15 years ago I had attempted to sew a doll for the first time. It was a baby Krishna doll for Janmashtami, an earnest attempt at rebranding, de-ritualising festivals for my children. Doll-making is an art that requires a very high level of skill, which I didn’t possess, but I had tons of audacity. Consequently, the only thing Krishna-like about the outcome was the colour, which I had nothing to do with. I abandoned the project and announced that I was going to dump the blue lump into the dustbin, when my 4-5 yo daughter started crying like someone was hurting her. How could I even consider throwing baby Krishna into the dustbin, she wept bitterly.
It was a shift in consciousness moment for me. I quickly stitched a pair of yellow chaddis and tied a yellow ribbon around its head to jam a peacock feather into. Blue Lumpy was loved and played with by both my children for many many years.
This memory of the shift came back to me when my friend Poornima Kulathu spoke about her favourite and the only doll she ever had. A large, genderless cotton doll sewn by her sister in craft class. “Ugly as fuck”, she said, “but I loved them”.
Children look at the world very differently than adults. They don’t know the rules of the game, so everything is very real and magical at the same time.
What was merely a failed project for me, was already beloved to my daughter. She didn’t see the external, she only sensed the energy, her mother was making a baby doll or in Poornima’s case her sister.
Dolls are a very important aspect of Waldorf/Rudolf Steiner pedagogy. The first doll that a child ever receives is one that a beloved person has made for them, embodying the energy of the maker. They are always genderless and often with minimal or no features. The idea is not to colour the child’s imagination with adult notions of gender or emotions but allow the child to impart whatever they are feeling. And because these dolls are made with so much care, the children also play with them carefully. I made Guddu for my son when he was five and Guddu went with him everywhere for years and years. When they were older, I taught my children to sew companion dolls for their first dolls, these are more important to me than the ones I made.
I read once that in Japan, they would never throw away children’s dolls. They believed that much of the child’s energy had entered the doll and throwing away the doll would be throwing away an aspect of the child. And so once the child had grown up, the dolls would be taken to a local shrine or temple and left there under the protection of the deity. And then they could be given away to another child.
Children don’t need expensive toys or dolls. They may ‘want’ them later, barbies, action figures, etc. But in the early years, often even a knotted handkerchief can be presented as a doll and played with. Children only really need thoughtful, caring parents.