Thar Parkar, Pakistan and Marwar, Rajasthan, India: the folk music connection

Than of Pir Pithora at Adoori, Bikaner 

Largely because of it's location, the Thar Parkar district has held an important place in the social and economic history of the arid regions of Rajasthan and Gujarat. The history of settlement of this region has made it a linguistic zone where several dialects like Marwari, Kutchi, Dhati, Sindhi, Balochi, Pathani, and Punjabi were spoken. This polyglot character of the region coupled with attributes of a frontier region has imparted the region with a cultural diversity that has got disseminated to the adjoining regions over successive historical periods.      

The contribution of the region in the formation of the folk culture of Marwar has been immense. Most of the popular folk songs which are hummed and sung by the people of western Rajasthan like todadlo, heli, moomal‑ mahendro, kachbo, balochan, raiko, jalal, hanjlo, ratan rano, ridmal, sodo khiwro have the Dhat region as their landscape. The famous historical couplet of ‘nav koti marwar’ mentions Omerkot, the farthest fort on the eastern banks of Indus, as one of the nine forts that mark the boundary of Marwar region.  This region has served as a refuge zone and a transitional region where the Rajputs of Rajpootana interacted with muslims from Sind and Balochistan.    

A Pak Ousteee in Command Area of IGNP Allotted to them

Around nine thousand families from Chachro taluka crossed over to villages of Chohtan and Sheo tehsils of Barmer in Rajasthan. About five thousand families from Nagar parkar taluka escaped to the neighboring region of Kutch and North Gujarat. These communities had fled for the fear of persecution, hardship and discrimination at the hands of the military dictatorship of the Islamic state of Pakistan as well as the uncertainties and grain scarcity of the war affected occupied territory. They defied the orders of the Shimla Pact of 1972 that stipulated repatriation of prisoners of war and civilian internees. The persuasions of the Sindhi politicians to take them back to Pakistan proved abortive. Their hopes for a better future in India eroded in the face of the growing hostility of the raiyas (natives) on the Indian side of the border as well as by the partisan treatment meted out by the Indian state. Viewed with suspicion they were doomed to exist as sharanarthis (refugees) dependent upon the rations provided by the Indian state in relief camps under confinement and strict surveillance. Theses refugee camps continued for a little more than a decade and have left indelible marks on the future life patterns of these communities. After the granting of Indian Citizenship in 1977 the refugee camps were gradually closed and by 1980 majority of these families were rehabilitated. In Gujarat around five thousand families have been rehabilitated in villages and towns of Kutch and north Gujarat. Some of the families have been given agricultural lands, others plots for setting up small business and household livelihoods and many were hardly given any assistance. In Rajasthan out of eight thousand families to be rehabilitated around five thousand were allotted rain fed agricultural land in Barmer and Jaisalmer district. And three thousand families were allotted twenty five bighas land in what would qualify as one of the worst patches of land in the canal command area of the IGNP Stage II in Bikaner in Rajasthan.

It is during extended sessions of listening to refugee lore from many men and women from different castes that the rich multi layered connections between these two regions gets revealed.

The multi-layered cultural exchange that had developed historically was further added on in years after the exodus. The gripping popular music of singers like Mai Bhagi, Haider Rind, Fojia Soomro, Kasam Aadoo, Sawan Khan, especially it's nostalgic and emotional rendering, make listening of experiences of this community a memorable event. The recordings of live music sessions of these singers, while invoking the memory of displacement and life in Thar Parkar reinforces the strong cultural traditions of the Dhati community which gave them strength to cope up with tough times in an uprooted context of survival.  One such cultural strategy has been the recreation of shrine of Pir Pithora, a popular deity in Thar Parkar, in their new villages.   

Bhagi ji and Jivraj singh soda (vani session at Adoori, Bikaner, April 2010) 

These regions have had their own share of rich music traditions by Meghwals and Ravanna Rajputs who using simple instruments- a tanpoora, mata and khanjari- create reverberating music that serves as a bridge not only between the different scattered communities but also provides soulful connections for remembrance of past.

