Nine Lives (17 page)

The temple was a simple village affair, but newly built in marble. It had a single image chamber containing an ancient hero stone showing the mounted Pabuji in profile, sword held high. The temple, tank, well and village of Pabusar were all inexorably linked, explained Mohan. One night, during a great drought, Pabu had come in a dream to one of the poets of the Charan caste in the area. He told the man to follow the footprints from his door, through the sand, to a distant shallow valley where, said Pabu, you will find a stone. Take that stone as your marker, continued the god, and dig down thirty hands deep and there you will find an inexhaustible supply of the sweetest water in all the Shekhawati. This hero stone was the stone in the dream, said Mohan. Once it had been built into the parapet of the well, but now, since the new temple had come up, it was worshipped as a
murti.

While he talked, Mohan placed two bamboo poles in the ground and unfurled the
phad
from right to left. It was like a wonderful Shekhawati fresco transferred to textile: a great vibrant, chaotic seventeen-foot-long panorama of medieval Rajasthan: women, horses, peacocks, carts, archers, battles, washer-men and fishermen, kings and queens, huge grey elephants and herds of white cows and buff camels, many-armed demons, fish-tailed wonder-creatures and blue-skinned gods, all arranged around the central outsized figure of Pabuji, his magnificent black mare, Kesar Kalami, and his four great companions and brothers-in-arms.

While Mohan set up, I looked closely at the
phad
. The durbar and palaces of the different players of the epic were the largest images, with Pabuji and his warriors in the centre, and the courts of his enemies, Jindrav Khinchi and Ravana, at the furthest distance from him at the two extremities. In between, all Indian life was here in this wonderfully lively, vivid textile, full of
joie de vivre
and folk-artistic gusto. The
phad
has a teeming energy that seems somehow to tap into the larger-than-life power of the epic’s mythology to produce wonderfully bold and powerful narrative images. It is also marked by a deep love of the natural world: dark-skinned elephants charge forward, trunks and tails curling with pleasure; pairs of peacocks display their tails, white doves and red-crowned hoopoes flit between mango orchards and banana plantations. Warriors charge into battle against roaring yellow tigers, swords at the ready.

The different figures and scenes were not compartmentalised, but were clearly organised with a strict logic. Like the ancient Buddhist paintings in the caves of Ajanta, the story was arranged by geographical rather than narrative logic: more a road map to the epic geography of courtly Rajasthan than a strip cartoon of the story. If two scenes were next to each other it was because they happened in the same location, not because they happened in chronological succession, one after the other.

Seeing me peering closely at the
phad
, Mohan said that it was the work of the celebrated textile artist Shri Lal Joshi of Bhilwara. His family had been making
phads
for nearly 700 years, and their images had more power than those of any other artist.

‘Even rolled up, Joshiji’s
phads
keep evil at bay,’ said Mohan. ‘The way he paints it, the involvement he has with the epic, gives his
phads
more
shakti
[power] than any other. His
phads
have the power to exorcise any spirit. Just to open it is to give a blessing.’

Mohan explained to me that once the
phad
was complete and the eyes of the hero were painted in, neither the artist nor the
bhopa
regarded it as a piece of art. Instead, it instantly became a mobile temple: as Pabuji’s devotees were semi-nomadic herders, his temple – the
phad –
visited the worshippers rather than the other way around. It was believed that the spirit of the god was now in residence, and that henceforth the
phad
was a ford linking one world with the next, a crossing place from the human to the divine.

From this point, said Mohan, the
phad
was treated with the greatest reverence. He made daily offerings to it, and said he would pass it on to one of his children once he became too old to perform. If the
phad
got ripped or faded, he would call the original painter and take it with him to the Ganges, or the holy lake at Pushkar. There they would together decommission it, or, as he put it,
thanda karna –
make it cool, remove the
shakti
of the deity – before consigning it to the holy waters, rather like Excalibur being returned to the lake in the legends of King Arthur.

‘It is always a sad moment,’ said Mohan. ‘Each
phad
gives great service, but eventually they become so threadbare you can no longer see anything. After we have laid it to rest, we throw a feast, as if it was the cremation of a family member. Then we consecrate a new
phad
. It is like an old man dying, and a child being born.’

