Ukhrul and Tanghkul Nagas

Sandstorm Tango

The absence of monsoon has been one of the quintessential experiences in the popular psyche of arid Thar in Rajasthan. The region is endowed with extremely scarce rainfall - less than 100-150mm - and every three years out of five are drought years. Much of the history of everyday life here has revolved around this overwhelming marker of seasons and the monsoon makes its presence felt by the eerie silence that scars the pristine Thar each time it does not come.

Plunged in prolonged scarcity, stoic locals harden themselves to cope with the annual misery and drudgeries associated with droughts that have been the reverse of monsoons and the rains they bring. When the monsoon does not come, time gets elongated into one long tale of hardship and tragedy, and coping to survive becomes the dominant rhythm of everyday life. The wait for monsoons is a never-ending saga of the resilient spirit of the people in the Thar to survive amidst hardships. This chronicle - the leitmotif of much of the common popular folklore in Thar - is undoubtedly more heroic, subaltern and radical than the chivalric corpus of feudal panegyrics, still recounted by bards of the oral tradition and folklore in the deep, dusty sandy interiors of the desert.

The non-existence and irregularity of the monsoon in most years of the previous decade has contributed to the persistence of drought in most parts of Thar. It is as if the failure of the monsoon has cast its evil wrath on a region that has been rashly colonised by the onslaught of private capital, reeling under the greed of a chosen few legitimised by the top-heavy development paradigm of the establishment.

The peculiar, dry and sharp heat, beefed up by vigorous dusty sand storms, make the summers look like a never ending infinity. The daily life of most people is one continual struggle for securing the basic necessities of food, fodder for the cattle, and water. Amra Ram from Dedusar village in Barmer district runs a government-supported famine relief cattle camp. "We have got just enough, the bare minimum to pass this annual ordeal. If it does not rain, then the real problem begins. How long can you stretch this camp? People would have no choice but to migrate or leave their cattle stray," he says. Cattle left stray also means that they will be left to die.

"The chief minister has listened to us, so at least the Public Distribution System (PDS) shop in the village is open for some days in a month and we can get our rations," Laxmi from Navatala village points out with a sigh of relief. At Hathma village, women can be seen huddled up in long queues in front of a hand-pump that runs only for some hours in the day. During these months, 'Thar women' spend an average of two to three hours daily organising a few pots of water.

Fazal looks intently at the barren fields and rain-parched land all around him. If monsoons do not come, he may have no option but to keep going to MNREGS public works, the new guise of the old famine/drought relief works. Each day he goes to dig earth for a pond desilting work at a site 6km from his house. He leaves at 4am in the morning to join work that begins at 6am. There are many like him, men and women in different villages, who spend consecutive summers like this, year after year after year.

Mohan Ram talks nihilistically about the tragic fate of common people, expressing his anguish and despair, heightened by the extreme heat around. The dusty, audacious violent winds that swallow the village in the day, when you can barely see beyond two feet, clogs hope, chokes sensibilities and dries up precious life-giving fluids. The heat it generates is only to be matched by the deep red colour of the flowers of the eternal kair shrub, the par excellence xerophyte plant of Thar. The blazing oven of Thar only begins to get slightly toned down by the evening, which then slowly slips into the cool solace promised by the thousand-starred sky and the blue moonlight that illumines the Thar late in the night.

The uninterrupted tango of the vigorous winds and sand storms slowly, persistently, try to pull the rains down. As if they are whispering, in a dry, breathless sound symphony: come rain, come. Hence, cloud-gazing becomes the dominant fixation of most villagers during these hard, thirsty days when tufts of shallow, soulless clouds can be seen in the sky, their colour changing from pale blue to a deeper, richer blue. Oh, meaningless clouds, without water!Indeed, the pessimism and sense of fatalism that engulfs the eternal wait for the monsoon fades away with the coming of the rains. It's a sudden metamorphosis from the dead-end of despair to quick happiness, and yet, there is a philosophical acceptance. Something as rare as the rain is celebrated by the Thar in a grand way.

