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Golu — The Festival Of Dolls Inside A Beautiful Home

I was lucky to be invited

Anu Anniah
Namaste Now
Published in
6 min readOct 11, 2024

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Display of dolls for dasara on 9 steps.
Dolls display at a friend’s home. Photo by Anu Anniah

Dasara, Navarathri, Golu — all these names represent the 9-day Hindu festival that gives us so many ways to celebrate. For some, it is all about the food, a huge variety of food cooked each day of the festival season. For others, it is about dressing up and visiting family and friends. For many, it is about dance, the incredible dandiya with its power moves and energetic beats. For people seeking experiences, Dasara is about travel to Mysore, the land of the magnificent Dasara procession with its majestic decked-up elephants.

For people in Karnataka and Tamil Nadu though, Dasara is about dolls — dolls made of clay, paper mache, bronze, wood, knitted dolls, and dolls in different shapes, sizes, colors, and textures. All these dolls make their way into the festival display.

Every year, I receive a few invites into homes where they have painstakingly set up their collection of dolls on display. It is a treat to see the effort people put into unpacking the dolls from wherever they are stored and arranging them on 3 or 7 or 9 steps/tiers depending on how many dolls they have.

This year, I had the good luck to be invited into a home where the owners had pulled out all the stops to…

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Namaste Now
Namaste Now

Published in Namaste Now

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Anu Anniah
Anu Anniah

Written by Anu Anniah

Writer. Published author. Technical writer. Poet. Sit-down comedian. Collector of friends. Greedy for laughter.

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