River Town Chronicles Read online

  IN SEARCH OF RIVER TOWN’S PAST

  I SPENT THE NEXT MONTH researching the past of River Town in town records and at the National Archives in Delhi. What I discovered was that most of the area had been wrested from Muslim control by the Sikhs in the 18th Century. The Sikhs created a patchwork of small confederacies controlled by various Sardars (chiefs, or leaders). The Sardar who controlled River Town belonged to the Bhangi confederacy, so named because of the members of this confederacy’s fondness for bhang (hashish). The Sardar made River Town the capital of his small chieftainship, fortifying the town with a mud wall to the north and a bamboo palisade around the remaining sides. An entrance gate was built at each of the four corners of the enclosure, and watchmen were mounted on pillars erected just outside the gates. From these positions, the watchmen could beat their drums to announce the arrival of potential enemies and signal the Sardar’s armed retainers to repel any attack. Within the enclosure, the Sardar built his own palace, a court house and a dungeon to imprison recalcitrant subjects. In front of this complex the Sardar, although a Sikh, built a small Hindu shrine (khera), which still served as an important sacred shrine during my stay in River Town.

  To encourage a financial base for his chieftainship, the Sardar encouraged merchant families to settle in the town. In return, the merchants were promised protection and a favored position in the trade routes that passed through the Sikh territories of the Punjab. Each merchant who took up the offer was given a space in the bazaar large enough to build a small shop. Over time, the merchants built their houses in the narrow lanes behind the bazaar. The lanes were a maze of passageways where women could move from place to place without being seen in public. Some of these lanes led to dead ends, where unsuspecting strangers and enemies could be cornered and attacked from behind.

  The Sardar needed more than an army and money to validate his claim to power. He needed the services of a large assortment of castes that would reflect his preeminence. The result of his success in accomplishing this end was detailed in an 1842 census report (khana shamari) that I found bundled together with other documents in the town’s administrative office. The report listed the caste affiliations and members of forty-two distinct castes residing in River Town. Among the castes listed were Brahman Priests, merchants, cotton carders, leather workers, carpenters, water carriers, barbers, potters, rope makers, bettle nut sellers, prostitutes, sweepers, goldsmiths, jewelers, brick makers, cloth dyers, religious mendicants, acrobats, funeral priests and musicians. Altogether, the population of the town in 1842 was 9,250 persons.

  When the Sardar died, he left no male heirs to succeed him, and the British took over the administration of the town under the terms of an earlier treaty with the Sikhs. But the Sardar did leave behind two wives who bitterly fought over control of his estate. The older widow managed to gain the upper hand and had the younger widow imprisoned in a neighboring village, out of sight of the British authorities. When the British finally discovered the existence of the younger widow, they reinstated her in River Town, and allowed her to receive half of the Sardar’s estate, including the use of the royal seal, the right to occupy certain forts within the town, to possess elephants, guns and cannons, and to share of the Sardar’s cash and jewels.

  With the death of the Sardar, British rule ushered in a new basis for power in River Town. Gone was the allegiance to a particular powerful person and in its place was power based on the ownership of property. This set the stage for the emergence of the merchant castes as the dominant power in River Town, much as it remained during the time of my stay in the town. The new “rajas” were wealthy merchants who began to act themselves like “kings.” It was during the period of British rule that the Raja Sahab (of merchant caste) gained ownership of over one hundred villages, built his own palace within the town, adorned it with a pair of elephants tethered to large iron rings and built his own temple within the walls of his palace. With these tangible symbols of power in hand, the Raja Sahab was allowed to settle all disputes within the town and became the visible representative of the new era of British rule of River Town.

  A STRANGER AT THE GATE

  THERE WAS A CLAMOR at the gate to our house, and a crowd of young men and boys surrounded a person dressed in a sari standing amongst them. She was heavy set, with makeup under her eyes and on her cheeks. A large pendant hung from her nose, and she was singing in a high pitched voice. I listened for a few moments, and then asked her who she was and where she came from. “You tell me, Sahab. Who am I?” I was puzzled by the question, but responded with what I thought was the obvious answer. “You’re a woman.” The crowd laughed and someone from the back shouted, “Pay the woman.” The woman held out her hand and demanded payment. Ram Swarup, who was standing behind me said, “Put a rupee in her hand.” Then the woman repeated the question, “Who am I? Booloo, Sahab (Tell me, Sahab).” I thought I detected a slight break in her voice and a wisp of hair on her chin. “You’re a man?” I questioned. The crowd burst out in laughter for a second time. The person held out a hand again, and I placed another rupee in it. “I’m not leaving until you get it right. Who am I?” The crowd pressed in a little tighter and looked at me, waiting for my reply. “I give up,” I said out of desperation. “Wrong answer.” The hand shot out again, and I stuffed another rupee in it. I was running our of options and was willing to try anything to get out of my predicament. “You’re a man and a woman,” I finally offered as a last chance to end this charade. The hand shot out again, but this time it held a tambourine which shook in the air as the person began to dance in circles. When the dancing stopped, the hand came out once more and I stuffed three more rupees into it, before the person moved on down the lane towards chowk bazaar, followed by the entourage of young men and boys.

