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.