Kalbelias of Thar, Rajasthan

Jagdish Nath and Party, Lunkaranasar, Bikaner, December 2000

Rajasthan is known for its tourism and that too with a mystique. Among these tourist circuits, heritage hotels, shanty guest houses, makeshift taverns and camps on sand dunes, it is quite common to encounter women dressed in black dress, adorned with imitation silver ornaments being paraded as kalbelia dancers.   Who are kalbelias? What are the heroic trajectories of this community who gets so cheaply represented as  ‘dancers’ whose deft and athletic  movements conjures up the heady feeling of so called ‘rangilo rajasthan….

It would be quite appropriate, to start with, clarify certain basic propositions regarding what constitutes an ‘alternative representation’ of a nomadic and marginal community of Kalbelias. It is an alternative to the veiled, static and stereotypical and ahistorical representations which are usually the subjects of much of ethnography that is so conveniently paraded by tourism for it profits. In particular we have in mind a representation that is able to articulate a perception that takes into account the temporal dimension and incorporates the historical growth (with all it’s regressions, transitions, and expansions) of a community. Such a representation facilitates understanding in a manner that the ‘present’ of a community is then explicable in a concrete historical context, and not simply a metaphoric and hyperbolic context constituted out of ‘essentials’. A representation like that then is rendered more capable to articulate the perceptions and sensibilities of the members of community, the anxieties, hopes and aspirations of the community better.

Let me clarify what this means in the context of Daliwal Kalbelias. The Daliwal Kalbelias are even today mostly looked at as ‘snake charmers’ only. This representation is so powerful and all pervasive that it contributes to obfuscate and stunt any other way of looking at them. It completely hides the fact that men amongst them are good musicians, women good embroiderers and on a whole are a community caught in a blind fatalistic destiny, existing on the fringes of society caught in an uncertain dilemma about settling / pulling on with a nomadic existence.

Good poongi (A kind of an aerophonic instrument, two tubes (pedis) fixed to a hollow gourd – one for the notes and the other for the drone) players feel disgusted and let down by the fact of their playing of that instrument being only associated with catching and showing snakes. They feel that the artistry involved in playing music has not been given it’s due and is, in fact, been treated as subsidiary to showing snakes. And such reactions are so common and pervasive that they constitute a whole perspective and a position on the Kalbelias being regarded essentially as ‘snake charmers’.

So rather than understanding ‘nomads’ as static anachronistic elements, to be left to their own imminent death, an effort is made to constitute a process that is more closely and passionately able to present and argue their case. It is acknowledged too often that Rajasthan, especially the western parts of it, “…has a large number of nomadic communities”.

But the implications of this rarely seem to inform the prevalent notions and practices surrounding the processes of development. The ethnographic humanscape that consciously or unconsciously exists in the contemporary discourses on development is a sedentary one that constantly succeeds in relegating the deliberations about the nomadic communities to the margins. By a sedentary ethnographic humanscape what is meant here is the basic social grid that is the point of reference of the majority of development schemes and programmes, governmental or otherwise. The nomads are conspicuously absent from this. Similarly sedentary perspectives pervade most of the thinking about the element of mobility that is one of the constitutive rhythms of a major portion of everyday life at least in the western parts of the state of Rajasthan. Sedentary perspectives tend to understand the ‘element of mobility’ from their own ‘fixed’ standpoints. Most of them understand it as an aberration rather than as an organic element of everyday life of many communities. All this amounts to marginal considerations accorded to the ‘future’ of nomadic peoples. An ‘alternative representation’ has ‘stakes’ in the dissipation of such views.      

Nomadism of the Daliwal Kalbelias: An Explanation

We are talking here about a group of Daliwal Kalbelias who live in makeshift nomadic settlements in and around villages and towns of North West Rajasthan. The Daliwal kalbelias are a section of the Kalbelia community and are also known as Sapera or Poongiwala or Jogira. It must be pointed out that among the Daliwal Kalbelias the notion of the ‘community’ is very fundamental and the nomadic elements have to be made sense in that context.

