Nine Lives

by William Dalrymple

  Today, however, while children in Persia, Pakistan and parts of India may be acquainted with some episodes, the entire Dastan-i Amir Hamza no longer exists as an oral epic. In India, the last of the great dastan-gos who knew the epic by heart, Mir Baqar Ali, died in 1928, only a few years before sound revolutionised the nascent Indian film industry that itself had borrowed much of its style, and many of its plots, from the oral storytelling tradition. Now there are fears that the Mahabharata and other Hindu epics could share that fate in the twenty-first century, surviving in recorded forms only.

  Given all this, it seemed extraordinary to find in modern Rajasthan performers who were still the guardians of an entire oral culture. Apart from anything else, I longed to know how the bhopas, who were invariably simple villagers, shepherds, cowherds and so on, often illiterate, could remember such colossal quantities of verse.

  According to the Rohet aunts, while there were perhaps as many as twenty fully fledged Rajasthani epic poems that the bhopas still performed, two were especially popular. The most famous one told the tale of the deeds, feuds, life, death and avenging of Pabuji. Pabuji, they pointed out, was a Rajput of the Rathore clan, a member of the ruling line that would eventually produce the maharajas of Jodhpur as well as their own family; but at the time of the poem, Pabuji seemed to have been merely the chieftain of a small village named Kolu, in the desert near Jaisalmer.

  The other great poem, that of Dev Narayan, was Pabuji’s only real rival. Four times its size, older and now rarer than the Pabu poem, The Epic of Dev Narayan is much more ambitious: the tale of a humble cattle herder named Bhuj Bhagravat, who elopes with the beautiful young wife of an elderly Rajput raja, and so sparks a monumental caste war. This ultimately leads to the bloody death of Bhuj and his twenty-four brothers—deaths that are avenged, Sicilian style, by Bhuj’s son, Dev Narayan, the legend’s hero, and the god who has since become the special deity of the cattle-herding Gujar community.

  Both folk epics were apparently based on a kernel of historical truth—Pabuji and Dev Narayan both seem to have been historical figures who flourished in the fourteenth century—before the mythological process began to elaborate their stories and turn them into gods. Significantly, the divinity of neither figure is accepted by the Brahmins, and the gods’ priests and bhopas are both drawn from among the lower castes.

  According to the Rohet aunts, the Dev Narayan epic had been written down for the first time only some thirty years earlier. The person who did this was their distant neighbour and friend, a feisty-sounding Rajasthani rani named Laxmi Kumari Chundawat. The aunts said that Laxmi Chundawat, though frail and elderly, was still living in Jaipur, and they arranged for us to meet there, in her family’s town house.

  I found the old lady sitting on a cane chair on the veranda of an inner courtyard. The rani was a poised and intelligent octogenarian, whose fine bones were obscured by thick librarian’s glasses, which perched heavily on her nose and gave her expression a rather owlish gleam. She told me that she had been born into the palace at Deogarh, from which her father had ruled his huge semi-desert principality. The purdah system—the seclusion of women—still operated then as much for aristocratic Hindu women as for Muslim ones, but in 1957 the rani had shocked her family by emerging from the zenana (women’s quarters) and standing for the Rajasthan Assembly.

  “The area where the story of Dev Narayan was set was in my father’s principality and in my own constituency,” she said. It was during her time in the assembly that she became interested in the epic, which she feared was under threat from television and the cinema. “When I realised that the epic about him was beginning to die out,” she added, “I determined to do something about it.”

  In the early 1970s, the rani began to ask around to find out if any of the local bhopas still knew the entire saga by heart. Many knew the outlines, she discovered, and some knew parts in great detail, but none seemed to know the entire story. Eventually, however, she was directed to a village near Jaipur where an old grey-bearded bhopa named Lakshminarayan lived. She persuaded him to come to her house, along with another bhopa (“to encourage him”), while she went to Delhi and bought a tape recorder.

