be the decline of quality of Indian spinners today is directly correlated to this once popular game vanishing from Indian streets.

Right, that is enough nostalgia for now. If you feel outraged that your favourite street game has been slighted by not getting written about, let me know. We will settle it over a street game of your choice.

Source: http://technova-solutions.blogspot.com/2010/08/not-just-cricket-street-games-of.html