Nine Lives(43)

The idea that the oral tradition was seriously endangered was something I had heard repeated ever since I first began reading about the oral epics of Rajasthan. The Cambridge academic John D. Smith did his PhD on the bhopas of Pabuji in the 1970s. When he returned to make a documentary on the subject twenty years later, he found that many of the bhopas he had worked with had given up performing, and instead taken up work pedalling cycle rickshaws or sweeping temples. They told him that fewer and fewer people were interested in the performances, while the Rabari nomads who were once the main audience were themselves selling their flocks and drifting off to the cities. “Having lost their flocks,” he wrote, “they lost their chief connection with Pabuji, who is above all associated with the welfare of livestock.”

Another, still more serious threat that Smith identified was the DVDs and cable channels, and their broadcasting of the great mainstream Sanskrit epics, which he believed had begun to have a “standardising effect on Hindu mythology, which will inevitably weaken local variants, such as the Pabuji story.” There is no question that TV and film are formidable rivals: when the Mahabharata was broadcast on the Indian state-run TV channel Doordashan in the early 1990s, viewing figures for the series never sank beneath 75 percent, and at one point were said to have risen to 95 percent, an estimated audience of some 600 million people. Everyone who could stopped what they were doing to sit in front of whatever television was available.

In villages across South Asia, hundreds of people would gather around a single set to watch the gods and demons play out their destinies. In the noisiest and most bustling cities, trains, buses and cars were suddenly stilled, and a strange hush came over the bazaars. In Rajasthan, audiences responded by offering aarti and burning incense sticks in front of their television sets, just as they did to the bhopa’s phad, the portable temple of the phad giving way to the temporary shrine of the telly.

Some bhopas had clung to their tradition, wrote Smith, but in a bastardised form, singing snatches of the epic for tourists in the Rajasthan palace hotels, or providing “exotic” entertainment in the restaurants of Delhi and Bombay. Either way, Smith concluded that “The tradition of epic performance is rapidly dying … Thus a tradition that was still flourishing in the 1970s—though even then promoting attitudes that seemed to belong to a much earlier age—has almost completely lapsed.”

When I had first read this, its grim prognosis sounded all too likely. But as I sat now in a tent full of enthusiastic Pabuji devotees, Smith’s predictions seemed unnecessarily extreme and gloomy. During an interval in the performance, while Mohan stopped for a glass of chai, and Mahavir continued to entertain the audience with a Hindi film song, I asked Mohan what he could possibly do to hold out against Bollywood and the TV, and if he was worried about the future. Were the epics merely going to become stories watched on television and borrowed from video libraries? What could the bhopas do to save their audiences?

Mohanji shrugged. “It’s true there is increasingly a problem with ignorance,” he said. “Here in Pabusar it is still fine. But in the towns and cities the younger generation know nothing of Pabuji. They don’t understand the meaning. If they listen it’s because of the music and dancing. They don’t know the hunkara—the correct responses—and they are always asking for irrelevant songs: new filmi ones from the latest movie that have nothing to do with the phad. Earlier people just wanted a pure recitation of Pabu—nothing else.

“I am always trying to improve my singing,” he added. “And for the younger generation I try to put in the occasional joke when people are getting sleepy. Nothing Bollywoodish or vulgar, just enough to grab attention in between scenes. It’s not easy for people to concentrate for eight hours—though here in the villages, where there are no distractions, few get up while I am performing.”

I asked: “Will the phad survive?”

“Oh yes,” he said firmly. “It will. It has to. For all that has changed, it is still at the centre of our life, and our faith, and our dharma.”

This, it seemed to me, was the key, and the answer to the question of how it was that the Rajasthani epics were still living in a way that the Iliad and the other epics of the West were not. The poems had been turned into religious rituals and the bhopas had become receptacles for the messages of the gods, able to penetrate the wall–in India always a fairly porous wall—between the divine and the mundane.

Moreover, the gods in question were not distant and metaphysical beings but deified locals to whom the herders could relate and who, in turn, could understand the villagers’ needs. The people of Pabusar certainly took care to propitiate the great “national” gods, like Shiva and Vishnu, whom they understood as controlling the continuation of the wider cosmos, but for everyday needs they prayed to the less remote, less awesome figures of their local god-kings and heroes who knew and understood the intimacies of the daily life of the farmers in a way that the great gods could not.