Songs Of Survival
Text and photographs by Sharanya Deepak
Mounds of dried jowar (or sorghum) husk in Palasani, Rajasthan
Rajasthan is India’s largest state. It scales the country’s northwest and crawls through the mighty Thar desert, which consists of the state’s primary landscape of formidable sand dunes, terse, rocky hills and brazen, pink skies. The Thar begins in India, but stretches across borders that were hastily drawn during India’s independence and the subsequent partition into Punjab and Sindh in Pakistan. The oft-uttered, true cliché about the Indian subcontinent being a place of astounding, unfathomable diversity, and the parable that its lands hold lives stacked against one another in brutal hierarchy, does not only present itself in Rajasthan but perhaps derives from it.
The cultures that inhabit the frontiers of the vast, vaporous desert have been deemed remote and inscrutable for centuries. Its expanse has hundreds of distinct clusters of people – both sedentary and nomadic, differing in the way they eat, live and marry. Thousands of languages and dialects populate the landscapes of the desert; variable, vernacular knowledge systems exist at each sandy bend. But nation-states do not consider desert communities as holders of knowledge. The bigotry established within ruling castes about nomadic, marginalised caste populations in Rajasthan has spilled over to legislation and governance. They have been deemed undeserving of attention and assistance, and devoid of legitimate perspective on how to govern themselves.
Both under British rule and under its post-colonial governments, India has treated desert-dwelling communities with a particular disdain. The region has been reduced to a merchandisable cultural algorithm. Its kings and landowners have curated and sold Rajasthan as a place of colour, valour and sensualised desirability, glorifying the powerful and obscuring the lives of the people that live and work on the land.
The food of Rajasthan has consequently been depicted as one of royal ceremony and abundance. Dishes laid out for royalty, and ritualistic procedures that last several days and span an assortment of culinary techniques, are the bedrock of stories told about the region’s cuisines. But the dishes that pack in rural ingenuity, and reveal more about people surviving in these scalding, bristling landscapes, remain largely ignored. This has emboldening discrimination towards certain foods and communities.
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While descriptions of Rajasthani cuisine generally dwell on the opulence of royal feasts, the foodways of famine are conspicuous by their absence
In Rajasthan, a look at documented cuisine and the foodways of famine are proof that a pecking order that is not only prevalent, but also the basis of growing and consuming food in India even today. It is evidence that food as custom is the privilege of only a few. Cultural systems glorify what is eaten for comfort and cultural grandeur, simply negating the experiences and histories that do not fit.
This is probably why foods that feed times of scarcity do not make the cut when one talks about “cuisine.” For instance, ker sangri, a dish made from the berries and beans of the khejri tree are widely documented in mentions of Rajasthani food. But the bark of the same tree, which is eaten during famine, remains absent from any mentions. When Durgaram Devarsi spoke about the foods, dishes and techniques that kept his family fed during dire times, he called them his “parampara” or heritage.
“Heirlooms are not only physical,” he said, as he cooked a lunch of bajra rotis and gobi ki sabzi (or curried cauliflower). “Stories on how to survive the desert form a great part of what is handed down to us.”
Durgaram maintained that it was through “watching, that he knew how to preserve food.” He remembered that his mother and aunt would put dried neem leaves in a large clay pot before they stored bajra in it. “This way, it didn’t spoil,” he said. He also mentioned “raak chhidakna,” a preservation technique in which ash is sprinkled in a pot before it is filled with grain. He spoke about making pots out of “gadhay ka laat” or donkey dung. “Gadhay ka laat protects from keedas or insects,” he said.
Sun-dried foods and hardy grains like millets have helped generations of desert communities navigate a landscape of scarcity
Like Devi, Durgaram remembered stories of the Chhapaniya Akal told to him by his mother and aunts. He talked about “kheenp,” a local shrub that was ground and added to bajra to make it double in quantity, and recounted how villagers would gather fruit like guwar phali (or cluster beans) and ker and dry them for harsh times. As Anmol Arora writes about the popularity of sun dried foods in the Rajasthani desert: “In the natural climate of the Thar desert, where sunlight is abundant and there is little moisture, sun-drying has been widely adopted as a suitable method for preserving and storing food. A lot of it has to do with survival.”
As he thinks about these dried items, Durgaram remembers a penchant for stealing them.
“But my theft was dealt with sternly by our parents,” he recounted. “Stealing stored food, and wasting. Yeh paap hai baday. These are great sins.”
As he ate, Durgaram continued to talk about the wisdom of “puraanay log” or ancestors, noting how young people from his community would now rather move to the city than live where they were born.
“They want a job somewhere else, and not live here — where the land does not give. But how can they be blamed?” he said. When he finished eating, he cleared away his meal, keeping aside half a roti to eat with gur or jaggery during his evening tea. “Am I not doing the same as well? Traditional methods are good to preserve, but when history has acted harshly, one cannot criticise people for trying to abandon them.”
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Durgaram often turned to stories and songs that lingered in the minds of his community when they spoke about akal. But it is from Shafi Mohammed Langa, a traditional musician from Badnava, Barmer, that I first learned about stories and metaphors that dwell on drought and famine. Throughout Rajasthan, stories of great periods of hunger are omnipresent in folkloric cultures. According to Shafi, they are expressed through muhavaray or idioms, and kahaniyan or folktales devised in local dialects. It is a telling way to think about Rajasthan, whose histories are so myriad that they both resist linearity, and also require a great deal of listening. On the morning that I met Shafi, he brimmed with conversation. As I listened, I would try and steer him back into a linear narration by the instinct that I possessed as a city-bred, Anglophone listener. But Shafi’s stories had their own heartbeats, going where they wanted, and not returning to the initial path they started on unless they desired to.
