Nine Lives (21 page)

‘Because of the power of the
phad
,
we are careful never to treat it casually. To make sure it is never damaged, we keep it rolled up most of the time. I do not perform during the rains, in case the
phad
gets damaged with water. When I am home, I hang it rolled up above my bed, so that dogs or cats or rats cannot hurt it. That way it also blesses our family. If we ill-treat the
phad
,
or make some mistake, Pabuji will usually appear in a dream and inform me of the wrong I have done. The following morning I will offer a coconut and ask for forgiveness at his temple. If it is a more serious matter, I will also offer thirteen pounds of jaggery to the cows of the village.

‘Some of the more educated people in the village these days like to show off, and say they do not believe in the healing power of the
phad.
Also there is some vet in Bikaner who has begun telling people not to summon the
bhopas
,
and
who says
that it’s just superstition and faith healing. Maybe in part they are right: maybe faith and trust do play their part. But most people here just laugh if someone tells them that a doctor or a vet has more power than Pabuji. I certainly do. Ha! Show me the doctor or even the vet who could bring camels all the way from Lanka.’

That evening, after sunset, Mohan continued his performance of the epic. The first night had taken the story up to the episode of Goga’s wedding to Kelam. The second opened with the story of the she-camels.

Watching the epic performed in a village setting where everyone was familiar with not just the plot but the actual text of the poem was a completely different experience to seeing it done before the sort of urban, middle-class audience I had previously seen Mohan perform to.

The farmers and villagers were all sitting and squatting on a red and black striped durree under the awning of the tents, and were wrapped up against the cold with scarves and shawls and mufflers. Rather than sitting back and enjoying a formal performance, as the middle-class audience had done, the villagers joined in, laughing loudly at some points, interrupting in others, joking with Mohan and completing the final line of each stanza.
Sometimes, individuals got up to offer Mohan a Rs 10 note, usually with a request for a particular song or
bhajan
.

Three generations of the family performed: as well as Mohan and Batasi, Shrawan was on
dholak
, the eldest son Mahavir also joined in with his
ravanhatta
, and Mahavir’s naughty four-year-old son Onkar, Mohan’s eldest grandson, danced alongside his grandfather in a white
kurta-dhoti
. For three hours the family sang without a break, and the audience cheered and clapped.

‘Because the
phad
is dedicated to our god Pabuji, we are never allowed to get up in the middle,’ said the village goldsmith, who was sitting next to me. ‘Until the
bhopaji
gets tired and stops for chai, we have to sit and listen out of respect – even until dawn.’

‘But now that we have TV our children don’t like to listen so much,’ added Mr Sharma, one of the village Brahmins, who had earlier insisted on taking me away for what he called ‘a pure vegetarian dinner’. ‘The younger generation prefer the CD with the main points of the story. It takes only three or four hours maximum.’

The idea that the oral tradition was seriously endangered was something I had heard repeated ever since I first began reading about the oral epics of Rajasthan. The Cambridge academic John D. Smith did his PhD on the
bhopas
of Pabuji in the 1970s. When he returned to make a documentary on the subject twenty years later, he found that many of the
bhopas
he had worked with had given up performing, and instead taken up work pedalling cycle rickshaws or sweeping temples. They told him that fewer and fewer people were interested in the performances, while the Rabari nomads who were once the main audience were themselves selling their flocks and drifting off to the cities: ‘Having lost their flocks,’ he wrote, ‘they lost their chief connection with Pabuji, who is above all associated with the welfare of livestock.’

Another, still more serious threat that Smith identified were the DVDs and cable channels, and their broadcasting of the great mainstream Sanskrit epics, which he believed had begun to have a ‘standardising effect on Hindu mythology, which will inevitably weaken local variants, such as the Pabuji story’. There is no question that TV and film are formidable rivals: when the
Mahabharata
was broadcast on the Indian state-run TV channel Doordashan in the early 1990s, viewing figures for the series never sank beneath 75 per cent, and at one point were said to have risen to 95 per cent, an estimated audience of some 600 million people. Everyone who could stopped what they were doing to sit in front of whatever television was available.

In villages across South Asia, hundreds of people would gather around a single set to watch the gods and demons play out their destinies. In the noisiest and most bustling cities trains, buses and cars were suddenly stilled, and a strange hush came over the bazaars. In Rajasthan, audiences responded by offering
arti
and burning incense sticks in front of their television sets, just as they did to the
bhopa’s
phad
,
the portable temple of the
phad
giving way to the temporary shrine of the telly
.

Some
bhopas
had clung on to their tradition, wrote Smith, but in a bastardised form, singing snatches of the epic for tourists in the Rajasthan palace hotels, or providing ‘exotic’ entertainment in the restaurants of Delhi and Bombay. Either way, Smith concluded that ‘The tradition of epic performance is rapidly dying . . . Thus a tradition that was still flourishing in the 1970s – though even then promoting attitudes that seemed to belong to a much earlier age – has almost completely lapsed.’

