Nine Lives(34)

“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 patron’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.