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.