Nine Lives(33)

We had been expected earlier in the afternoon and the two boys, who were worried that we would miss the evening performance, spoke in an agitated manner to their father. But Mohan just smiled and led me over to his pump, where we washed. We gulped down a glass of hot masala chai, handed to us by a daughter-in-law. Then, reverently picking up the phad, Mohan led the way to the small Pabu shrine that he had built in his compound. There he gave thanks for his safe journey and asked the blessings of the deity for the performance. Then, without waiting for dinner, we headed off, through the sandy lanes, on the short walk to the tent where he was to perform.

The temple was a simple village affair, but newly built in marble. It had a single image chamber containing an ancient hero stone showing the mounted Pabuji in profile, sword held high. The temple, tank, well and village of Pabusar were all inexorably linked, explained Mohan. One night, during a great drought, Pabu had come in a dream to one of the poets of the Charan caste in the area. He told the man to follow the footprints from his door, through the sand, to a distant shallow valley where, said Pabu, you will find a stone. Take that stone as your marker, continued the god, and dig down thirty hands deep and there you will find an inexhaustible supply of the sweetest water in all the Shekhawati. This hero stone was the stone in the dream, said Mohan. Once it had been built into the parapet of the well, but now, since the new temple had come up, it was worshipped as a murti.

While he talked, Mohan placed two bamboo poles in the ground and unfurled the phad from right to left. It was like a wonderful Shekhawati fresco transferred to textile: a great vibrant, chaotic seventeen-foot-long panorama of medieval Rajasthan: women, horses, peacocks, carts, archers, battles, washer-men and fishermen, kings and queens, huge grey elephants and herds of white cows and buff camels, many-armed demons, fish-tailed wonder-creatures and blue-skinned gods, all arranged around the central outsized figure of Pabuji, his magnificent black mare, Kesar Kalami, and his four great companions and brothers-in-arms.

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.