The Daliwal Kalbelias are divided into a number of exogamous clans or gotras. Community endogamy is strictly followed but now sometimes they also practice marriage within the same clan. But they always avoid four generations in the ascending order. Apart from these well structured rules of inter-community interactions there are many features that speak of an inherent egalitarianism, philosophical and mystical binding that keep the ‘community’ together. This finds it’s own expression in their nomadic existence. If we go by the prevalent ethnographic understanding then along with Gadia Lohars, etc the Kalbelias are among those communities that are still strongly nomadic having refused to or unable to settle down. Nomadism is something that is deeply permeated in their everyday life and structures their interactions with the settled communities.  But what are the temporal dynamics of this mobility!     

We know that as a rule, persecutions were widespread in the Ancient World. Part of it was the result of the process of acculturation, the frictions it generated, and the major part of it was the consequences of long drawn out animosities, both metaphysical in nature and social. All this made migrations and mobility, flights and maneuvers, movement of groups and sects a regular feature. This aspect of mobility is intrinsically linked to historical change.

The glimmerings of such a dynamic phase can be seen from the beginnings of the 11^th  century that was going to culminate in the second urban revolution. At the level of substrata, where human beings mattered, we see the comings and goings of heretic sects from Central Asia and Iran along with their mystics and seers. Delhi became a haven and refuge for persecuted philosophers, sciences, heretics during the ‘mystical prince’, Iltutmish’s reign. Selective and discriminatory privileges co-existed with a policy of internal repression, and nowhere was this felt more intensely than in Delhi. Following this period there were forced migrations and flights away from Delhi in search of other havens and pastures. It was from this context too that the Daliwal Kalbelias moved away from Delhi, though not en masse, to more nomadic, ascetic and renouncing life styles, carrying with them the prefix Daliwal, meaning inhabitants of Delhi.       

During this expansionary phase of mobility, the kalbelias constitute themselves as a group under the spell, teachings and influence of the famous 13^th century ascetic yogi, Baba Gorakhnath. Giving primacy to the body under the precepts of Patanjali’s Yogasutras, Baba Gorakhnath came to be regarded as a legendary messiah in the Persian chronicle Dabistan-al-mazhab as well as an extraordinary avatar in the Chisti traditions of Punjab whose foremost figure was Shaikh Farid-al-Din, the mystic extraordinaire. Under Baba Gorakhnath many yogic / nath schools and tendencies flourished and  Kalbelias were one of them.

  

Ustad Basaye Khan, Mir i Alam from Pugal: Illustrious father of Distinguished Mir Mukhtiyar Ali

He was the legendary singer I met initially when Mukhtiyar was deciding to following his real calling of pursuing mystical singing of which he has now become the master and is well known all around. Basaye Khanji was his dad and somebody who was well versed not only in the art of sufiyana singing but known for his expertise in the alchemy of indigenous healing traditions of Lukman fakir. Basaye ji epitomized the dexterous forbearance that was the hallmark of those who have braved this harsh sand strewn desert.  

Just going to his house in one of the hot afternoons of Pugal, would never forget the first meeting with him that left an indelible imprint on my memory. It changed the manner in which I was to experience the region where had been working for over a decade with farmers and pastoralists. The piercing insights this short musical meeting gave were to endure for years to come and his voice still echoes in my heart.

Such was Basaye Khan ji, committed, humble and tenacious. An organic community leader his aura helped us enormously during those initial years of trial and experimentation in our effort to reinvigorate  Sufiyana qalam of the Pugal region.  

(click on the link to hear)

jani raat rahepo gali karesa 

stay overnight and we would talk

Sanjoy Ghose’s Bikaner and Magraj Jain’s Barmer: harbingers of modern human development for vulnerable and marginal in Thar, Rajasthan

The Indian Thar has the distinction of being one of the few deserts of the world that have had a long uninterrupted human history. This magnitude of time has blessed it with myriad layers of life experiences, pasts and memories. For this reason the ‘present’ of the Thar is so densely embedded that transformations that modernity brings are nuanced, impregnated with immense possibilities.  The region of Thar continues to be a prodigal mass of vast sandy plains and uninterrupted chains of sand dunes merging into limitless horizons. It is well known that the Thar has its own characteristic appeal, a mystique that has its own aura of rustic and majestic forbearance of life in this harsh terrain. Last few decades have been times of radical transformation of the region.