Khwaja Ghulam Farid, the wandering desert mystic, expresses this beautifully in his qalam (rendition), Kaldi jungle vich, a perfect pastoral romance that passionately describes how the desert comes to life after the rains - the grasslands shine with hues of green, the ponds are full to their brims with water and the vegetation, flocks of sheep and cattle are out in the grasslands, the parched lithosphere becomes animated with insects like the dung beetle, and a variety of colourful snakes wriggle out on the dark brown water-soaked sand.

The carnivalesque laughter of the rains, the grand festive celebration of colours, heralds the experience of abundance and its magic touch enlivens and rejuvenates everything. In these times, when the State and private capital combine is moving relentlessly and unabashedly with its nefarious design of appropriating the resources of Thar, when the 'idea of development' is less a quest for collective well-being and more an enterprise for the profit-obsessed rich and powerful, the monsoon is the only hope for the vulnerable. Oh rain, bless the Thar this time.

From HARDNEWS, July 2010, see

MNREGA Ignores Sufi Folk musicians of thar desert

Sufi Folk musicians of thar desert combat drought to live with dignity

The ensuing note tells about an effort by Mir musicians to combat desert strife in the hope of safeguarding their life affirming creativity. As drought tightens its clutches, with the advancing summers dooming lives to ever increasing daily misery, the Mirs are engaged in a valiant quest for dignity for themselves and their musical traditions that are a rich repertoire of sufiyana qalam and nirgun bhakti.

Baba Farid Rang is a small learning camp organised in a small settlement called 1PB (Pugal Branch), one of the IGNP settlements in Bikaner, Rajasthan. At a time when there has been practically no water for irrigation since the past year and a drinking water scarcity that worsens with each day, the Mirs have decided to take on these hostile conditions by invoking their soul stirring music, in the hope of rescuing themselves from the grip of this scourge of drought.

Most of the Mir singers are BPL families who do not really get work in the on going NREGA works that have large numbers to accommodate on their muster rolls, besides being entrenched in nepotism, delayed and irregular payments. For the Mirs it is an attempt to revive their tradition and earn a more respectable and dignified work other than just digging and carting earth.

The camp has been going on since last month supported through voluntary contributions from music enthusiasts from Delhi and Mumbai. There have been five learners and three ustads who occasionally visit the camp that continues with full passion and energy in the blazing heat of the day and cool star studded nights.

Such a collective effort would be surely motivated from your kind support. You could give them an opportunity to perform. If not an opportunity for performance, some modest contribution to help carry on with this by including more musicians, both learners and ustads.

Abdul Jabbar (09784939212) and Bassu Khan (09929787552) are leaders of the camp. You could get in touch with them for supporting their music. Since correspondence to these areas is difficult, contributions could be directly put into their joint bank account the details for which are as follows:

State Bank of Bikaner and Jaipur, Pugal, Bikaner

Bank Code: 10408

IFC Code: SBBJ0010408

Bank Account No. : 61092898080

Cheque could be given in the name of Abdul Jabbar and Bassu Khan, and sent to

Rahul Ghai, 179 Sahyog Apartments, Mayur Vihar Phase I, New Delhi 110092

here are some photographs of the camp

Though a rough cut recording, listen to a qalam that sings of the prayers of drought struck people yearning for a water source (toba); and another qawali sung in the praise of the unmatched sacrifice on the path of Ishq by Mansur

Please find a link below of a small piece on desert strife and creativity. You might find it useful.

http://www.hardnewsmedia.com/2009/11/3336

Pash the poet of impossible dreams

Ambedkartimes.com congratulates Prof. T.C. Ghai for his great efforts in translating entire poetry of Avtar Pash, one of the pioneer revolutionary Punjabi poets who in his very young age became a house-hold name not only in his home state but also in the entire India. In addition, he is equally popular among the wide Punjabi Diasporas. Prof. Ghai’s translation (Pash: A Poet of Impossible Dreams) was released at the Martyrdom day remembrance ceremony at Pash’s native village (Talwandi Salem). At the ceremony, Prof. Ghai dedicated his book to Bha Ji Gursharn, a noted revolutionary activist in the domain of theatre art in the region. Among other recipients of the book at the ceremony were Prof. K.K. Pathak, Dr. Ronki Ram, Prof Tarsem Sagar, Sh. Sant Sandhu and Dr. Amolak Singh. The book is published by Pash Memorial International Trust. Prof. T.C. Ghai (Born 1937) retired from Delhi University as an Associate Professor of English in 2002. He has published two short novels and a Hindi translation of his short stories, Adamboo, originally written in English. He has translated a Punjabi poet, late Dr. Puran Singh Kanwar’s collection of poems, Rattan Di Rut (1984), into Hindi in 2000 and English in 2006.

