Nine Lives (18 page)

One afternoon, during a long walk through the desert, I met a
bhopa
sitting outside a simple whitewashed shrine topped with a pair of saffron flags. He was very old and dressed in a tatty white
kurta-dhoti
. He had a cataract in his left eye, and he parted his great fan of beard outward at the centre of his chin. This man worked as a village exorcist, and that night I was taken to see him cast out the evil spirit that was said to have entered one of the village girls. In the light of camphor flames, drums were beaten, mantras recited, and with a dramatic shout, the spirit was ordered out.

Afterwards, I heard that there were still many other
bhopas
, out in the wild places of the desert, whose job it was to recite the great epics, some of them thousands of stanzas long. They were the men I wanted to meet: my Rajasthani Homers.

Before long, I began to read up the different on oral traditions, to try to discover why it was that they had survived in some parts of the world, such as Rajasthan, and why in other places these traditions seemed to have completely disappeared.

In the summer of 1933, a young Harvard classicist named Milman Parry caught a ship to Yugoslavia. Parry set off on his travels intending to prove in the field a brilliant idea he had dreamed up in the libraries of Cambridge, Massachusetts: that Homer’s works, the foundation upon which all subsequent European literature rested, must have originally been oral poems. To study Homer properly, he believed, you had first to understand how oral poetry worked, and Yugoslavia was the place in Europe where it seemed such traditions had best survived.

On and off for the next two years, Parry toured the cafés of the Balkans. One of his assistants, Albert Lord, described the approach they adopted: ‘The best method of finding singers was to visit a Turkish coffee house,’ he wrote, ‘and to make enquiries there:

This is the centre for the peasant on the market day, and the scene of entertainment during the evening of the month of Ramadan. We found such a place in a side street, dropped in and ordered coffee. Lying on a bench not far from us was a Turk smoking a cigarette in an antique silver cigarette holder . . . He knew of singers. The best, he said, was a certain Avdo Mededovich, a peasant farmer who lived an hour away. How old is he? Sixty, sixty-five. Does he know how to read and write?
Ne zna, brate!
(No, brother!). . .

Finally Avdo came and sang for us of the taking of Baghdad in the days of Sultan Selim. We listened with increasing interest to this homely farmer, whose throat was disfigured by a large goitre. He sat cross-legged on a bench, sawing the
gusle
, swaying in rhythm with the music . . . The next few days were a revelation. Avdo’s songs were longer and finer than any we had heard before. He could prolong one for days, and some of them reached 15,000 or 16,000 lines.

What Parry found in the months that followed exceeded all his hopes. By the time he returned to America in September 1935 he had made recordings of no fewer than 12,500 heroic poems, songs and epics – tales of the great Serbian defeat by the Ottomans at Kosovo, or of the deeds of long-dead Balkan heroes – and had accumulated half a ton of aluminium recording discs.

Parry, often referred to as ‘the Darwin of oral literature’, died shortly afterwards, in a shooting accident, at the age of thirty-three; but his work revolutionised understanding of the Greek classics. Yet even while Parry was at work, the oral tradition was already beginning to die out in the cities of Yugoslavia. Since then, it has all but disappeared as a living institution, its end speeded by the bloody civil war that devastated the region in the 1990s.

In India, however, it seemed that an even more elaborate tradition had managed to survive relatively intact. An old anthropologist friend had told me how he once met a travelling storyteller in a village in southern India at the end of the 1970s. The bard knew the
Mahabharata –
India’s equivalent of the
Iliad
, the
Odyssey
and the Bible all rolled into one. The epic is the story of the rivalry of two sets of princely cousins whose enmity culminates in an Armageddon-like war on the battlefield of Kurukshetra; the
Bhagavad Gita
, for many Hinduism’s most profound and holy text, lies at its heart, a dialogue, on the eve of battle, between the god Krishna and one of the princely heroes about duty, illusion and reality.

With its hundred thousand
slokas
, the
Mahabharata
is fifteen times the length of the Bible. My friend had asked the bard how he could possibly remember it all. The minstrel replied that, in his mind, each stanza was written on a pebble. The pile of pebbles lay before him always; all he had to do was remember the order in which they were arranged and to ‘read’ from one pebble after another.

India’s population may not be particularly literate – the literacy rate is officially 65 per cent, compared with 77 per cent in the United States – but it remains surprisingly culturally erudite. As the critic Anthony Lane noted in 2001, in the aftermath of the Islamist attacks on America, the people of New York again and again compared what had happened to them to films or TV: ‘It was like
Independence Day
’; ‘It was like
Die Hard
’; ‘No,
Die Hard 2
.’ In contrast, when the great tsunami struck at the end of 2004, Indians were able to reach for a more sustaining narrative than disaster movies: the apocalyptic calamities and world-ending floods that fill the
Mahabharata
and Indian oral literature in general. As the great American Sanskrit scholar Wendy Doniger put it, ‘Myths pick up the pieces where philosophy throws up its hands. The great myths may help survivors to think through this unthinkable catastrophe, to make sense by analogy.’

While the
Mahabharata
is today the most famous of the Indian epics, it was originally only one of a great number. During the Mughal period, for example, the most popular was the great Muslim epic, the
Dastan-i Amir Hamza
or
Story of Hamza
. The brave and chivalrous Hamza, the father-in-law of the Prophet, journeys erratically from Iraq to Sri Lanka, via Mecca, Tangiers and Byzantium, in the service of the just Emperor Naushervan.
On the way he falls in love with various beautiful Persian and Greek princesses, while avoiding the traps laid for him by his enemies: the cruel villain Bakhtak and the necromancer and arch-fiend Zumurrud Shah.

Over the centuries, as the story of Hamza was told across the Islamic world, the factual underpinning of the narrative was covered in layers of subplots and a cast of dragons, giants and sorcerers. It was in India, however, that the Hamza epic took on a life of its own. Here it grew to an unprecedented size, absorbing whole oral libraries of Indian myths and legends. In this form it began to be regularly performed in the public spaces of the great Mughal cities. At fairs and at festivals, on the steps of the Jama Masjid in Delhi or in the Qissa Khawani, the Storyteller’s Street in Peshawar, the professional storytellers, or
dastan-gos
, would perform night-long recitations from memory; some of these could go on for seven or eight hours with only a short break. There was also a great tradition of the Mughal elite commissioning private performances of the Hamza epic – the greatest Urdu love poet, Ghalib, for example, was celebrated for his
dastan
parties at which the story would be expertly recited.

In its fullest form, the tale of Hamza grew to contain a massive 360 separate stories, which would take several weeks of all-night recitation to complete; the fullest printed version, the last volume of which was published in 1905, filled no fewer than forty-six volumes, each of which averaged 1,000 pages.
This Urdu version shows how far the epic had been reimagined into an Indian context in the course of many years of subcontinental retelling. Though the original Mesopotamian place names survived, the world depicted is that of Mughal India, with its obsession with poetic wordplay, its love of gardens and its extreme refinement of food and dress and manners. Many of the characters have Hindu names; they make oaths ‘as Ram is my witness’; and they ride on elephants with jewelled
howdahs
. To read it is to come as close as is now possible to the world of the Mughal campfires – those night gatherings of soldiers, Sufis, musicians and camp followers that one sees illustrated in Mughal miniatures: a storyteller beginning his tale in a clearing of a forest as the embers of the blaze glow red and the eager fire-lit faces crowd around.

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.