Meditations on Nomadism, Pastoralism in the history of Indian Thar

Coauthored with Dr. Debabrata Banerjee

In the winter months of 1996-97 we in AZERC (Arid Zone Environment Research Centre) planned a reconnaissance that crisscrossed the districts of Bikaner, Jaisalmer, Barmer and the area known as Shekhawati, in the Churu and Jhunjhunun districts where the discontinuous splinters of the 609 km Aravali range mark the eastern limits of the Thar. The region traversed is the eastern extension of the vast persio- arabian desert which joins the great Sahara on the west. It can also be seen as the eastern limit of the great chain of hot deserts stretching across the entire width of the Ancient World.

While planning the itineraries with the road map of Rajasthan and India spread out in front of us, eyes were scanning the western sections of the maps and fingers touching names of places located in regions, with annual average rainfall of less than 50 cms which is erratically distributed; temperatures ranging between 4548 degrees in summer and below freezing points in winters; low humidity and high wind velocity, even during the monsoon months, making the area moisture deficient. Prospects of a journey through the desert excited our imaginations about the illustrious gallery of travelers who had traversed portions of the region in different historical periods. From Huen Thsang, who came in the 7^th century A.D. to James Tod, the father of modern travel in the desert, all of them have talked about the adventures, hardships of the passage through this stalking ground of droughts and famines, the marusthali or the region of death.

Our reconnaissance over a period of one and a half months consisted of sixteen itineraries crisscrossing the three most arid districts of Rajasthan. At the end of it we had traveled a little over 5000 km on highways, link roads, sandy trails and rail tracks. An abstract desert like feeling accompanied by long desolate distances and vast stretches of emptiness enveloped us in the course of our journey through the landscape (rather a dreamscape), even though the transport revolution of the last quarter century has completely altered the meaning of time and travel here.

Before the 20^th century i.e. prior to the early phase of the recent transport revolution, the devouring landscape must have been like the ‘unharvested’ sea of Homer where men can pas through as a pilgrim and a sojourner and can halt there for a brief moment. We were particularly reminded of a folk saying about drought which must have been composed many years ago but is still popular. It can be roughly translated as:

“Feet in Pugal (Bikaner), head in Umarkot (Sind), limbs in Barmer, keeps wandering in Jodhpur and resides in Jaisalmer”.

This couplet describing the omnipresent expanse of drought in the Thar more closely represents the base reality of Thar and seems more apt as a metaphor. During these excursions through settlements, archaeological sites, grasslands and along the IGNP canal, the eye was in search of images which capture moments from the contemporary life and the state of the biosphere of the Thar. The journeys became a series of discussions a patchwork of sorts constituted by the micro regions within the Thar.

The sense of history which guided us one which was attentive to the longer time scales, the longee duree, that prodigious mass as F. Braudel described it, that bears within it an unconscious heritage. In other words we were interested in the history of the human and livestock communities of the Thar and the physical territory in which they were inscribed, the deciphering of the relations, multiple, intertwined and elusive, between man and biosphere in Thar. Many settlements and the places we visited were living testimonies of rich historical as well as pre historical tradition and sensibility. The conversations with people afforded ample opportunities for reflections on the longee duree of the Thar. In particular this meandering into the past was impelled by the need to situate the historical rationality of nomadism and pastoralism as a way of life and as a resource use strategy more firmly into our existence. This was considered necessary as a historical rationality is often found lacking in the numerous prophecies (like nomadic pastoralism will / must / should disappear) on the future of pastoralism and the pastoral communities in the Thar.

The Indian Thar is a region with a fabulously rich prehistory and history where a range of cultures have coexisted and interacted with one another. We get ample evidence on the transition from the Lower to the Upper Paleolithic phase of industry. This transition to a microlithic material culture was facilitated by a dramatic increase in bio mass and human population mainly due increased rainfall as becomes evident from lake sediments and buried soil in the sand dunes in western Rajasthan. Consequently, pastoralism and nomadism, the mainstay of the culture and the moral economy of contemporary western Rajasthan, originated in the Mesolithic age that began in 9000 B.C., with the site at Bagor providing the earliest evidence of domesticiation of animals around the 5000 B.C.

Further development of Neolithic, Chalcolithic and the urban Harrapan sites from 6000 to 2000 BC, was a simultaneous occurrence. Simultaneous developmental and stylistic differences among sites, incorporating Neolithic, Chalcolithic and Harrapan cultures make up a mosaic that is basic to South Asian prehistory. Archaeological reconstruction implies the existence of similar but distinct groups of people in a common region, possibly interacting yet maintaining different forms of economic adaptation (i.e. farmers, hunter gatherers and pastoralists as well as groups following a combinatory of subsistence strategies. After all is time not both continuous as well as discontinuous and history does not stand for progress and meaning all the time. We were asking such questions when the sun was setting on a mature pre Harappan site of Kalibangan, which is surrounded by irrigated fields and double cropped areas in the Ghaggar river bed, as it was even five thousand years ago. What was the nature and consequence of the interaction over time between food gathering, pastoral nomadic cultures and urban sites / complexes which controlled

large tracts of domesticated food producing areas by means of an evolved hierarchical social structure and ‘hydro-managerialism’? Given the apparent openness of the settlement grid fore the Harrapan Urban phase the noted archaeologist Gregory Posshel argues that “extensive pastoralism may have been the predominant subsistence practice of these times as well”. Why should it be that so many of the Early Harrapan settlements like Kalibangan were abandoned at that point of time when there seems to be evidence of the development of an internally differentiated, structurally specialized society in this region? What was the nature of this abandonment process? Was it a shift to nomadic pastoralism as the biotic and non biotic costs of the transition to a settled agricultural life proved too overbearing!