While speaking at Martyrdom day remembrance ceremony at Pash’ village, Prof Ghai said that “in the premature violent death of Pash the Punjabi poetry has perhaps missed its own Pablo Neruda, or may be someone even greater”. Dr. Ronki Ram said that in contemporary times, the poetry of Pash has become rather more relevant and crucial in dealing with general myopia of free market economy led consumerism, and electronic media’s persistent campaign for festivities and glamour! Dr. Amolak reiterated on the need for pro-people policies which he lamented are nowhere to be seen in the present regime at the state and centre level. On the occasion different theater groups staged revolutionary plays including the famous play Aeh Lahoo Kis da Hai by Bha Ji Gursharn theater group.

for more reports on 23 March 2010, Talwandi Salem

Paash-Hans Raj Memorial Function in Talwandi Salem on 23rd March 2010

पौ फटते ही फिजा में गए पाश के नग्मे

Paash-A Poet of Impossible Dreams

Cash-fixed Panchayat Democracy at grass roots in the Thar

The recently concluded Panchayat elections in Rajasthan have been a grotesque spectacle of unabashed display of wealth and dubious activity by political leaders masquerading as harbingers of wellbeing and justice at the grassroots. The two month roll out of local democracy for 32 districts covering 237 panchayat samities and 9,184 village panchayats was completed in three phases in a major state where the three-tier panchayati raj system was inaugurated by Jawaharlal Nehru on October 2, 1959, at Naugaur. The most important feature was the open display of vulgar money. Clearly, the dirty money trends set in the parliamentary and assembly elections are catching up on ground zero, despite the persistence of mass poverty, caste hierarchy and unemployment all around.

The attraction of fat profits through the NREGS funds has fuelled the ambition of many to file their nominations for sarpanch (panchayat head) in village gram panchayats. In what would have been the most intense multi-candidate election till date, many candidates have spent huge sums exceeding reportedly Rs 25 lakh per candidate, while most have spent around Rs 4/5 lakhs each. In most panchayats there were at least three to four candidates contesting for sarpanch. In Parwa panchayat in Nokha, there were 22 women candidates for the post of sarpanch; in another, there were as many as 18 candidates contesting among 1,800 voters.

A cursory glance at the profile of those contesting would reveal the deep wedges the political economy has created among brothers, mother and daughter-in-law, and other intimate family ties. Prosperous households had fielded two or three of their family members, contesting elections from different places. Even those living in towns were keen to contest the sarpanch elections. Considering that under NREGS, a whopping Rs 9,500 crore will be spent in the state in the current fiscal year, this excitement makes supreme business sense. The budgets of each panchayat would surely go up several times in the days to come.

Many of those contesting have been 'successful beneficiaries' in the 'development enterprise' of the last 15 years. They have acquired the trappings: land, farm houses, fleets of vehicles, among other objects of conspicuous consumption. Feudal pomp and show, and prosperity hence earned, is used rather lavishly to sponsor feasting for the pre-election wooing of voters. Sumptuous feasting for days on, lure of job cards, cash and cheque payments, free joy rides in fleets of vehicles gliding in the sand dunes, are some of the key features of a typical election campaign of a rich sarpanch candidate. Stark display of solidarity and kinship are invoked: caste, community, family genealogies reveal the realpolitik of the political culture here, and future governance taking shape in full public view.

The panchayat elections are times of heightened social activity that bring to the fore the travails of a nascent civil society coming to terms with the tyranny of tradition as well as winds of change espoused by the democratic polity that is beginning to take roots in the interiors of the desert state. From Bajju, an interior village in the Kolayat Panchayat Samiti in Bikaner, the road takes a right turn, upstream the Indira Gandhi canal, and glides across the undulating terrain of Pawarwala and Mankasar to take a further turn westwards. After travelling on a serpentine road for 15 km in and out of small sand dunes, we reach Bhaluri.

