Assam: Karbi youth festival fuels interest in community's traditional games

Karbi Anglong (Assam) [India], January 16 : The golden jubilee celebration of the ongoing Karbi Youth Festival (KYF) has fueled an interest in the dying traditional games of the Karbi community.
In a first for any ethnicity-based festival in India's Northeast, President Droupadi Murmu will attend the festival on January 17. The eight-day festival at Taralangso, a 672-acre cultural complex on the outskirts of Diphu, began on January 12.
Diphu, the headquarters of central Assam's Karbi Anglong district, is about 250 km east of Guwahati.
The Karbis have dozens of traditional games such as Theng Angtong Pen Kekat (racing while carrying a bamboo basket), Sekserek (stick game), Keron (calculation game), Sansuri Kachivung (tug-of-war), Kengdongdang (racing on bamboo stilts), and Hon Kejeng (spinning). The spotlight during the 50th KYF has been on the Hambi Kepathu.

"Only a few of these traditional games are remembered and too little is known about them today. They are usually only played at modernised community festivals such as the KYF," said Karbi Cultural Society president Chandra Sing Kro.
The Karbi Cultural Society has been organising the KYF since 1977, although the festival began in 1974 as a by-product of a movement to use the Roman script for the Karbi language.
"We have been trying to promote all the traditional games that are surviving, but we have recognised Hambi Kepathu as our national game because it is linked with the birth of the Karbi community," Kro said.

Hambi Kepathu, also known as Simrit in some parts of Karbi Anglong, is played with the spherical dried dark brown seeds of Entada rheedii, a creeper commonly known as the African dream herb.
The game is played by two teams comprising three members each, each manning as many rectangular courts. Each member of a team has to place the Hambi--the creeper seed--vertically on the midpoint of the boundary line of his court for a player of the rival team to hit with his Hambi.
Flicking the striker's Hambi with the finger, as in a game of marbles, rolling, aiming and throwing, and kicking are some of the ways of striking the erect Hambi of the rival team.
"Involving 25 steps, the game used to be played throughout the day in the past. Shorter versions of the game evolved over the years because of the paucity of time," said the tribal culture research officer of the Karbi Anglong Autonomous Council (KAAC), Dilip Kathar.
The KYF has been largely funded by the KAAC, which governs Karbi Anglong.
Hambi Kepathu is a traditionally male game, although half of its name is derived from the name of Ham Tungjang, a Karbi girl of yore. Ham is believed to have invented the game along with her brother, Bi Tungjang. Some Karbi traditional games are for women only. They include Sekserek and Hon Kejeng.
A few, such as Sansuri Kachivung and Keron, are gender-neutral.