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.