The Bhaluri panchayat is spread in 40 sq km and has around 7,000 voters. The contest is between the raiya rajputs, raiya Muslims and 'oustees from Pakistan', Indians who settled here from across the border. The intense triangular contest in which each party tried to woo the voters in many places is a sign that the culture of democratic polity with its associated calculations of party politics and gains and losses has struck basic roots. Significantly, there has been a transition from the uncontested feudal terrain that had mostly supported BJP in the past, to an assertion of voices by all the major demographic groups - the raiya Muslims and Hindus, the allotees and 'Pak oustees'. Even the wards were not without their expressions of small dissents at the village level. In Bhaluri, among 15 ward panchs, only ward no. 8, 4, and 9 could elect their candidates unanimously, while the rest had 12 elections.

Security forces were deployed, there was beefed up security on the international border, and the voter turn out was 20 per cent more than the last elections. There were many panchayats where the electorate turn out was more than 70 to 90 per cent, including in sensitive places like Bhaluri.

Ever since the commencement of panchayat elections five decades back, the organised prevalence of tyranny in silencing dissenting voices has been complete. The unquestioned authority of the thakurs of Barsalpur patta had reigned supreme in the pastoral desert bastion of feudal lords and nomadic chieftains. Among other changes, these elections saw the coming in of a new generation of leadership from among the 'Pak oustees'. They have deftly steered a successful entry by the Jat-dominated Congress in the BJP- dominated Rajput bastion, as increased the authority of the maulvis who called for consolidation of Muslim votes in favour of Jannat, supported by Nabi, who subsequently won the sarpanch elections in Bhaluri.

In Bandhali, Bhaluri, Bikendri, Bijeri, Jaggasar, Dandkalan, Mumowala, Sammewla, Deli Talai, Parbati, Adoori, and Pugal, people can be seen all around, huddled and squatting in open sunshine discussing enthusiastically the fate of the candidates for the coming elections. There is a glaring paradox that catches your eye in the misty desert mornings. This is a chronicle which spreads like a folk narrative across the arid landscape.

As people start to congregate near a hutment, one can hear individual voices of disillusionment and apathy. Their cynical gaze at the passing trailers overloaded with limestone reveals another side of public life that has been decisively smothered and appropriated by the vested interests in power, the nexus of local politicians, police and powerful feudal and other lobbies. Many voters pensively pointed out at the utter mockery of a pristine institution like the panchayat; how these elections have become an ugly and unabashed display of money and opulence earned at their expense. They scoff at it. And yet, as many villagers said, they are so utterly helpless in the face of awesome societal pressures that just would not let them abstain from voting even if they wanted to.

Indeed, behind the facade of sumptuous carnivals of feasting, lies eternal despair, anger and anguish. The area has been reeling under an acute water crisis. All through the route the telling signs of a creeping drought are evident in the shrinkage of acreage area of sowing in the fields - only one fourth in most of the land. Prospects are so bleak and feeble that people just don't want to talk about it. The water crisis has taken roots in the total silence of the people on this issue. It is this despair that collectively translates into a mob-like participation in the elections. That the sarpanch elections are going to be like this, basically seems fait accompli, so claimed many.

the article appeared in Hardnews March 2010, see

URMUL Rural Health and Development Trust, Bikaner, Rajasthan, India

The URMUL Rural Health Research and Development Trust, URMUL Trust, as it is more popularly known, has been working in different areas of western Rajasthan since 1984. Initially formed as an outreach project of the URMUL Dairy it soon developed its own independent vision and mission to work with the vulnerable desert communities. Along with a team of dedicated people from Bikaner it was formed by Mr. Sanjoy Ghose. Before Sanjoy moved from Bikaner to work in Majuli island in the North East in early nineties he had fostered a number of autonomous rural organisations that continue to work in different parts of western Rajasthan.

Many of them continue to strive for improving the quality of life of poor and vulnerable in the fragile ecology of Thar, independent autonomous yet part of URMUL Trust family. 

