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Category: Household Items

Pachisi, Sepoys, Cowries: My Grandparents’ Tabletop Story

Throughout history, pachisi was the ‘poor man’s chaupar’. But to my grandmother, whose childhood pachisi grids were scribbled in chalk, my grandfather’s novelty board — like rubies, emeralds, sapphires, and pearls sewn together — seemed no less regal. “She embroidered each bead herself,” she tells me, looking back at the outbursts, meltdowns, and amusement this game brought to my grandparents’ living room 60 years ago. “I guess she’d be your great-great-grandmother”.

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Palli Palagai: a telling object of South India’s maritime stories

Palagai or Palavai, like it is called colloquially, is a wooden plank which was used as a reading and writing material for Arabic language in the provincial town of Kayalpatnam, Tamil Nadu. It was used actively until the turn of the 21st century by the Palli-going kids in the town. Palli translates to ‘school’ and ‘mosques’ in Tamil. But in Kayalpatnam it has also got another meaning.  A Palli is a private residence or a public place where reading classes in Arabic are given to young kids as small as three year olds.

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A life in Burma

One of the few remnants of my family’s connection with erstwhile Burma (now Myanmar), is a lacquerware box, an inheritance from my maternal grandmother. When my mother, Manimegalai, got married, the box was a part of her dowry and is well over 80 years old.

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The Foreman Sahib’s Whisky Glasses

My grandmother recalled how my grandfather had actually bought these glasses in the mid 1970s from a shop in Pragati Maidan, Delhi. At the time, there were two sets of six glasses each – of one set, now four remain and of the second set, there is only one left. Classically meant for brandy, my grandfather and great-grandfather used to drink whisky in them.

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Strings of Silence: Shushila Devi’s Pair of Beaded Dogs

These beaded dogs were made in my grandmother’s natal home in Chabua, a small town in upper Assam, sometime in the late 1960s, most certainly before 1968, the year my grandmother, Shushila Devi Lohia, got married.

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About

The Museum of Material Memory is a digital repository of material culture of the Indian subcontinent, tracing family history and social ethnography through heirlooms, collectibles and objects of antiquity.

Through storytelling, each post on the Archive reveals not just a history of objects and the people they belong to, but also unfolds generational narratives about the tradition, culture, customs, conventions, habits, language, society, geography and history of the vast and diverse subcontinent.


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