Oral Traditions in Jaipur: a Storyteller’s Tale by William Dalrymple
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Mohan Bhopa is a tall, wiry, dark-skinned man of about 60, with a bristling grey handlebar moustache and a mischievous grin. He wears a long red robe and a tightly tied red turban. I first came across him in the garden of a palace hotel in Jaipur, where he was preparing to entertain a bus full of tired French tourists. They had just come back from a day trooping around the forts of Rajasthan and looked badly in need of a drink. None of them seemed to show much interest in the entertainers that had been laid on for them.
The time for his performance came, and Mohan duly picked up his zither as his wife, Batasi, held up the lamp to illuminate the textile that had been erected behind them both. Mohan played an instrumental overture, then, accompanied by his son on the dholak drum, he began to sing in a voice full of solemnity and sadness. Every so often, as Batasi held up the lamp, he would stop, point with his bow to an illustration on the textile and then recite a line of explanatory verse, all the while plucking at the string with his thumb.
At the end of each verse, 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 verses 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, delicate and almost feminine movements.
The performance only lasted a few minutes, and before long, the group had got up and headed off to dinner. But I was intrigued by what I had seen and stopped to talk to the couple. Mohan, it turned out, was no ordinary hotel entertainer: he was a bard and a village shaman, who, though completely illiterate, was one of the last hereditary singers of a great Rajasthani mediaeval poem, the Epic of Pabuji, a short passage from which he had just sung.
This 600-year-old poem is a fabulous tale of heroism and honour, struggle and loss, and finally, martyrdom and vengeance. When this 4,000-line courtly poem is recited from beginning to end — which rarely happens these days – it takes no less than five nights of eight-hour, dusk-till-dawn performances to unfold. Depending on the number of chai breaks and Hindi films, songs and other diversions added into the programme, it can, on occasion, take much longer.
What I had seen was, in fact, a fragment of one of the world’s last surviving traditions of oral epic poetry. Bhopas, like Mohan, who know the epic by heart, are in effect modern Indian Homers still alive and well in Rajasthan. Before long, I had persuaded Mohan to let me go back with him to his village, so I could discover more about this extraordinary story.
Spoken Histories
Rajasthan, the most popular destination in India for British travellers, and famed for its wonderful palace and hotels, is also arguably the most conservative state in the country. 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 British intrusion meant that many surprising aspects of mediaeval Indian society had remained intact. On the one hand, this meant that the grip of the old feudal landlords 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 and bards and mimes were still practicing their skills.
Every prominent family in the landholding Rajput caste 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.
The most remarkable survival of all is a number of orally-transmitted epic poems, unique to the state. Many of these celebrate deified cattle heroes, who died rescuing a community’s cattle from rustlers. A long accumulation of hagiography has transformed once historical characters into gods. 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 gods, and their epics grew into something approaching liturgies. But unlike the ancient epics of Europe—the Iliad, the Odyssey, Beowulf, and the 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 like Mohan who travelled from village to village, staging performances.
Keepers of the Legend
The landscape, as we neared Mohan’s village of Pabusar, was a white, sun-leached expanse of dry desert plains, spiky acacia bushes and wind-blown camel’s-thorn. The emptiness was broken only by the odd cowherd in a yellow turban, patiently leading his beasts through the dust, and by a long, slow convoy of nomads in camel carts, pursued by a rearguard of barking dogs.
Once, as we turned off the main Jaipur-Bikaner highway, we passed a group of nomadic Rabari woman, in saris of bright primary colours, resting in the narrow shade of a single, gnarled desert tree; abandoned road building equipment lay scattered all around them. A little later, we saw a group of three Jain nuns in white robes, with masks over their faces, pushing a fourth in a white wheel chair through the open desert.
In Mohan’s village at least, it seems the tradition of the epics is still alive and well. That night, which turned out to be a day sacred to Pabuji, I saw Mohan perform all night for his peers.
The farmers and villagers were all sitting and squatting on a red and black striped duree under the shamiana of the tents and were wrapped up against the cold, with scarves, shawls and mufflers. Rather than sitting back and enjoying a formal performance, as the tourists in Jaipur had done, the villagers joined in, laughing loudly at some points, interrupting in others, joking with Mohan and completing the final line of each stanza.
Three generations of the family performed as well as Mohan and Batasi: Shrawan was on dholak, the eldest son Mahavir also joined in with his ravanhatta, and Mahavir’s naughty four year old son Onkar, Mohan’s eldest grandson, danced alongside his grandfather in a white salvar-dhoti. The family sung for three hours without break, and the audience cheered and clapped.
“Because the performance is dedicated to our god Pabuji, we are never allowed to get up in the middle,” said the village goldsmith, who was sitting next to me. “Until the bhopa-ji gets tired and stops for chai, we have to sit and listen out of respect—even until dawn.”
“But now that we have TV, our children don’t like to listen so much,” added Mr Sharma, one of the village Brahmins. “The younger generation prefer the CD with the main points of the story. It takes only three- four hours maximum.”
The idea that the oral tradition was seriously endangered was something I had heard repeated ever since I first heard 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 had taken up work peddling cycle-rickshaws or sweeping in temples. They told him that fewer and fewer people were interested in the performances,
The following morning I asked Mohan what he could possibly do to preserve his tradition against the competition of 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?
Mohan-ji shrugged: “It’s true there is increasingly a problem with ignorance,” he said. “Here in the villages of Rajasthan it is still fine. I am always trying to improve my singing. 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 tradition 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 religion. For myself, all my life my heart has been bound up in the epic and its stories. I have never had any real interest in agriculture or any other work. Pabuji has recognised this and has guarded us. Every day I get up hungry in the morning, 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. It is Pabuji who does this. It is he who looks after us all.”
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