For reading Moving in Sand and Time, the story of this desert organisation till 1999

click here

Text and Layout: URMUL Team (Arvind Ojha, V.K. Madhavan, Chetan Ram Godara, Ramchander Baropal, Kashyap Mankodi, Anwar Ali, Rahul Ghai, A.K. Mukherjee)

Design: Bibhas Das; Printed by Ganeshan, Uttara Print

Panchayat elections in Bikaner

Location: Bhaluri panchayat, Kolayat, Bikaner

Misty winters of Thar

Village: Bandhali, Kolayat, Bikaner

Gerbils of Thar went to the rich forests of Palamu. here are some spiders we saw

Crafts and Craftspeople of Thar - part I

Western Rajasthan comprises the major portion of the region called the Indian Thar. Life in the Thar is an endless struggle and persistent negotiation with the fragile and harsh ecology. Shifting sand dunes, high wind velocities and very deep, scarce and saline water sources have always posed a formidable challenge to sustained human settlement here. Yet it is one of the few arid regions in the world that has the oldest histories of human settlement and is the most thickly populated among all the deserts.

The long history of the Thar has been the story of migrations impelled by famines, feuds, political turmoil and an incessant search to set up new settlements and colonise new tracts. These patterns of mobility, over long time periods, have bequeathed to the region, among other things, highly resilient folk craft traditions and a diverse group of communities as active bearers of these.The Indian Thar is known for it’s rich and diverse heritage of craft and handicraft traditions. Whether it is weaving, carpentry, woodwork, pottery, terracotta, tie and dye, hand printing, carving, embroidery, basket making, braiding, leather work, stone work, lac work, metal work etc., to name a few of the salient craft traditions, all have one thing in common – an exuberance, vigor and a desire to celebrate life. It is as if the monotony of survival in this vastly stretched landscape has been rendered sublime with exquisitely crafted handmade objects. Robust, well marked compositions using bright colours and intricate patterns stand out is sharp contrast to the sandy backdrop. As if human creativity and imagination have prevailed over drudgery and suffering.

For many of these crafts, the growth of markets was associated with the tourism coming to in the late seventies. Different rural crafts made their entry into the tourist markets as well as into the tourist / export market that has piggy ridden on the circuit of desert festivals and fairs in the Thar.

Though the extent of benefits from the tourist trade to the craftspeople remains debatable it is clear that the handicraft trade has really benefited middlemen turned exporters having plush and swanky showrooms in the cities. Important for the expansion of the export trade have been factors like easy access to cheap labour in the villages as a result of a growing poverty, destitution, loss of traditional skills and crisis of livelihoods among the craftspeople.

It is in this context that some organisations are striving for the well being of the craftspeople and the continuing of the living traditions associated with crafts.

To read more click here

(To be continued...)

MNREGA in Indira Gandhi Canal, Thar

As the first decade of the 20^th century comes to a close amidst apocalyptic climate change pronouncements of doomsday for the Gaia, the metropolis and the cityscapes prepare for yet another celebration of New Year. With semblances of recovery from ‘economic recession’ coffered up by State protectionism and false hopes of the ruling and market elite, all night parties and midnight balls are round the corner. Bikaner, the medieval desert township located in the interiors of the Thar, too gears up for the New Year bash, with all the glitter of the newly come up swanky showrooms of major labels and upcoming shopping malls that promises an illusion of successful transition to modern tastes away from seasoned Bikaneri bhujias, sweets and the rustic market lanes of the Kot Gate, Station Road and KEM road. The bewitching displays laden with desires and fantasies are an open invitation for hedonistic plunge nurtured by complacency syndromes of all is well and business as usual that keeps the middle classes apathetic, atomized and snugly locked up in their own ivory towers or castles. Compare this phantasmagoria of opulence with the grim realities of the IGNP canal command area where settlers eke out their daily survival and battle with one of the worst droughts of the century and get ready to cope up with the long winter of misery and destitution that is in the offing.

Conceived by the genius civil engineer Kanwar Sain in 1948 and ideologically propped up by Nehru as the ‘kingpin’ of state planning for developing the desert, the Indira Gandhi Nahar Pariyojna (IGNP) was started in 1960s and more than 3200 million rupees had already been spent on the canal network till 2008. The 445 km long lined main canal with its nine branches, seven lift schemes and a network of more than 8500 sq km of canal network make it the largest multi purpose canal project in the world. In addition to irrigating around 9.6 lakh hectares of land, the IGNP is meant to provide drinking water to 3,461 villages and 29 towns in seven desert districts of western Rajasthan. That these staggering costs and awesome statistics have produced a unique and unparalleled development spectacle is without doubt. The most ambitious opening of the Thar since Independence, settlers were brought in from various places to populate a desert that had four settlements per 100 sq. km. With the advent of the canal there are numerous settlements with more than 2000 settlers. The new life line of the desert, the perennial water stream has aided the growth of human settlements and laid preconditions for a radical transformation from a predominantly pastoral to a settled life. In desert that had grasslands and a rudimentary rainfed agriculture in patches the canal has aided cropping of wheat, cotton, groundnut, pulses. It would not be inappropriate to say that the canal has solved the drinking water crisis in a water scarce region.