Musing on this question ever since we came across evidence which shows that during the mature well developed Harrapan phase, food gathering and nomadic pastoral communities from Baluchistan, Afghanistan, Punjab and other contiguous areas did indeed migrate en masse to urban centres, and / or to the double cropped areas surrounding them. This was a meaningful process whereby prehistory made a transition to the planeof History, i.e. civilization. However this process lasted for about four hundred years and, by 2000 B.C. all the major Harappan cities were abandoned and a process of dispersal set in. The twin phases of maturation and dispersal into the night of history of Harappan civilization has been admirably mapped on the Pakistan side of the Thar called Cholistan by M. Rafique Mughal. According to him, the hydrological deterioration (e.g. the drying of the Hakra river bed and the westward shift of the Indus system) forced most people to abandon the flood plains. In a more general sense it is argued that the desert had engulfed many settlements, as attested by the history of sand dune formation in the area. This is quite plausible if we recollect that sand dunes elsewhere have buried capital c

ities, its houses, streets and aqueducts.

After Harappan civilizations’s possible conflicts and interactions with nomadism, the next high point in the history of the Thar is represented by the orgin and consolidation of Rajput polity. The origin of Rajputs is inexorably bound with the upsurge in nomadic conquests and expansion from the 6^th century A.D. The Chinese chronicler Huen Thsang was the first to make this observation when writing about the Gurjara Pratihara kingdom of western India in the 7^th century A.D. British colonial annalists and geographers such as James Tod and A. Cunningham have elaborated on the same point. More detailed research by the eminent contemporary historians like Prof. R.S. Sharma, Prof. B.D. Chattopadhaya has sought to explain this phase of nomadic conquests in terms of ‘an imposition of clan aristocracies on old settled villages’.

However the nomadic origins of Rajputs became a thing of the past once they had come to terms with civilization. In the process it so tempered and transformed itself that the Rajputs soon became the ruling ideologues of supra local and supra regional State form which articulated its power interms of Brahmanical injunctions, mythical genealogies and initiatives taken in the construction of wells and reservoirs. This process of inversion from nomadism was made possible by the ideological hegemony of High Brahmanism, then the dominant civilization of the subcontinent. Such a pattern of consolidation was unlike what had happened in northern Sahara and east Africa where nomadic States sprang up from nowhere, adapted to a sedentary form of life only for a brief moment before vanishing again into darkness. The stabilization of the rajput polity was guaranteed, albeit paradoxically by an upsurge of the main aspects of nomadism i.e. long distance transhumance and the movement of long caravans along nomadic trails. A rejuvenation of these routes linked the Indian Thar to the silk route, Persia, Arabia, and beyond. Capital accumulation in Marwar (western Rajasthan) also starts from this period when we hear Arab geographers talk about the widespread circulation of Indo Sassanian silver coinage in this region in the 10^th century A.D.

Supra regional Rajput states were based on feudalism with a method of quartering or garrisoning of

a conquering warrior aristocracy and its followers (= army) on the land. These fortifications weresecured by a fief system that was mostly distributed along clan lines. Certain nomadic aspects were in built in the distribution of fiefs suchas communal land / tribal ownership and the duo decimal pattern of distribution.

These numerous fortifications could not withstand what was possibly the greatest wave of nomadic expansion in World History, signaled by the advent of early Islam. For ‘Islam is the desert, it is the emptiness, the ascetic rigor, the inherent mysticism, the devotion to the implacable sun, unifying principles on which myths are founded, and the thousand consequences of this human vacuum. Founders of all the dynasties of the four empires of theOrient, the Ottomans (from Seliq), the Uzbeks (from the Mongols of the Goldern Horde), and the Mughals (from the Chagtai Horde) and the Saffavids had their initial following among the nomads. The hordes from Ghazni and the region of Ghor that devoured the Rajput supra regional states were driven by a fundamental nomadic impulse.

However we need not belabor and oversimplify this point. Islam cannot be equated with nomadism for Islam is a civilization. But the point is that its world was this vast waterless band with deserts and grasslands which contained the largest reservoir of nomadic peoples. The history of the core area of the Islamic world was patterned around the nomad city syndrome; and it is the particular virtue of Ibn Khaldun, the great historian of the 14^th century to have built a theory of historical development on this basis. The nomadic base of early Islam needs to be separated from its urbanism, monotheistic ideology and a highly evolved political and ruling class infrastructure. Islamic civilization thereby offered a mechanism for co opting and settling the nomad. Marco Polo observed this in Anatolia where the Turkish nomads wee adapting themselves to a sedentary way of life. A similar story is repeated in Morocco and Tunisia. Similarly in the arid regions of western India, formal institutions of Islamic polity offered immense advantages to the Rajpout states, e’g. the indigenous land grant system- the patta- became a replica of the Mughal land grant system- the iqta and the jagir system.