  “He came to stay with me for ten or twelve weeks,” she said. “He used to sing and I used to write. We did nothing else but this, six or seven hours at a time. We got the other bhopa to shout ‘Wa! Very good! Wa Wa! Well done!’ Lakshminarayan couldn’t do it without someone to echo him, like drums on a battlefield. It was astonishing to me that any individual could remember such a long work. In my printed edition, it fills 626 pages.

  “The bhopa told me he was only four years old when his father began to teach him to learn it by heart,” the rani continued. “Every day, he had to learn ten or twenty lines by rote, then recite the whole poem up to that point in case he forgot what went before. Every day his father gave him buffalo milk so that his memory would improve.”

  When I asked the rani why she thought that the epics were beginning to die out, she was very clear. “When the stories used to be told, everyone had a horse and some cattle. Now, when a bhopa tells stories about the beauty of a horse, it doesn’t make the same connection with the audience. And then there is the question of time: who has the time these days to spend four or five nights awake, listening to a story?”

  “It’s the same story with the bhopas themselves, and even the painters,” she added. “None of them know the whole epic, or the significance of all the figures on the phad.”

  I asked whether the bhopas were illiterate. Milman Parry had found in Yugoslavia that this was the one essential condition for preserving an oral epic. It was the ability of the bard to read, rather than changes in the tastes of his audience, that sounded the death knell for the oral tradition. Just as the blind can develop a heightened sense of hearing, smell and touch to compensate for their loss of vision, so it seems that the illiterate have a capacity to remember in a way that the literate simply do not. It was not lack of interest, but literacy itself, that was killing the oral epic.

  This had also been the conclusion of the great Indian folklorist Komal Kothari. In the 1950s, Kothari came up with the idea of sending one of his principal sources, a singer from the Langa caste named Lakha, to adult education classes. The idea was that he would learn to read and write, thus making it easier to collect the many songs he had preserved. But soon Kothari noticed that Lakha needed to consult his diary before he began to sing, while the rest of the Langa singers were able to remember hundreds of songs—an ability that Lakha had somehow begun to lose as he slowly learned to write.

  “Anyway, I’ve arranged a performance for you tonight,” replied the rani. “Mohan Bhopa is coming here at seven. So you can ask him all about it then.”

  That night, when I returned to Laxmi Chundawat’s mansion, the courtyard had been transformed. Lamps had been hung around the arches, amid the tangling bougainvillea. Thin white mattresses had been laid out on the ground, along with round silk bolsters to lean on, and at the end of the cloister, stretched between two poles, a phad had been unfurled.

  “The bhopas have always used the phad as part of their performance,” the rani explained. “It’s a very ancient tradition. If you look at the paintings from the caves in Central Asia, such as Dunhuang”—in western China—“you’ll see images of itinerant monks and storytellers with the scrolls they used then. The phads are the last survival of that tradition. The bhopas like to say that the phad has all nine of the essences, or navras, of classical Indian aesthetics—love, war, devotion and so on—in it. But in particular they say it is so full of bravery that when you tell the tale the grass gets burned around it.”

  At first, I didn’t notice Mohan and his family squatting in the shadows. As Mohan supervised, Batasi swept the ground around the phad and sprinkled it with water, while Shrawan cradled his dholak on his knees. Mohan lit incense sticks at the base of the phad. Then all three of them raised their palms in the gesture of prayer to the scroll.

 
Before long, Laxmi Chundawat arrived with her guests, and she gave the signal for Mohan to begin. He picked up his ravanhatta as Batasi held up the lamp to illuminate the phad. Mohan played an instrumental overture, then, accompanied by his son on the dholak, he began to sing in a voice so filled with solemnity and sadness that even a non-Mewari speaker could tell it was some sort of elegiac invocation of the hero. Every so often, as Batasi held up the lamp, he would stop, point with his bow to an illustration on the phad and then recite a line of explanatory verse, the arthav, all the while plucking at the string with his thumb.

  At the end of each sloka, Batasi would step forward, fully veiled, and sing the next passage, before handing the song back to her husband. As the story unfolded, and the husband and wife passed the slokas back and forth, the tempo increased, and Mohan began to whirl and dance, jiggling his hips and stamping his feet so as to ring the bells, and shouting out, “Aa-ha! Hai! Wa-hai!” Occasionally, as the audience clapped, he would put down his zither to dance with both hands raised, moving along the length of the phad with surprisingly supple and delicate and almost feminine movements.

