Nine Lives

by William Dalrymple

  While Mohan set up, I looked closely at the phad. The durbar and palaces of the different players of the epic were the largest images, with Pabuji and his warriors in the centre, and the courts of his enemies, Jindrav Khinchi and Ravana, at the furthest distance from him at the two extremities. In between, all Indian life was here in this wonderfully lively, vivid textile, full of joie de vivre and folk-artistic gusto. The phad has a teeming energy that seems somehow to tap into the larger-than-life power of the epic’s mythology to produce wonderfully bold and powerful narrative images. It is also marked by a deep love of the natural world: dark-skinned elephants charge forward, trunks and tails curling with pleasure; pairs of peacocks display their tails, white doves and red-crowned hoopoes flit between mango orchards and banana plantations. Warriors charge into battle against roaring yellow tigers, swords at the ready.

  The different figures and scenes were not compartmentalised, but were clearly organised with a strict logic. Like the ancient Buddhist paintings in the caves of Ajanta, the story was arranged by geographical rather than narrative logic: more a road map to the epic geography of courtly Rajasthan than a strip cartoon of the story. If two scenes were next to each other it was because they happened in the same location, not because they happened in chronological succession, one after the other.

  Seeing me peering closely at the phad, Mohan said that it was the work of the celebrated textile artist Shri Lal Joshi of Bhilwara. His family had been making phads for nearly 700 years, and their images had more power than those of any other artist.

  “Even rolled up, Joshiji’s phads keep evil at bay,” said Mohan. “The way he paints it, the involvement he has with the epic, gives his phads more shakti [power] than any other. His phads have the power to exorcise any spirit. Just to open it is to give a blessing.”

  Mohan explained to me that once the phad was complete and the eyes of the hero were painted in, neither the artist nor the bhopa regarded it as a piece of art. Instead, it instantly became a mobile temple: as Pabuji’s devotees were semi-nomadic herders, his temple—the phad—visited the worshippers rather than the other way around. It was believed that the spirit of the god was now in residence, and that henceforth the phad was a ford linking one world with the next, a crossing place from the human to the divine.

  From this point, said Mohan, the phad was treated with the greatest reverence. He made daily offerings to it, and said he would pass it on to one of his children once he became too old to perform. If the phad got ripped or faded, he would call the original painter and take it with him to the Ganges, or the holy lake at Pushkar. There they would together decommission it, or, as he put it, thanda karna—make it cool, remove the shakti of the deity—before consigning it to the holy waters, rather like Excalibur being returned to the lake in the legends of King Arthur.

  “It is always a sad moment,” said Mohan. “Each phad gives great service, but eventually they become so threadbare you can no longer see anything. After we have laid it to rest, we throw a feast, as if it was the cremation of a family member. Then we consecrate a new phad. It is like an old man dying, and a child being born.”

  Batasi was now cleaning the space in front of the phad, and lighting a clutch of incense sticks. Shrawan tightened the screws of his dholak drum, and began to tap out a slow beat. A small jyot (lamp) of cow dung was lit by Mohan, and circled in front of the image of Pabu. Then he blew a conch shell, announcing that the performance was about to begin. The farmers of the village finished their card games and cups of chai, and began to gather around. It was already getting cold, the temperature dropping rapidly in the desert on winter nights, and several of the farmers pulled their shawls tightly around them, tucking the loose end under their chins.

  Mohan then picked up his ravanhatta—a kind of desert zither, a spike fiddle with eighteen strings and no frets—and began to pluck it regularly with his thumb.

  “We’d better make a start,” he said. “The reading of the phad should begin not long after sunset. We have a long night ahead of us, and the flame of my voice only really starts to glow after midnight.”

  I had first come across the bhopas—shamans and bards—of Rajasthan twenty years previously, when I went to live in a fort outside Jodhpur to begin work on a book about Delhi.

