“In this village, everyone still loves the epic as much as they ever did,” said Mohan. “There really is very little difference from the response I saw to my father’s performances when I was a boy. It’s true that some of the old customs have gone: when I was growing up, for example, if a water buffalo delivered a calf, the first milk and the first yoghurt were always offered to Pabu. These days no one seems to bother.
“And then there is a feeling that Pabuji himself is a little more distant than he used to be. When I was Onkar’s age everyone in the village used to hear the noise of Pabuji riding through the village at night, circling the houses and the temple, guarding us from demons and epidemics. But it has been many years now since I heard the sound of his hooves. I don’t know why that is. Perhaps because we have less faith than we used to, or because we show him less devotion.
“But you asked about the phad,” he added. “Yes, here at least the phad has survived. Everyone knows it.”
I asked why he thought that was.
“You see,” said Mohan, “this village was founded by Pabuji, so we are all of us great devotees. We don’t ignore the other gods: they are wonderful and powerful in their own way, and their own place. But here if we have a problem we naturally seek first the help of Pabu.”
“Especially if it is a problem with an animal,” said Mr. Sharma. “That is what he is most famous for.”
“The great gods are here of course,” added the goldsmith. “But Pabuji is close to us, and when we need immediate help it is more sensible to ask him.”
“Pabu is a Rajput,” said a man in a turban, who had also been listening in. “We people who worship Pabu are comfortable with his company. Like us, he eats meat and drinks liquor also.”
“He understands us and knows our fields and our animals.”
“He is a god from our own people,” said Mohan. “He is like us.”
“Not that the other gods are far away,” added Mr. Sharma. “Gods are gods. Whatever god you worship, he is close to you.”
“But it’s like applying to the village sarpanch [headman],” said Mohan, “rather than asking the prime minister. Naturally we are closer to the sarpanch.”
I wondered whether this lack of a devotional following was the reason that the great Indian Muslim epic, the Dastan-i Amir Hamza, had died out: its last recorded performance was on the steps of the Jama Masjid in Delhi in 1928. The Hamza epic was always understood to be primarily an entertainment, and so had died as fashions changed. But the bhopas and their religious rituals had survived because the needs and hungers that they addressed remained.
“Will Shrawan take on the tradition?” I asked Mohan.
“Of course,” he said. “He knows the whole epic. All he lacks yet is confidence, and a wife with a sweet voice. But he loves Pabuji, and he can see that it’s a good life. When the gods are asleep”—during the monsoon season—“I stay at home and look after the goats. In the other months, I travel with my phad wherever I want. There is still a lot of work for a good bhopa—all the castes around here still commission readings of the phad when they need something.”
Mahavir and Shrawan were now beckoning for Mohan to return to the phad to continue the performance. Mohan smiled, and held up a single finger to indicate that he would come in just a minute. “For myself, all my life my heart has been bound up in the phad and its stories,” he said. “I have never had any real interest in agriculture or any other work. Pabuji has recognised this, and has guarded us. We none of us have ever had a serious illness.
“Every day, I get up hungry in the morning,” he said, picking up his ravanhatta, “but thanks to him, neither I nor my family ever go to bed on an empty stomach. Not everyone in the village could say that, even the Brahmins and Rajputs.
“It is Pabuji who does this,” said Mohan Bhopa, walking back to the phad and strumming the first note with his thumb. “It is he who looks after us all.”
Postscript
About a month after my trip to Pabusar, Mohan and Batasi came to Jaipur and we did another event together, at the literary festival there. Mohan was in his usual sparkling, mischievous form, dancing as flirtatiously as an eighteen-year-old despite his advancing years. Then a fortnight later, back in Delhi, I heard he was dead.
After his performance at the festival, Mohan had complained to a mutual friend of stomach pains, and had been taken to the main state hospital in Jaipur. Advanced leukaemia was diagnosed within a week, but owing to some bureaucratic tangle, Mohan had been directed first to a small hospital in the Shekhawati, and then on to Bikaner. At each of these he had been refused treatment, for bureaucratic or financial reasons, and sent on to another place. It is the sort of thing that often happens to the poor and powerless in India. When he died, still hospital-less, in Bikaner, ten days after the first diagnosis, he had received no medical treatment whatsoever, not even a painkiller.