Amidst all this gust of changes and the equally swiftly changing scenario of civil society action it would not be inappropriate to briefly write about two personalities who have had a major impact on the manner in which one makes sense of and engages in social and economic development of vulnerable communities living in interiors of Thar, Rajasthan. Indeed Sanjoy Ghose and Magraj Jain were two personalities who have motivated and would continue to inspire many in the quest for human dignity and well being.

Both of them are better known as individuals who formed two of the largest civil society organisations in western Rajasthan. URMUL Trust starting in 1984 as a subsidiary of the URMUL (Uttari Rajasthan Milk Union Limited) dairy was transformed by Sanjoy Ghose in 1987 into a veritable organisation committed to achieving food fodder and water security and a dignified quality of life for the poor and marginal communities in Bikaner district. Magraj Jain was the guiding spirit behind forming SURE (Society to Uplift Rural Economy) in 1990 to work for a just social order and upliftment of rural economy in the interior regions of Barmer district.

In their characteristic ways both strived tenaciously to bring modern development within the reach of the vulnerable and marginal desert communities. And in doing this both of them led exemplary lives of service beyond the self motivating people around him in the lessons of compassion and empathy for vulnerable and marginalized.   

Sanjoy studied in Elphinstone College in Mumbai and then went on to do an MBA in Rural Management from IRMA, Anand and a strong altruistic desire of service beyond self that made him live in the harsh deserts of Bikaner. Magraj Ji was born in a remote village in the interiors of Barmer district and was a village school teacher and later a district coordinator of Nehru Yuvak Kendra in Barmer. Perhaps it was his frugal upbringing and rustic values of piety rooted in Jain samskaras that made him devote himself towards selfless social service.

Magraji had a working career of more than six decades in this region and was a son of the soil par excellence and was a trailblazer for voluntary action among local people. Sanjoy Ghose coming for an upper middle class urban background actively worked in Thar for two and a half decades and has been and would remain a role model for anyone coming to work with Tharis from outside.    

Both of them aspired for striking a delicate balance between the rustic yet resilient traditions of survival of desert communities and modern science and technology. This involved shedding or acquiring as the case may be a balance of tradition and modernity in their own lives. Magraj ji though born in a traditional context in an underdeveloped region had an unflinching faith in modern science and technology and strived for integrating it in his life as well for the benefit of the common humanity in the backward region of Barmer. Sanjoy born and groomed up in modern urban life toned down and consciously de urbanised himself to come at a comforting level with traditional lived context of life in Thar. 

With respect to traditions of Thar both these personalities had a faith in the ability of these traditions to respond to challenges thrown up by the transformations entailed by modernisation processes. This belief in the intrinsic ability of these traditions got manifested in the love for common mortals which they both had and displayed with vigour. 

Village Voice: Thar of Sanjoy Ghose

Sanjoy Ghose was the founder of URMUL Trust a civil society organisation that has been working in desert districts of western rajasthan since 1984. 

In his early years of tryst with the Thar desert Sanjoy used to write a column called ‘Village Voice’ for Indian Express an English national daily newspaper. Following is an excerpt from one of them….

For hours in the morning after you wake up, there is a strange feeling of emptiness, inspite of the crowded train compartment. The hazy sunlight outside is fractured by dust, an unstoppable, innocuous stream, filtering in through the tightly shut windows, and settling with the flakes of engine soot in your hair. It is past winter now, and the desertscape is flecked with green, a bonus from the unseasonal rainfall a few weeks ago.

To an outsider, coming in for the first time (as I did just five years ago) it seems a mystery how this inhospitable waste can support life. For miles there is just sand and sand : then a few shrivelled khejdi trees. Suddenly out of nowhere, emerging from behind a dune, a large collection of houses, some thatched, some pucca. The women in bright reds and greens, in the distance like vivid scars disappearing into houses, pausing to look at the train as it passes by.