  Bruce Chatwin was then my hero, and his widow, Elizabeth, had told me about a remote fortress in the desert where Bruce had written his wonderful study of restlessness, The Songlines. Rohet Garh was built by a Rajput chieftain who had been given land by the maharaja as a reward for bravery on the battlefield. It was surrounded by a high, battlemented wall that faced out over a lake. In the morning, light would stream into the bedroom through cusped arches, and reflections from the lake would ripple across the ceiling beams. There were egrets nesting on an island in the lake, and peacocks in the trees at its side.

  Though relatively close to New Delhi—only nine hours’ drive to the west—Rohet existed in an utterly different world, almost in a different century. In Delhi, the Indian middle class among whom I lived inhabited a fragile, aspirational bubble. On every side, new suburbs were springing up, full of smart apartment blocks and gyms and multiplexes. As you drove down the Jaipur Highway, however, the trappings of modernity dropped away, and the farther you went towards Jodhpur, the drier it got. Fertile fields full of yellow winter mustard were replaced by sandy melon beds and fields of drooping sunflowers. It was as if the colour was beginning to drain away from the landscape, but for the odd flash of a red sari: a woman winding her way to the village well.

  Rohet Garh was the home of a thakur—a Rajasthani gentleman landowner. Secluded in his oasis in the Thar Desert, he had preserved the quiet, ordered way of life inherited from his feudal forebears, a way of life not wholly dissimilar to that of those reclusive tsarist landlords immortalised by Chekhov and Turgenev. To enter the gates of Rohet Garh was to walk into a world familiar from A Month in the Country or Sketches from a Huntsman’s Album. Lapdogs careered over croquet lawns. Long-widowed grandmothers and great-aunts held court from far-flung dowager wings. Unmarried daughters would blush into their silks while their father loudly discussed their suitors.

  Only the fortnightly expedition into “town” broke the daily routine. The entire family, along with lapdogs, Labradors and a full complement of servants, would pile into the family jeep. Then they would set off, over the scrubland, to the town house in Jodhpur. There the great-aunts would be wheeled to their rival temples, the unmarried daughters and visiting nieces would buy new salwars and the boys stock up on cartridges for their sand grouse shoots. Thakur Sahib would visit his bank manager, and his club. I would remain in the old fort, and I used to relish the solitude. From my desk, the desert scrub was flat and dry, and its very harshness concentrated the mind. In the following weeks, the pages of the new manuscript began to pile up.

  Rajasthan was a profoundly conservative state, even by the standards of India. During the Raj, around two-fifths of India’s vast landmass remained under the control of its indigenous princely rulers, and a fair proportion of this autonomous territory lay in Rajasthan, where semi-feudal rule had effectively continued up to 1971, when Indira Gandhi finally abolished the maharajas.

  The absence of any form of colonial British intrusion meant that many surprising aspects of medieval Indian society had remained intact. On the one hand, this meant that the grip of the old feudal landlords—like Thakur Sahib—was stronger here than elsewhere; cases of ritual widow-burning, or suttee, were not unknown. On the other hand, castes of nomadic musicians, miniaturists and muralists, jugglers and acrobats, bards and mime artists were still practising their skills. Every prominent family of the land-holding Rajput caste, I discovered, inherited a family of oral genealogists, musicians and praise singers, who celebrated the family’s lineage and deeds. It was considered a great disgrace if these minstrels were forced by neglect to formally “divorce” their patrons. Then they would break the strings of their instruments and bury them in front of their p
atron’s house, cutting the family off from the accumulated centuries of ancestral songs, stories and traditions. It was the oral equivalent of a magnificent library being burned to cinders.

  It was while I was staying at Rohet that I heard about what seemed to be the most remarkable survival of all: the existence of a number of orally transmitted epic poems, unique to the state. Those current around Rohet celebrated deified cattle heroes who died rescuing a community’s cattle from rustlers. A long accumulation of hagiography had transformed the historical characters into gods: the story of a bhomiya, or martyr-hero, was kept alive, memorial stones were erected and in due course miracle stories began to spread, telling of how the hero had manifested himself to save his people after his death. Memorial stones became shrines, and over the centuries the legends grew into epics, and the heroes into gods, so that the different warriors at the centre of each epic became the particular deity of a different caste community.