  During the performance, I asked another guest, who understood Mewari, one of the five dialects of Rajasthan, if he could check Mohan Bhopa’s rendition against a transcription by John D. Smith, of Cambridge University, of a version performed in a different part of Rajasthan in the 1980s. Give or take a couple of turns of phrase, and the occasional omitted verse, the two versions were nearly identical, he said. And there was nothing homespun about Mohan Bhopa’s language, he added. It was delivered in incredibly fine if slightly archaic and courtly Mewari diction.

  In Yugoslavia, Milman Parry had been excited by the way that his poets recomposed and improvised their work as they recited it: each performance was unique. Yet, from what I could gather of the Rajasthani epics, they were regarded as sacred texts, their form strictly fixed. Bhopas such as Mohan were no more free to tamper with the text than, say, a Catholic priest was free to alter the words of consecration at the holiest moment of the Mass. In this sense, they were still like Homer’s epics, for both the Iliad and the Odyssey invoke the gods at the beginning.

  Mohan sang one of the most famous episodes: the Story of the She-Camels. This follows the wedding of Pabuji’s favourite niece, Kelam, to his friend the snake deity Gogaji. The wedding guests give fabulous gifts: diamonds, pearls and “a fine dress of the best Deccani cloth to wear,” carriages and strings of gold bells for Kelam’s horses, herds of “excellent white cows” and “swaying elephants.” Then comes Pabuji’s turn. Instead of producing a gift, he makes a vow: “I shall plunder she-camels from Ravana the Demon King of Lanka,” he says. The wedding guests all laugh, because no one in Rajasthan had ever seen a camel and they were not quite sure whether such a beast existed. Gogaji, Kelam’s husband, is asked, “What kind of wedding gift did Pabuji give you?” and he replies:

  O mother, Pabuji’s wedding gift wanders and grazes in Lanka.

  Who knows whether it is like a hill?

  Who knows whether it is like a mountain?

  Who knows whether it has five heads or ten feet?

  But he has given me a kind of animal that I have never seen.

  This episode was, incidentally, one which particularly interested Komal Kothari, because it linked the Pabuji epic with one of the great classical Sanskrit epics, the Ramayana, in which the hero, Lord Ram, also goes to Lanka to fight Ravana, although in the case of the Ramayana the hero is trying to rescue not camels, but his kidnapped wife, the goddess Sita, whom Ravana had abducted and was in the process of trying to seduce. For Kothari, the episode was an indication of how, when dealing with epics, distinctions between “classic” epics and “folk” epics had little meaning. They were, he believed, two tributaries of the same great river. The passage is also especially sacred to the Rabari cattle herders, who regard it as their myth of origin.

  After Mohan had sung for a couple of hours, there was a break while the rani’s guests headed off for dinner. I asked Mohan for whom he normally performed—the local landowners, perhaps? He smiled and shook his head. No, he said, it was usually camel drivers, cowherds and his fellow villagers. Their motives, as he described them, were less to hear the poetry than to use him as a sort of supernatural veterinary service.

  “People call me in whenever their animals fall sick,” he said “Camels, sheep, buffaloes, cows—any of these. Pabuji is very powerful at curing sickness in beasts. The farmers send a message for us to come, and we go and recite—always at night, never during the day: it is almost a sin to read the phad after sunrise.

  “Pabuji is also good at curing any child who is possessed by a djinn,” he added. “On completion of the performance at dawn, the parents light a jyot. Seven times they put a holy thread around the flame, put seven knots in it, then they place this tanti [amulet] around the child’s neck. No djinns can stay after Pabu has come in this form.”

  “So does Pabuji enter you while you perform?”