Bikaner was even more of a surprise. For several minutes before the city comes into view, there is lush green on either side of the tracks. I learnt later that this was the work of an enterprising man who used the sewage of the city that drained to the outskirts to grow vegetables ! And after the green, the city gradually comes into view. Passing the Nagnachji temple, and the exquisite carved chhatris, little box like dwellings packed close together, clothes on lines. The railway crossing at Rani Bazar, camels imperiously staring through the window as the train crawls past.

The train is invariably on time, arriving at 8.30 in the morning. Then the walk to the jeep, harrassed by the same three women who make their living off alms from travellers. Through the city, the impressive 500 year old Junagadh on the left, from where the kings of Bikaner ruled. On the right, in a "public park" a less impressive but similar palatial structure houses the offices of the District administration : the "Collector‑sahib", todays maharaja.

The drive to Lunkaransar is a stark contrast of wasteland and affluence, thanks mainly to the canal, which has had three incarnations ‑ the Rajasthan Canal, when it was started, in the early 1950's, the Indira Gandhi Canal, after her death, and now (by some canny coincidence, just after the elections) the Kunwar Sen Lift Nahar. An old Rajput from Adsar explained that Kunwar Sen was the engineer who first designed the canal, in the time of the most illustrious of Bikaner's maharajas, Ganga Singhji. Vast tracts of sand give way to shades of green, young wheat punctuated by the pungent yellow of mustard and tara‑mira.

This is an area in transition ‑ from a mainly pastoral living to one of settled, irrigated agriculture. It hasn't been all sweet, either. Sevan grass, the main fodder of the rich cattle economy, has virtually disappeared. That grass needs very little water to flourish, and can withstand the prolonged droughts the area is subject to. The only way it can be destroyed is by tractor harrowing. Camel ploughing, the traditional method, did not go deep enough to unearth the bush from its roots‑ but the pressures of time and science are against the camel.

Just before Lunkaransar, a walled enclosure holds four enormous heaps, covered with black tarpaulin. Food, stored by the Food Corporation of India. In the drought of 1987, those tarpaulin covered heaps were mocking reminders of the contradictions in our country. No food to distribute under the famine relief works, but the stored stocks were from a "different head".

Lunkaransar comes from Lunkaran, the son of Rao Bika, the first king of Bikaner. "Sar" means a body of water, like a tank, or natural water catchment. Some people attribute it to Loon (meaning salt in marwadi), because the water in the area is really salty. When we started work a few years ago, we rented a small house close to the main bazaar, where we set up a small lab, ran an outdoor clinic, and sometimes even admitted patients who needed watching. We all lived there as well, six of us. We hired a jeep, which came to have a personality of its own. We called it 2899 (in Hindi). The driver was Narayan, a 24 year old who claimed as many years experience, as a mistry and a driver. When we came upon better times, and moved into a "campus" of our own a couple of kilometres down the road, we bought a vehicle, and Narayan joined us. Last heard, 2899 was playing the role of Ravana's rath in the Ram Lila celebrations in Bikaner. An ignominous end for a noble machine.

In our new campus we have a small six‑bed hospital, which has been through seven doctors in the last three years. They join, stay briefly till they can get a job with the government, and then leave. Six months ago we decided to close it down, and wrote to the Government offering it to them, if they could manage it. Our present doctor goes out with us to villages around, and stays at Lunkaransar between the 19th and 25th of each month, to treat tuberculosis patients whom we supply drugs to.

Tuberculosis is a mystery. You find it everywhere ‑ in small villages, sparsely populated, among muslims and Hindus, among men and women, and of course children. It's a mystery because the climate is so extreme (49 celcius in summer, to below zero in winter) and the people don't seem to be sick ‑ yet it's stalking the district, selectively killing the weak and the poor. It's a strange disease because it's so easy to control, and cure ‑ in just two months of treatment, the person feels a new being ‑ and stops taking the medicines. The disease developes again, and then it's too late to try the same drugs, to which the person would have built up resistance.