  In this form these herders acted as mediators between the members of that community and the heavens, and their epics grew into something approaching liturgies. But unlike the ancient epics of Europe—the Iliad, the Odyssey, Beowulf and The Song of Roland—which were now the province only of academics and literature classes, the oral epics of Rajasthan were still alive, preserved by a caste of wandering bhopas who travelled from village to village, staging performances.

  “The bhopa is a normal villager until the god Pabuji comes to him,” one of the Rohet aunts explained. “Then he has great power. People bring him the possessed, and Pabuji cures them.”

  “How?” I asked.

  “Sometimes the bhopa just says a mantra over them. He tries to make the spirit speak—to reveal who he is. But,” she added ominously, “sometimes he has to beat the possessed person with his rods, or cut them, and draw their blood.”

  One afternoon, during a long walk through the desert, I met a bhopa sitting outside a simple whitewashed shrine topped with a pair of saffron flags. He was very old and dressed in a tatty white kurta-dhoti. He had a cataract in his left eye, and he parted his great fan of beard outward at the centre of his chin. This man worked as a village exorcist, and that night I was taken to see him cast out the evil spirit that was said to have entered one of the village girls. In the light of camphor flames, drums were beaten, mantras recited, and with a dramatic shout, the spirit was ordered out.

  Afterwards, I heard that there were still many other bhopas, out in the wild places of the desert, whose job it was to recite the great epics, some of them thousands of stanzas long. They were the men I wanted to meet: my Rajasthani Homers.

  Before long, I began to read up on the different oral traditions, to try to discover why it was that they had survived in some parts of the world, such as Rajasthan, and why in other places these traditions seemed to have completely disappeared.

  In the summer of 1933, a young Harvard classicist named Milman Parry caught a ship to Yugoslavia. Parry set off on his travels intending to prove in the field a brilliant idea he had dreamed up in the libraries of Cambridge, Massachusetts: that Homer’s works, the foundation upon which all subsequent European literature rested, must have originally been oral poems. To study Homer properly, he believed, you had first to understand how oral poetry worked, and Yugoslavia was the place in Europe where it seemed such traditions had best survived.

  On and off for the next two years, Parry toured the cafés of the Balkans. One of his assistants, Albert Lord, described the approach they adopted: “The best method of finding singers was to visit a Turkish coffee house,” he wrote, “and to make enquiries there.”

  This is the centre for the peasant on the market day, and the scene of entertainment during the evening of the month of Ramadan. We found such a place in a side street, dropped in and ordered coffee. Lying on a bench not far from us was a Turk smoking a cigarette in an antique silver cigarette holder … He knew of singers. The best, he said, was a certain Avdo Mededovich, a peasant farmer who lived an hour away. How old is he? Sixty, sixty-five. Does he know how to read and write? Ne zna, brate! (No, brother!) …

  Finally Avdo came and sang for us of the taking of Baghdad in the days of Sultan Selim. We listened with increasing interest to this homely farmer, whose throat was disfigured by a large goitre. He sat cross-legged on a bench, sawing the gusle, swaying in rhythm with the music … The next few days were a revelation. Avdo’s songs were longer and finer than any we had heard before. He could prolong one for days, and some of them reached 15,000 or 16,000 lines.

  What Parry found in the months that followed exceeded all his hopes. By the time he returned to America in September 1935 he had made recordings of no fewer than 12,500 heroic poems, songs and epics—tales of the great Serbian defeat by the Ottomans at Kosovo, or of the deeds of long-dead Balkan heroes—and had accumulated half a ton of aluminium recording discs.

  Parry, often referred to as “the Darwin of oral literature,” died shortly afterwards, in a shooting accident, at the age of thirty-three; but his work revolutionised understanding of the Greek classics. Yet even while Parry was at work, the oral tradition was already beginning to die out in the cities of Yugoslavia. Since then, it has all but disappeared as a living institution, its end speeded by the bloody civil war that devastated the region in the 1990s.