The remarkably detailed census by Mohnot Nainsi, the 17^th century chronicler of the Jodhpur state enables to infer that the pastoral economy was a flourishing autonomous sector of considerable importance size in the seventeenth century. The colonial state symbolizing the new civilization had to come to terms with this predominantly pastoral and nomadic Thar in the nineteenth century. The British involvement in the early decades of the nineteenth century explored the possibilities of using the Thar as a ‘corridor zone’ for connecting the ports of Gujarat and Bombay with the regions on and across the Indus. The still flourishing periodic fairs, markets in Kabul and Afghanistan were marked out as having lucrative prospects for selling English goods especially woolens. The colonial regime concentrated on the ways to monopolize and broad base this ‘passage through the desert’. The later part of the nineteenth century imposed its own imprint on this already existing network of the lines of communication. The laying of around 600 miles of railway network in this period and the resultant brisk traffic by rail worked to the marginalization of pedlars and traditional carriers (banjaras and baldias) whose populations declined all over Marwar in the later part of the nineteenth century. They either disappeared altogether or were confined to local networks of exchange. Livelihood strategies related to or dependent upon livestock products like the prolific production of woolens in the countryside crumbled under the growing weight of exports of raw wool and the process of deindustrialization.

The greater penetration of the market in late colonial times through newer modes of carriage ironically also provided the material context for the growing economic importance of sheep rearing in western Rajasthan. The British records all through the nineteenth century single out animal wealth and livestock products like wool and ghee (clarified butter) as the major resources of the arid regions of Rajaputana. Livestock fairs, main source of income of native states, still proliferated all over the almost all the major micro regions of Thar. The bigger regions like Marwar continued to supply animals to as far as United and Central Provinces. The British tried to extract a share in this importance source of income of the Rajput states by trying to levy its own export duties, tariffs or even at places jointly organizing new fairs like the Trevor fair in Jodhpur which was to compete with the Tilwara fair. This expansion of commerce was made possible by the colonial structures of dominance and control. These were deployed right through the nineteenth century, which was described by the British in disquieting terms, to coerce and regulate the mobility of several nomadic communities who were perpetually on the move.

By selectively narrating sections out of the prehistory and history of Thar the ideas is not to present any synoptic account of the mere occurrence of nomadism and pastoralism in the long history of human settlement in the Thar. Rather, the point we are raising pertains to a more complex order of observation, i.e. the multifarious interactions including conflicts between nomadism and civilization. This was among the most important contradictions of the Ancient world and though the significance of this interaction is not as great as it was in the past, yet the terms of the conflict are still opposed to one another in western Rajasthan as in the Sahara and the cold deserts of Central Asia. We have tried to show in the preceding paragraphs that the peak points in the history of Thar have had something to do with a heightened and dramatic rise of this conflict. In other words what we are suggesting is that the longee duree of the Thar is basically structured by as conflict between nomadism and civilization.

So too in contemporary western Rajasthan, the dialectic between pastoral nomadism and civilization is far from being resolved despite the latter’s overall hegemony and dominance. That semi nomadic pastoralism is still one of the most popular livelihoods practiced by the people of Thar was quite apparent to us during our travels. By the tuime we had traveled a few hundred kilometers the eyes were quite used to seeing flocks and sheep and goat grazing on grasslands, scrubby landscape, agricultural fields spread both sides of the roads. Novel attractions to the eye in the beginning they soon became permanent fixtures inscribed as if they were in the sandy landscape of the Thar.

Even with the coming of canals in the north and west Rajasthan a process of arable expansion and sedentary processes have brought large part of the vast sprawling grasslands and open spaces into agricultural fields. But even here, ‘contrary to what might have been expected, the expansion of agriculture and the broader assault on pastoral resources in the home ranges of sheep pastoralists has not led to the abandoning of sheep pastoralism but rather to a transformation and increasing emphasis on a migratory means of resource use: an intensification of the pastoral practice…” so writes Prof. Purnendu Kavoori in 1999.

Our deep seated prejudices as civilized human beings have not only made us greedy, aggressive and atomized creatures involved in the fundamental war of all against all. It has also made us tragically oblivious of our common links with the nomads, besides much else.

In his meditation on the Australian aborigines, Bruce Chatwin writes:

“…psychiatrists, politicians, tyrants are forever assuring us that wandering life is an aberrant form of behaviour; a neurosis, a form of unfulfilled sexual longing, a sickness, which in the interests of civilization must be suppressed.”

(With fond remembrance of ecstatic journeys with Uttam Singh, Mukesh Sharma, Guman Singh, Chatar Singh)