But this stupendous conquest of nature has not been without its perils and pitfalls. The state has been unabashed in pursuing a skewed paradigm that sliced the desert commons into individual farm plots in which the pristine and organic desert land was subjected to high inputs of water, fertilizers and pesticides in an effort to script a green revolution of the Punjab type. The tragedy is that this green revolution type growth controlled by cow boy economics of might is right has been highly inequitable and has given rise to new inequalities.

The socialist gestures of the Nehruvian legacy of giving land to the landless who would diligently work to settle the desert seem like a faint echo from the past, a fuzzy basket of jettisoned promises. Instead the State has played to hilt the ‘peasant instinct to colonise the land’, churning out recipes for high input intensive farming and the growth of a full blown land market that has an ugly underbelly populated by a greedy land mafia. The peculiar credit and speculation-oriented cash economy of the command area has precipitated increasing debt burden on the farmers. As the stacks of Kisan Credit Cards in the local banks would testify increasing majority of farmers are being seduced to pawn their lands for repaying already accumulated debts of the bania and meeting daily costs of survival in these bleak times. Many of the ordinary allotees have been flattened into agricultural labour at the cost of a mere 10-15 % who have made it to the middle or big ranks of the peasantry owning more than 500 to 100 bighas as against a mere 25 bighas (6.2 hectares) of land promised to the ordinary settlers who survive through a variety of wage and labour sharing arrangements, some bordering dangerously close to sub human feudal practices of servitude and bondage. These rich kulaks the new lords of the canal fiefdom after grabbing most of the good agricultural lands are now eyeing mining of limestone, investing their usurped surplus into buying fleets of trucks and setting up illegal units.

During the severe drought of 2000 it was the first time the govt. hesitatingly had to declare the IGNP canal command area as affected. In the last few years what had added to these water woes is a structural water scarcity in the canal system because of the increasing claims by different states like Punjab, Harayana and even Himachal Pradesh who vie with each other over the conquest of Indus waters. The production of kharif crop has been really low in the last three four years. The myth of irrigated farming was somehow assuaged by an average winter crop all these years. The grueling water crisis this year have plunged the command area to an all time low with no kharif crop and feeble rabi crop reduced to more than half and in many cases only one fourth of what it used to be in the previous years. The state is somehow managing the show by a rationed quota of three water turns only as compared to six or eight that the farmers had been getting earlier. The tentacles of rumors about the worsening water crisis are fast spreading sending bone chilling shivers among the farmers who see no option other than plunging into localized water wars and bloody protests. The drudgery is compounded by an acute scarcity of fodder and a fuelwood crisis that are telling signs of a future of despair.

It is already two months from the time the Govt had declared drought and promised to open drought relief works. Apart from sporadic sanctions of fodder depots the state has not done much except buying time and spreading confusion with its potent mix of NREGA that has given a new lease of life to state sponsored indebtedness and corruption. The newly found fascination for bricks and pucca work under NREGA reaffirms a pale worn out logic of creating infrastructural assets for Development pandering as modern conquest, creating more and more exclusion and facilitating the onslaught on the fragile biosphere of the Thar.

As the techno bureaucrats and the rich kulaks, the de facto owners of the new canal fiefdom, get ready with their toasts for the new year resolutions to renew their commitments of keeping the rhetoric of irrigated farming alive and pursuing their profit maximization drives more vigorously, for the subaltern settler whose world has already been turned upside down the serpentine labyrinth rolling on the chests of Thar ceaselessly rehearses a tragedy exposing the farcical claims of a post colonial state with its bandwagon of formulas for development.

Photographs: Deepak Verma

See a version of this article in

HARDNEWS January 2010 click here