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| 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 11th
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 13th 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.