Batasi was now cleaning the space in front of the
phad
, and lighting a clutch of incense sticks. Shrawan tightened the screws of his
dholak
drum, and began to tap out a slow beat. A small
jyot
(lamp) of cow dung was lit by Mohan, and circled in front of the image of Pabu. Then he blew a conch shell, announcing that the performance was about to begin. The farmers of the village finished their card games and cups of chai, and began to gather around. It was already getting cold, the temperature dropping rapidly in the desert on winter nights, and several of the farmers pulled their shawls tightly around them, tucking the loose end under their chins.

Mohan then picked up his
ravanhatta –
a kind of desert zither, a spike fiddle with eighteen strings and no frets – and began to pluck it regularly with his thumb.

‘We’d better make a start,’ he said. ‘The reading of the
phad
should begin not long after sunset. We have a long night ahead of us, and the flame of my voice only really starts to glow after midnight.’

I had first come across the
bhopas
– shamans and bards – of Rajasthan twenty years previously, when I went to live in a fort outside Jodhpur to begin work on a book about Delhi.

Bruce Chatwin was then my hero, and his widow, Elizabeth, had told me about a remote fortress in the desert where Bruce had written his wonderful study of restlessness,
The Songlines
. Rohet Garh was built by a Rajput chieftain who had been given land by the maharaja as a reward for bravery on the battlefield. It was surrounded by a high, battlemented wall that faced out over a lake. In the morning, light would stream into the bedroom through cusped arches, and reflections from the lake would ripple across the ceiling beams. There were egrets nesting on an island in the lake, and peacocks in the trees at its side.

Though relatively close to New Delhi – only nine hours’ drive to the west – Rohet existed in an utterly different world, almost in a different century. In Delhi, the Indian middle class among whom I lived inhabited a fragile, aspirational bubble. On every side, new suburbs were springing up, full of smart apartment blocks and gyms and multiplexes.
As you drove down the Jaipur Highway, however, the trappings of modernity dropped away, and the further you went towards Jodhpur, the drier it got. Fertile fields full of yellow winter mustard were replaced by sandy melon beds and fields of drooping sunflowers. It was as if the colour was beginning to drain away from the landscape, but for the odd flash of a red sari: a woman winding her way to the village well.

Rohet Garh was the home of a
thakur –
a Rajasthani gentleman landowner. Secluded in his oasis in the Thar Desert, he had preserved the quiet, ordered way of life inherited from his feudal forebears, a way of life not wholly dissimilar to that of those reclusive tsarist landlords immortalised by Chekhov and Turgenev. To enter the gates of Rohet Garh was to walk into a world familiar from
A Month in the Country
or
Sketches from a Huntsman’s Album.
Lapdogs careered over croquet lawns. Long-widowed grandmothers and great-aunts held court from far-flung dowager wings. Unmarried daughters would blush into their silks while their father loudly discussed their suitors.

Only the fortnightly expedition into ‘town’ broke the daily routine. The entire family, along with lapdogs, Labradors and a full complement of servants, would pile into the family jeep. Then they would set off, over the scrubland, to the town house in Jodhpur. There the great-aunts would be wheeled to their rival temples, the unmarried daughters and visiting nieces would buy new
salwars
and the boys stock up on cartridges for their sand grouse shoots. Thakur Sahib would visit his bank manager, and his club. I would remain in the old fort, and I used to relish the solitude. From my desk, the desert scrub was flat and dry, and its very harshness concentrated the mind. In the following weeks, the pages of the new manuscript began to pile up.

Rajasthan was a profoundly conservative state, even by the standards of India. During the Raj, around two-fifths of India’s vast landmass remained under the control of its indigenous princely rulers, and a fair proportion of this autonomous territory lay in Rajasthan, where semi-feudal rule had effectively continued up to 1971, when Indira Gandhi finally abolished the maharajas.

The absence of any form of colonial British intrusion meant that many surprising aspects of medieval Indian society had remained intact. On the one hand, this meant that the grip of the old feudal landlords – like Thakur Sahib – was stronger here than elsewhere; cases of ritual widow-burning, or suttee, were not unknown. On the other hand, castes of nomadic musicians, miniaturists and muralists, jugglers and acrobats, bards and mime artists were still practising their skills. Every prominent family of the land-holding Rajput caste, I discovered, inherited a family of oral genealogists, musicians and praise singers, who celebrated the family’s lineage and deeds. It was considered a great disgrace if these minstrels were forced by neglect to formally ‘divorce’ their patrons. Then they would break the strings of their instruments and bury them in front of their patron’s house, cutting the family off from the accumulated centuries of ancestral songs, stories and traditions. It was the oral equivalent of a magnificent library being burned to cinders.

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.’