When I had first read this, its grim prognosis sounded all too likely. But sitting now in a tent full of enthusiastic Pabuji devotees, Smith’s predictions seemed unnecessarily extreme and gloomy. During an interval in the performance, while Mohan stopped for a glass of chai, and Mahavir continued to entertain the audience with a Hindi film song, I asked Mohan what he could possibly do to hold out against Bollywood and the TV, and if he was worried about the future. Were the epics merely going to become stories watched on television and borrowed from video libraries? What could the
bhopas
do to save their audiences?

Mohanji shrugged. ‘It’s true there is increasingly a problem with ignorance,’ he said. ‘Here in Pabusar it is still fine. But in the towns and cities the younger generation know nothing of Pabuji. They don’t understand the meaning. If they listen it’s because of the music and dancing. They don’t know the
hunkara
– the correct responses – and they are always asking for irrelevant songs: new
filmi
ones from the latest movie that have nothing to do with the
phad.
Earlier people just wanted a pure recitation of Pabu – nothing else.

‘I am always trying to improve my singing,’ he added. ‘And for the younger generation I try to put in the occasional joke when people are getting sleepy. Nothing Bollywoodish or vulgar, just enough to grab attention in between scenes. It’s not easy for people to concentrate for eight hours – though here in the villages, where there are no distractions, few get up while I am performing.’

I asked: ‘Will the
phad
survive?’

‘Oh yes,’ he said firmly. ‘It will. It has to. For all that has changed, it is still at the centre of our life, and our faith, and our dharma.’

This, it seemed to me, was the key, and the answer to the question of how it was that the Rajasthani epics were still living in a way that the
Iliad
and the other epics of the West were not. The poems had been turned into religious rituals and the
bhopas
had become receptacles for the messages of the gods, able to penetrate the wall – in India always a fairly porous wall – between the divine and the mundane.

Moreover, the gods in question were not distant and metaphysical beings but deified locals to whom the herders could relate and who, in turn, could understand the villagers’ needs. The people of Pabusar certainly took care to propitiate the great ‘national’ gods, like Shiva and Vishnu, whom they understood as controlling the continuation of the wider cosmos, but for everyday needs they prayed to the less remote, less awesome figures of their local god-kings and heroes who – along with the almost numberless pantheon of sprites and godlings worshipped and propitiated in every Indian village – knew the things that the great gods could not, like the needs and thirsts of the cattle and the goats of the village. It is these local gods who are believed to guard and regulate the daily lives of the villagers.

‘In this village, everyone still loves the epic as much as they ever did,’ said Mohan. ‘There really is very little difference from the response I saw to my father’s performances when I was a boy. It’s true that some of the old customs have gone: when I was growing up, for example, if a water buffalo delivered a calf, the first milk and the first yoghurt were always offered to Pabu. These days no one seems to bother.

‘And then there is a feeling that Pabuji himself is a little more distant than he used to be. When I was Onkar’s age everyone in the village used to hear the noise of Pabuji riding through the village at night, circling the houses and the temple, guarding us from demons and epidemics. But it has been many years now since I heard the sound of his hooves. I don’t know why that is. Perhaps because we have less faith than we used to, or because we show him less devotion.’

‘But you asked about the
phad
,’ he added. ‘Yes, here at least the
phad
has survived. Everyone knows it.’

I asked why he thought that was.

‘You see,’ said Mohan, ‘this village was founded by Pabuji, so we are all of us great devotees. We don’t ignore the other gods: they are wonderful and powerful in their own way, and their own place. But here if we have a problem we naturally seek first the help of Pabu.’

‘Especially if it is a problem with an animal,’ said Mr Sharma. ‘That is what he is most famous for.’

‘The great gods are here of course,’ added the goldsmith. ‘But Pabuji is close to us, and when we need immediate help it is more sensible to ask him.’

‘Pabu is a Rajput,’ said a man in a turban, who had also been listening in. ‘We people who worship Pabu are comfortable with his company. Like us, he eats meat and drinks liquor also.’

‘He understands us and knows our fields and our animals.’

‘He is a god from our own people,’ said Mohan. ‘He is like us.’

‘Not that the other gods are far away,’ added Mr Sharma. ‘Gods are gods. Whatever god you worship, he is close to you.’

‘But it’s like applying to the village
sarpanch
[headman],’ said Mohan, ‘rather than asking the prime minister. Naturally we are closer to the
sarpanch
.’

I wondered whether this lack of a devotional following was the reason that the great Indian Muslim epic, the
Dastan-i Amir Hamza
had died out: its last recorded performance was on the steps of the Jama Masjid in Delhi in 1928. The
Hamza
epic was always understood to be primarily an entertainment, and so had died as fashions changed. But the
bhopas
and their religious rituals had survived because the needs and hungers that they addressed remained.

‘Will Shrawan take on the tradition?’ I asked Mohan.

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘He knows the whole epic. All he lacks yet is confidence, and a wife with a sweet voice. But he loves Pabuji, and he can see that it’s a good life. When the gods are asleep’ – during the monsoon season – ‘I stay at home and look after the goats. In the other months, I travel with my
phad
wherever I want. There is still a lot of work for a good
bhopa
– all the castes around here still commission readings of the
phad
when they need something.’