Nine Lives

by William Dalrymple

  “It was my father that attracted me to become a bhopa. He was so good! I was very proud of him, and learned the phad inspired by his example. I was the youngest of four brothers and as a child this left me free to do what I wanted: to play gindi—village hockey—or to take my father’s herd of goats out to graze. I was always with all the other boys of the village. But even at that stage in my life, when they were playing gindi or cricket, all I really wanted to do was to read the phad. I always tried to see my father’s performances, and during the day, when my father was out, or perhaps was sleeping after a night of singing, I would pick up his ravanhatta and repeat a few songs or lines, the way we all saw him doing.

  “I was too shy to play or to sing in front of him, at least at first. He was a very kind man, but he would quickly point out if I had missed a line, or pointed at the wrong image on the phad. I learned the epic line by line, and knew it in its entirety by the time I was sixteen. I also knew where every incident was located on the phad.

  “The phad is very complex, but if you learn very young, the complexity does not become a burden: instead you learn to appreciate how wonderful and abundant and full of life it is. I love the richness of it, and a good audience appreciates the complexity too. Having so many different layers gives pleasure to the audience. But if you leave learning it too late, you may never remember it properly, and eventually give it up. Luckily, I taught Shrawan the same way my father taught me, and now Shrawan knows the phad nearly as well as I do.

  “I got married at the age of sixteen. But I didn’t start reciting the epic professionally until I was twenty, because my wife was only nine when we got married. Batasi was of course then too young to perform with me, so I had to wait until she grew up and learned the epic. At the age of twelve she was brought to my house, and from that point I kept us both busy by becoming her teacher. Although her father was also a bhopa, she didn’t come with much knowledge of the phad from her parents: she had learned only a little from her mother, along with some bhajans. So every morning, early on, I would sing to her and she would follow me, repeating the same stanza, just as we do at a performance. She picked it up very fast, and within three years she was able to sing while I played the ravanhatta for her.

  “In our community, we marry young. The choice of a wife is a great gamble, because at nine you can’t really tell whether a woman can sing or not, yet this woman will have to be your professional partner in the reading of the phad, as well as your wife. A man cannot recite Pabuji’s epic on his own. He needs his wife to support him, or else people will not enjoy and appreciate the performance, however good he is. My father was very lucky: my mother was a great singer and had a wonderful voice. Few women could sing as high as her, or maintain such a pitch for a long period. I was also very lucky: Batasi also had a very nice voice, though to be honest she is not quite the equal of my mother.

  “As with so much in a man’s life, the choice of a wife is all. Performing together gives a great opportunity for a couple to come together. We actually get into a competition as to who sings better, or picks up the transitions more cleanly. That game goes on all night, and brings love between us.

  “Sadly my eldest son has not been so lucky. He wanted to become a bhopa but his wife turned out to be completely tone deaf, so he has had to become a manual labourer: he now works building roads. He only sings occasionally in hotels for a little extra money. There is no question that if his wife could sing, he would now be reading the phad, and probably earning better money. But there is nothing to be done.

  “By the time I was twenty, my father’s fame was such that it was easy for me to find work. People assumed that I would inherit something of my father’s talents. But there were drawbacks too. When I first began to perform, everyone wanted to hear my father rather than me. Even if he was just listening in the audience, and I was performing with Batasi, still my father would be made to come up and sing a few songs. He had a wonderful voice, and I can’t even begin to equal him; but I do think I have become the better ravanhatta player. His had only two tuning pegs and just look at the number of keys on mine!

  “It is very rare that the whole phad is sung these days. People want to hear individual episodes, and you can sing them in whatever order you like. But it is good to have continuity in the episodes, and you have to learn to get the timing right: certain episodes should only be sung at certain hours of the night: for example the episode of Pabuji’s marriage should always come at midnight, if at all possible.

  “We Nayaks are from a very low caste. At some point in our history we became nomads, and so fell from the high position we once had: people never trust nomads. Still to this day we cannot eat or drink in the house of many of the people in this village. But when we recite or perform as bhopas, this brings us respect. I may not sit at the same level as the Rajputs or the Brahmins, but they come to see me here, they commission me to read the phad for them and they are happy and proud about my success and my fame in the villages nearby. They tell everyone that in Pabusar we have the best and most powerful bhopa in all the Shekhawati.

  “Although it is our singing and performance that people talk most about, sometimes I think it is our healing powers that people are most grateful for. My father in particular found that reading the phad of Pabuji gave him the gifts of prophecy and healing. There was one case when a boy was bitten by a cobra. My father was fifteen miles from where this took place, but he had an insight that something had happened and he immediately stopped what he was doing, and set out in the midday sun to walk to that village.

  “He passed through two villages on the way and they all called out to him: what brings you here, Girdhariji? He replied, ‘Someone needs me, otherwise a calamity will happen.’ When he arrived at the village in question, he went straight to the headman, saying, ‘Bring the boy that is ill to me in the shrine of Pabuji immediately.’ By this stage the boy was very swollen, but they brought him to my father on a stretcher, weeping and wailing as they were sure he would die. But my father took some bitter leaves from his pouch and fed them to the boy, assuring him and his family that all would be well. By the following morning, the boy was completely cured.

  “There were many stories of this sort about my father. He was a great healer: headache, body ache, stomach ache, indigestion: he could cure any of these with a night reading of the phad and a handful of herbs.

  “I am not the healer he was. But people still come to me, especially for curing their animals, and for exorcising djinns. I find this work very easy. I don’t do much with the animals: just open the phad, give it some incense, put a tanti of Pabu around the neck of the animal and let Pabuji do the rest. It is the same with exorcism: it is not so much me as the phad of Pabu that does the work. As soon as I spread open his phad, all the djinns and bad spirits fly away from its power. Some djinns take longer than others, and several times it has taken a full recitation of the epic to take the spirit out of the person; but I have never yet come across any who can resist its power completely. Sooner or later, I will touch the person with the phad and the spirit will flee, shouting out, ‘I am burning! I am burning!’

  “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 supe
rstition 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 was 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 percent, and at one point were said to have risen to 95 percent, 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 aarti 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 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 as I sat 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 knew and understood the intimacies of the daily life of the farmers in a way that the great gods could not.

  “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.”