I remember begging with Kesra Ram not to stop ‑ we were supplying the drugs free, but he wouldn't listen. He had already mortgaged his land and sold his wife's jewellry before we met, and had just given up. When he died, the village talked about how stubborn he had been ‑ but that taught me a lesson I'll never forget. It's not the medicine ‑ it's the trust and belief that make the difference, and that doesn't come from driving into a village in a jeep with a couple of hours to spare to do "development".

August 1990

(Source URMUL Trust Archives)

Transformations of Indian Thar: Surviving Traditions and Modern times

What is of definite interest is the understanding of the transformations that are fast changing the Indian Thar into something of a modern complex. Am conscious of the fact that when one says this immediately one has to go on to define and clarify what one means by modernity that in turn relates to the more deeper question about the historical sensibility that informs such a quest.

So some time should be spent on these terms lest one may be misunderstood. Here it needs to be pointed out that what is of interest is not merely the phenomenon of modernity but also the constructions about modernity, both about its presence as well its absence. These though connected in more than one ways have to be understood as separate articulations.    

The term 'modernity' actually is well known to us and conjures up facets and assumptions about nature and human societies dating back to the late 18th and 19th centuries. These are broadly associated with and take its substantive form through ideas and ideals shaped during the European Enlightenment. Hence it is a term that right from the beginning encapsulates the substantive experience of a small region in the globe. Not so small after all as it successfully conquers the imagination and doings of much of the globe in the wild goose chase of 'catching up with the west'.

Well to begin with let us admit at the outset that one is inclined to view modernity and its coming in the Indian Thar as a protracted process and a very segmented and differential process as well. There are spaces where it arrived right in the beginning of the twentieth century as contrasted with where the complex of modernity started knocking less than a quarter of a century back. And there are still substantial expanses of vast spaces and indeed communities who are away from it. This is an important thing to be borne in point and the fuller implications of this we would elaborate later in the essay.

Ever since James Tod, the father of modern travel in Thar, pieced together the map of Rajpootana somewhere in the 1830s-40s the tryst with modernity really began. The fascination of the Rajput princely states towards things western dates back to these days. They were among the first converts who soon became zealous proponents of a particular variety of modernity that was highly  selective in terms of classes chosen for this midas touch of modernity

Having said this one may also hasten to add that a good part of the story of modernity marching into the deserts of Thar is well known. What is definitely less known is the manner in modernity masquerades and fudges realities that may be better understood as persisting traditionalism. It is here that one sees

(to be continued....)

Industry, modernity, cultural traditions and skills of desert communities in Barmer

Barmer district is all set to for  giant leap forward in modernization riding on big business in natural oil and power generation projects contributing to  a boom in real estate speculative enterprise. Starting somewhere in the last decade these are firmly in place in the last few years. The city of Barmer has been a valiant frontier post par excellence and happens to be among the oldest towns of the Thar desert in western Rajasthan, the long history and its memory going back to late ancient times.  

The contemporary context of heightened competing claims and control over natural resources has thrown its own challenges before rural communities. The largely survival economy of the fragile natural base and rustic life is volatile with possibilities of change.

Existing silently amidst all this clamour for modernity in Barmer city is an civil society organization known as SURE (Society to Uplift Rural Economy) that was started by a group of people in 1990 under the visionary leadership of Mag Raj Ji Jain to work in remote interiors of Barmer district.    

Be the Change: Society to Uplift Rural Economy (SURE) 

journey in sand and time 

(to be continued....)

Understanding ‘cultures’ of pastoralism and modern development in Thar: deciphering contemporary History of ‘present’

The French historian Marc Bloch who was a pioneer in mastering anthropological insights into studying history of rural transformations argues:

“…history is the study of dead and living. The faculty of understanding the living is, in truth, the master quality of the historian, who does not love the past but loves life”.

The present ongoing discussion strives to seek answers to understand changes in the complex social formation, especially the aspects of engagements of communities with each other, with the state and its institutions and the natural ecology of which they are an integral part. What interests us here is 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.

It would be of interest to decipher the fast changing contemporary realities that seem to shape up a present that is eager to throw away, shake off the heavy lethargic weight of past as a obscurantist legacy. It needs to be said that in the midst of this noisy clamor for ushering in a new present it is important that we do not loose sight of this remarkable ability of past to persist at the level of mentalities as well as a ‘prodigal inertial mass’.    

