A young girl in traditional Indian attire with a green sari and bangles, indoors, holding an open book

Turning Navratri and Dussehra Into Family Reading Time

Navratri starts on 11 October this year, building up to Dussehra on 20 October — nine nights that, in a lot of Indian homes, mean garba practice, new clothes, a house full of relatives, and a six-year-old asking "but who actually was Ravana, and why did he have ten heads?" right when you're least prepared to answer well. The good news: you don't have to have a perfect answer ready. The story itself, told or read, is doing more work than you'd think.

What the research actually says about shared stories

A 2022 systematic review by Claire Pillinger and Emma Vardy looked across the dialogic reading research — studies of "interactive" shared reading where the adult and child go back and forth, rather than the adult just reading straight through — and found consistent benefits for young children's language skills, reading motivation, and the parent-child relationship itself (Pillinger & Vardy, 2022, published via Reach Out and Read). The key mechanism isn't the book sitting passively in someone's hands. It's the back-and-forth: pausing to ask what a child thinks will happen, letting them fill in a word, letting them ask their own questions mid-story.

Where this genuinely extends to grandparents and oral storytelling

The studies in that review were built around printed picture books, so it would be overreaching to say the research proves oral storytelling works identically. What's fair to say: the ingredient the researchers identified as doing the work — back-and-forth engagement, not passive listening — is exactly what a grandparent's telling of the Ramayana or the Durga Puja story naturally contains, especially when a child interrupts to ask questions or a grandparent asks "what do you think Ram did next?" A joint-family Navratri evening, story by story, is very plausibly doing the same kind of work a well-run shared reading session does — even without a printed page in sight.

What this means this festival season

  • Turn the nine nights of Navratri into nine short story turns — one telling a night, whoever's around, rather than saving mythology for "someday."
  • Pair an oral telling with a book version afterward and ask what was different — children notice, and comparing versions is its own kind of thinking practice.
  • Let a grandparent lead at least one night, even a shortened or simplified version. The back-and-forth matters more than getting every detail textbook-correct.
  • Invite your child to ask their own "who" and "why" mid-story instead of saving questions for the end — that interruption is the useful part, not a distraction from it.

Sources

  • Pillinger, C., & Vardy, E. J. (2022). The story so far: A systematic review of the dialogic reading literature. Reach Out and Read research summary of the peer-reviewed literature on dialogic reading.

Related reading

Find festival-season stories that fit your 6-year-old — take the 2-minute reading assessment

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