  “How can I do it unless the spirit comes?” Mohan said. “You are educated. I am not, but I never forget the words, thanks to Pabuji. It would be impossible to recite the epic without some special blessings from Pabuji. As long as I invoke him at the beginning, and light a jyot in his honour, all will be well. Once he comes, he forces us on to recite more, and dance more. We feel the force of him there, demanding we give everything we have. There is no trance—it is not possession. But wherever we invoke him and perform, then we feel him. And so do all the demons and evil spirits—they just run away. No ghosts, no spirits can withstand the power of this story.”

  Mohan smiled, and twirled the ends of his moustache. “The phad is his temple,” he said. “The deity resides there, asleep until I wake him with the dance. Sometimes, when we recite the epic, towards dawn the lamp glows white. It happens when we reach the crux of the story—when Pabuji gives water to the stolen cattle that he has saved. At that point we know that Pabuji is pleased, that things are starting to happen, and I am empowered. It’s usually around 4 a.m. Then I can glimpse the future … But it’s very rare, and happens only when we do a complete performance. When this happens, and I complete the phad, there is a wonderful sense of well-being, and complete peace.”

  He added, “The lampblack from the lamp that glows in this way is very powerful. It can be used to heal anything.”

  It was the old primeval link between storytellers and magic, the shaman and the teller of tales, still intact in twenty-first-century Rajasthan. “So you are as much a healer, a curer of the sick, as a storyteller?” I asked.

  “Of course,” Mohan said. “But it is thanks to Pabuji. It is he who cures. Not me.”

  Five years after this first meeting, on the morning after Mohan’s night recitation of the epic in his home village of Pabusar, the bhopa and I sat down on a charpoy outside his house. The bright sun of the day before had given way to massing cumulus, and a strange grey light played over the desert and the village. The sun was now the colour of steel.

  Mohan had sung the epic until dawn, and had slept for only four or five hours before being woken by the visit of a neighbour, a family of bangle sellers who had dropped in for a chat. Now it was midmorning and we sat looking out at a very rare but highly auspicious event in Pabusar: clouds massing for the winter rains. Rarer still, a few drops were actually falling on the ground.

  “We call this rain the mowat,” said Mohanji, smiling brightly. “Even a few drops are wonderful for the wheat and grain. One or two showers will give enough forage and fodder for the sheep and the goats until the monsoon. Four or five showers and even the cows will be happy.”

  “Aren’t you tired?” I asked. “You were performing all night.”

  “Sleep doesn’t bother me,” he said. “We are friends of sleeplessness. I’ll happily do another performance tonight. After all these years I’m used to it.”

  Chai was brought, and parathas, and as we sat eating our late breakfast, I asked Mohan to tell me about his chi
ldhood, and how he had first come to be a bhopa. As we talked, his younger children and grandchildren began to cluster around to listen.

  “I was born and brought up right here,” said Mohan. “For three generations my family have held this land, and this is where the family have lived and died.

  “My father was a bhopa before me. He was very famous in his time—his name was Girdhari Bhopa. He used to be called to give performances even 300 miles away, and he made a very good living. All my ancestors—my grandfather, his father, his father before him—all were bhopas of Pabuji, but it was my father who made the family famous. He had all the three different skills you need for reading the phad: dancing, reciting and playing the ravanhatta. When he performed, he was such a fine dancer people would look at his feet. When he sang, they looked at his face; and when he played, they looked at his ravanhatta.

  “We are of the Nayak caste. Our ancestors were close to Pabu, and used to look after his horses. Ever since the time Pabuji ascended to heaven in his palanquin, we have glorified his name, and read the phad which commemorates him. No one can learn the epic from outside our caste—it is impossible. You have to be born to this.

  “That said, not everyone born to this family has the heart—the hirtho—or the head, to remember the epic and to do this work. Of my five sons, only one is a practising bhopa. Other jobs are easier and pay better. But if you have the heart, and can perform well, then this is still a good way of making a living.

  “The first step is to teach a boy to dance. He should come to as many of the phad readings as he can, and help to entertain the audience by dancing beside his father. By the age of twelve you can see whether the boy is suitable for further training. You can see if he has a sense of rhythm, can handle a ravanhatta, and if he has a good memory.