Shafi’s first story was about a tale he called “Ek Bhil aur Bhilni” from the Chhapaniya Akal, about a tribal Bhil couple from a village now in Pakistan. The Bhil leaves his family to go work in a village far away, while the Bhilni looks after their children. But when an epidemic strikes, the Bhilni has to make a tough choice.
“She leaves her youngest children to their misery, migrating with the others to a faraway village until she is found by her husband years later,” Shafi said, ending the story after many winding turns. He remembered how his own mother would guard grain with her life, and sympathised with the Bhilni in his story, and the pain of prioritising your own life over that of your children.
“That comes easily to men, but not to women,” he said. “Imagine! What [would] she would have gone through.”
Like Shafi’s stories, there are thousands of folk tales told directly or indirectly about akal. In his work, the oral historian Komal Kothari enumerated these. Tucked away in the villages he visited were stories spun to remember times of scarcity and hunger. In Rajasthan, an Oral History: Conversations with Komal Kothari, a
book-length interview authored by Rustam Bharucha, Kothari recounts a story of an upper-caste Rajput man who left his wife during a plague. She was protected by a Bhambhi family, from a historically marginalised caste, who took care of her when she was abandoned.
In a powerful story called “Capturing the clouds,” Kothari recounts a song sung by a Bhil woman. The woman sings about a terrible plague, and the Bhils call on their supreme “mother goddess” to end their suffering. To do so, the goddess goes to the home of a baniya, a dominant-caste trader, and finds that the baniya has captured the clouds under a bhatti or millstone. When they are found, Kothari narrates, “...these clouds escaped into the sky, the sky darkened and the rain descended heavily onto scorched lands. Everywhere rivulets and waters began flowing, and the people were happy.”
The story doesn’t finish before illustrating how the powerful are allowed pardons, even when they transgress. It is important to note that the stories often speak to the resilience of oppressed communities, and similarly underscore the neglect and pride of the ruling classes. Whereas the act of documentation itself is controlled by powerful castes all across India, through folk stories, it is possible to glimpse the oppression endured by the millions who had little access to power and land.
While it may be cliché to repeat that Rajasthan’s lives are imagined through folklore and oral traditions, it is crucial to do so to remember that a majority of encounters and narratives are left out of what we consider legitimate history. For the rural residents of the state, who are not members of the Anglophone, dominant-caste, post-colonial Indian nation, tales of suffering and ways to resist the same often spring up in rhymes. Stories of survival are woven into songs sung during farm work. While Shafi narrated stories, he also remembered muhavray that had to do with times of scarcity. He mentioned those that included portents, like specific linings on monsoon clouds, or the cries of birds and desert animals that indicate the arrival of rain.
“If during sunrise, the sun has the shadow of clouds, and during sunset, the clouds have streaks in them, famine is on its way,” Shafi said, recounting an idiom that predicted scarcity. He shared another one which was laced with hope instead of despair. “On the ninth day of the monsoon month, if you see the moon and the brightness of the night’s light fills the skies, then there will be rain on our parched earth.”
“Aur na dikhay toh?” I asked Shafi. What if one could not see the signs he spoke of? He was undeterred by my question. “Jo dekhta nahi, sirf usse dikhay na,” he responded. “If one cannot see the signs, it means they are not looking.”
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Histories of famine are preserved in songs like Shafi’s and hacks for survival like the ones Durgaram’s mother bequeathed to him. Because of these unforgiving conditions that have persisted for centuries, marginalised communities such as the Mirasis, Meghwals, Kalbelias and Manganiyars have been forced to be ingenious. But while they may seem ingenious to the city-bred person, Durgaram is quick to remind me that these labels are not viable and useful in the long term.
“Yes they exist. But famine foods, and these other devices, don’t really solve the problem of akal,” he said. “They must not be looked at as a solution.”
Devi, Shafi and Durgaram used a word when they spoke about times of scarcity. “Bas, timepass kiya,” they said, when asked how else they survived these periods of hunger, how they managed to get by without any support. “We simply passed time.”
The word timepass is colloquially used by city folk for boredom; it is associated with passing time by watching television, or apathetically scrolling through one’s phone. Timepass, heard so often as a metaphor for killing time, has a different connotation to these residents of rural Rajasthan. It indicates the futility of their hardened resilience against hunger. It suggests that even when they join heart and soul to feed their families, and labour endlessly to secure a future, it is often timepass and does not amount to any real change.
Despite the futility of the sort of timepass that Durgaram spoke of, he also proposed solutions.
“Think about this — if people manage in such conditions, then what would happen if they had assistance?” he asked. “What if irrigation channels were made, and then sustained? What if loans were given for them to invest in farming? What if villagers were treated with the same respect as kings, or rich people in the city?”
When I asked him what he thought would change, he was resolute that first these questions need to be asked, and that the solutions to these problems lie with people themselves.
“Thodi madad karo. Aur phir kya? Rajasthan ne sonay ki chidiya ban jaana hai bas,” he said. He used the same metaphor for Rajasthan that was given to the Republic of India when it was declared into a dreamlike state of independence.
“If they would just help a little bit, then just watch. Rajasthan would become a golden bird, ready to fly.”