 

The Indian Thar is a hot desert and ranks among the few deserts of the world that have had a long human history of settlement. This history has been made possible by the unique attributes of the complex of eco systems and their natural endowments that make the natural setting of Thar. Equally ingenious and resilient have been life practices of different communities, mobile and sedentary, who have displayed remarkable forbearance and endurance in populating the region.

It would not be very off the mark to suggest that pastoralism, along with the ways of life associated with it, has been one of the core elements of human history of this region. From early on it became an indispensable part of the combinatory of survival practices that included subsistence based sedentary farming and hunting- gathering. Pastoralism represented one of the significant patterns of mobility that was a phenomenon characterizing much of pre modern life in Thar. Mobility of pastoral groups contributed to urbanisation as well as the emergence of settled clan aristocracies, mainly of the Rajputs. The variant of pastoralism that was typical of this region was a diverse range of semi nomadic pastoralism that evolved in interaction with agriculture.

The agro pastoral region of the western and north western parts of the state of Rajasthan has been home to different pastoral communities nested within the overarching hegemonic dominance of the Rajputs. The Rajputs, Jats, Raikas, Charans, Bishnois, Meghwals and a group of Muslim communities are some of the major pastoral communities. The livestock rearing practices of these different communities are specific adaptations to distinct ecological niches negotiating a middle space between sedentary agriculture and free ranging pastoralism, relying on commons pastures and grasslands. These regions have their localized and hereditary customs, social ties, inter dependencies and practices relating to natural resource use and traditions of music and craft. The realms of the anthropological and the natural were articulated in specific ways for these distinct ecological regimes.

The pastoral way of life was majestic, given the frugal and rustic ecology where it had originated and thrived over centuries. It had come to represent a substantive holistic experience and was innovative in the sense of having capability for a range of adaptations devised to survive in the long periods of harshness, and bloom in the brief spells of abundance in the region. The sway of pastoral way is evident in the dexterous everyday work ethic of rearing animals to aesthetic pursuits of exquisite creations of music and rustic textiles and other crafts. These life-sustaining practices weave the complex of cultures of pastoralism. They are intimately linked and draw upon each other profusely in terms of their relation with nature.

Pastoralism has been increasingly relegated to margins of settled existence and indeed of the development discourse. The ecology that sustained it over centuries has dissipated fast having fallen prey to radical transformation by modernizing impulses of modern development.  

Notwithstanding the almost fatalistic present prophecies justifying the contemporary ‘sedentary turn’, long term historical sensibility urges the need to situate the historical roots of pastoralism as a resource use strategy and a way of life more firmly into our existence. This is considered necessary, because such a perspective is often found wanting in the numerous prophecies (like nomadic pastoralism will / must / should disappear) on the future of pastoralism and pastoral communities in Thar. Far from assuming that contemporary pastoralism is in an inevitable crisis and should/would give way to agro industrial complexes in the rapid on-going transformation, there is sense in learning from this remarkably resilient and frugal way of life.

It may hold insights and cues for transition to a sustainable world.

Ustad Nusrat Ali Fateh Ali Khan Sahib: the blessed voice radiating wilayat of sufis

On the occasion of the great mastero's 67th birthday it would be only appropriate to listen to his magical soul stirring voice as much as y can.

he would be undoubtedly remembered as a wali of music who extended the wilayat of sufis in the world, a true trailblazer who gave us the grace and abundant occasions for music of pure love.... unplugged, unadulterated

For us associated with the Thar, Rajasthan, he has been a harbinger of melodies pure and simple. Resonating in the vast desert, of formidable sand dunes and vast sandy plains, his six octave sonorous and prophetic prescient voice guides us to continue.......  

His grace illumines our daily lives.

Our deepest gratitude and prayers for his soul to rest in peace forever

enjoy these qawwalis

kitte ishq da rog na la https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6j5eMMY7lqk   

Sanu ek pal chain ne aave https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ge6tWkhohiQ
mele ne wichar jaana https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwg8pqsGUQA