Nine Lives(38)

“The bhopa told me he was only four years old when his father began to teach him to learn it by heart,” the rani continued. “Every day, he had to learn ten or twenty lines by rote, then recite the whole poem up to that point in case he forgot what went before. Every day his father gave him buffalo milk so that his memory would improve.”

When I asked the rani why she thought that the epics were beginning to die out, she was very clear. “When the stories used to be told, everyone had a horse and some cattle. Now, when a bhopa tells stories about the beauty of a horse, it doesn’t make the same connection with the audience. And then there is the question of time: who has the time these days to spend four or five nights awake, listening to a story?”

“It’s the same story with the bhopas themselves, and even the painters,” she added. “None of them know the whole epic, or the significance of all the figures on the phad.”

I asked whether the bhopas were illiterate. Milman Parry had found in Yugoslavia that this was the one essential condition for preserving an oral epic. It was the ability of the bard to read, rather than changes in the tastes of his audience, that sounded the death knell for the oral tradition. Just as the blind can develop a heightened sense of hearing, smell and touch to compensate for their loss of vision, so it seems that the illiterate have a capacity to remember in a way that the literate simply do not. It was not lack of interest, but literacy itself, that was killing the oral epic.

This had also been the conclusion of the great Indian folklorist Komal Kothari. In the 1950s, Kothari came up with the idea of sending one of his principal sources, a singer from the Langa caste named Lakha, to adult education classes. The idea was that he would learn to read and write, thus making it easier to collect the many songs he had preserved. But soon Kothari noticed that Lakha needed to consult his diary before he began to sing, while the rest of the Langa singers were able to remember hundreds of songs—an ability that Lakha had somehow begun to lose as he slowly learned to write.

“Anyway, I’ve arranged a performance for you tonight,” replied the rani. “Mohan Bhopa is coming here at seven. So you can ask him all about it then.”



That night, when I returned to Laxmi Chundawat’s mansion, the courtyard had been transformed. Lamps had been hung around the arches, amid the tangling bougainvillea. Thin white mattresses had been laid out on the ground, along with round silk bolsters to lean on, and at the end of the cloister, stretched between two poles, a phad had been unfurled.

“The bhopas have always used the phad as part of their performance,” the rani explained. “It’s a very ancient tradition. If you look at the paintings from the caves in Central Asia, such as Dunhuang”—in western China—“you’ll see images of itinerant monks and storytellers with the scrolls they used then. The phads are the last survival of that tradition. The bhopas like to say that the phad has all nine of the essences, or navras, of classical Indian aesthetics—love, war, devotion and so on—in it. But in particular they say it is so full of bravery that when you tell the tale the grass gets burned around it.”

At first, I didn’t notice Mohan and his family squatting in the shadows. As Mohan supervised, Batasi swept the ground around the phad and sprinkled it with water, while Shrawan cradled his dholak on his knees. Mohan lit incense sticks at the base of the phad. Then all three of them raised their palms in the gesture of prayer to the scroll.

Before long, Laxmi Chundawat arrived with her guests, and she gave the signal for Mohan to begin. He picked up his ravanhatta as Batasi held up the lamp to illuminate the phad. Mohan played an instrumental overture, then, accompanied by his son on the dholak, he began to sing in a voice so filled with solemnity and sadness that even a non-Mewari speaker could tell it was some sort of elegiac invocation of the hero. Every so often, as Batasi held up the lamp, he would stop, point with his bow to an illustration on the phad and then recite a line of explanatory verse, the arthav, all the while plucking at the string with his thumb.

At the end of each sloka, Batasi would step forward, fully veiled, and sing the next passage, before handing the song back to her husband. As the story unfolded, and the husband and wife passed the slokas back and forth, the tempo increased, and Mohan began to whirl and dance, jiggling his hips and stamping his feet so as to ring the bells, and shouting out, “Aa-ha! Hai! Wa-hai!” Occasionally, as the audience clapped, he would put down his zither to dance with both hands raised, moving along the length of the phad with surprisingly supple and delicate and almost feminine movements.