  In India, however, it seemed that an even more elaborate tradition had managed to survive relatively intact. An old anthropologist friend had told me how he once met a travelling storyteller in a village in southern India at the end of the 1970s. The bard knew the Mahabharata—India’s equivalent of the Iliad, the Odyssey and the Bible all rolled into one. The epic is the story of the rivalry of two sets of princely cousins whose enmity culminates in an Armageddonlike war on the battlefield of Kurukshetra; the Bhagavad Gita, for many Hinduism’s most profound and holy text, lies at its heart, a dialogue, on the eve of battle, between the god Krishna and one of the princely heroes about duty, illusion and reality.

  With its hundred thousand slokas, the Mahabharata is fifteen times the length of the Bible. My friend had asked the bard how he could possibly remember it all. The minstrel replied that, in his mind, each stanza was written on a pebble. The pile of pebbles lay before him always; all he had to do was remember the order in which they were arranged and to “read” from one pebble after another.

  India’s population may not be particularly literate—the literacy rate is officially 65 percent, compared with 77 percent in the United States—but it remains surprisingly culturally erudite. As the critic Anthony Lane noted in 2001, in the aftermath of the Islamist attacks on America, the people of New York again and again compared what had happened to them to films or TV: “It was like Independence Day”; “It was like Die Hard”; “No, Die Hard 2.” In contrast, when the great tsunami struck at the end of 2004, Indians were able to reach for a more sustaining narrative than disaster movies: the apocalyptic calamities and world-ending floods that fill the Mahabharata and Indian oral literature in general. As the great American Sanskrit scholar Wendy Doniger put it, “Myths pick up the pieces where philosophy throws up its hands. The great myths may help survivors to think through this unthinkable catastrophe, to make sense by analogy.”

  While the Mahabharata is today the most famous of the Indian epics, it was originally only one of a great number. During the Mughal period, for example, the most popular was the great Muslim epic the Dastan-i Amir Hamza, or Story of Hamza. The brave and chivalrous Hamza, the father-in-law of the Prophet, journeys erratically from Iraq to Sri Lanka, via Mecca, Tangiers and Byzantium, in the service of the just Emperor Naushervan. On the way he falls in love with various beautiful Persian and Greek princesses, while avoiding the traps laid for him by his enemies: the cruel villain Bakhtak and the necromancer and arch-fiend Zumurrud Shah.

  Over the centuries, as the story of Hamza was told across the Islamic world, the factual underpinning of the narrative was covered in layers of subplots and a cast of dragons, giants and sorcerers. It was in India, howev
er, that the Hamza epic took on a life of its own. Here it grew to an unprecedented size, absorbing whole oral libraries of Indian myths and legends. In this form it began to be regularly performed in the public spaces of the great Mughal cities. At fairs and at festivals, on the steps of the Jama Masjid in Delhi or in the Qissa Khawani, the Storyteller’s Street in Peshawar, the professional storytellers, or dastan-gos, would perform night-long recitations from memory; some of these could go on for seven or eight hours with only a short break. There was also a great tradition of the Mughal elite commissioning private performances of the Hamza epic—the greatest Urdu love poet, Ghalib, for example, was celebrated for his dastan parties at which the story would be expertly recited.

  In its fullest form, the tale of Hamza grew to contain a massive 360 separate stories, which would take several weeks of all-night recitation to complete; the fullest printed version, the last volume of which was published in 1905, filled no fewer than forty-six volumes, each of which averaged 1,000 pages. This Urdu version shows how far the epic had been reimagined into an Indian context in the course of many years of subcontinental retelling. Though the original Mesopotamian place names survived, the world depicted is that of Mughal India, with its obsession with poetic wordplay, its love of gardens and its extreme refinement of food and dress and manners. Many of the characters have Hindu names; they make oaths “as Ram is my witness”; and they ride on elephants with jewelled howdahs. To read it is to come as close as is now possible to the world of the Mughal campfires—those night gatherings of soldiers, Sufis, musicians and camp followers that one sees illustrated in Mughal miniatures: a storyteller beginning his tale in a clearing of a forest as the embers of the blaze glow red and the eager fire-lit faces crowd around.