  When they were gone, I walked back to the courtyard and found Ram Swarup sitting on a charpoi, smoking a biri. I asked him who the stranger was. “Hijiri. That person was a hijiri.” He went on to me that hijiris were castrated as young boys and roam around the earth to entertain people as half man and half woman. “That one must have known she could easily trick you into paying.”

  IN SEARCH OF EPIC TRADITIONS

  THIS MORNING, Roshan arrived at the house and asked if I wanted to visit a region in the Himalayan foothills where villagers still followed ancient customs, like those found in the epic Mahabharata. He wanted to take me to a village where the women still marry more than one husband, just as happened in the Mahabharata, where Kunti was the common wife of the five heroic Pandava brothers. I wasn’t sure about taking another bus trip with Roshan. “The last time I went on a bus trip with you, I almost lost my wallet!” I said jokingly. “Come on. We can catch a bus that leaves in half an hour.” Pat and bhabhi were listening while sitting on a charpoi, sunning themselves in the courtyard. “Take us with you,” shouted Pat. And from bhabhi, “Yeah, Sahab. Take us with you. Or at least bring us back some more husbands!”

  Roshan and I boarded the bus on the outskirts of River Town, on our way to search out epic traditions in a foothill village. The bus driver was a Sikh, and so too was the conductor, the man who collected the bus fare from the passengers. The conductor was a large man, well over six feet tall. A dagger stuck in his belt made him seem even more impressive. With his turban piled high on his head, the conductor had to bend down as he made his way along the aisle collecting the bus fare, while lurching from side to side as the bus rumbled down the road with the Sardar at the wheel.

  The landscape changed as we moved from the flat villages of the plains to a lightly forested area, where the population was sparse and the villages spaced farther apart. The landscape gradually changed again and became more like a jungle, with a heavy growth on both sides of the road. Along this stretch of the road, the driver suddenly pulled over to the side of the road to pick up a passenger. A middle-aged woman in a black shalwar/kamiz, her face and hair uncovered, entered the bus. Men on the bus glanced out of the corners of their eyes to get a glimpse of her.
A large gold pendant hung from the septum of her nose and there was a small tattoo on her cheek. As she walked down the aisle, she made a clanging noise from the stacks of metal rings surrounding her ankles. She made her way to the back of the bus, threw open a window and sat down. “Gujar,” Roshan whispered in my direction. “She’s a Gujar. They’re Muslim herders who live out there in the jungle.”

  The bus pulled back onto the road, and the conductor moved to the back of the bus with his book of tickets. “Where to?” he demanded. She replied in an unusual dialect, but I made out the name of the town in the foothills she was traveling to. “Two rupees,” the conductor snarled.

  The woman sat there expressionless. “Two rupees,” the conductor repeated in a gruff voice for everyone to hear. Still, the Gujar woman did not budge. All of us on the bus were now turned around in our seats, facing the back, waiting to see what would happen next. Now, the conductor was getting both nervous and angry. “Sister, if you don’t give me the money right now, I’m going to throw you off the bus.” I knew he was serious, because I had earlier seen him grab a man by the neck and fling him out the door when the man said he didn’t have enough money to pay for the bus fare. I feared a similar fate was awaiting the Gujar woman. “Last chance,” the conductor said and started to reach for her. The woman slapped his hand away and thrust out a closed fist in the direction of the conductor. “Here,” she said. “The money is in here. In my fist. Go ahead. Take the money from my fist.” The conductor turned around and saw that everyone on the bus was engrossed in his predicament. Even the bus driver was spending more time looking in the rear view mirror than he was looking at the road. The conductor hesitated for a moment, perhaps calculating the chances of being able to open her fist. Failure and humiliation must have crossed his mind. The stand off continued for a few more moments, the Gujar woman with her fist extended and the conductor considering the consequences. Suddenly the conductor, with his dagger still tucked in his belt, backed away, folded his hands in front of his face and, in a low whisper, said “maaf karo, bahin jii” (excuse me, sister), before moving back to his seat in the front of the bus. The Gujar woman relaxed back in her seat, and I watched as her empty hand fell quietly to her side.

  Roshan and I finally arrived at a small town in the hills and got off the bus. The bus stand was crawling with Indian soldiers with rifles slung over their shoulders. We were still fifteen or twenty miles from the village we planned to visit. One of the soldiers approached us and asked where we were from and where we were going. Roshan told him we were from River Town and were on our way to the village of the Pandavas. The soldier looked at me and scolded “No foreigners allowed. Do you want to go to jail?” I guess I should have known better. At the time, in 1962, the Indian Government was in the middle of a border crisis with China, and no foreigners were allowed near their military outposts in the Himalayan foothills. We were instructed to take the next bus out of town and back to where we came from. There were no more buses leaving that night, so Roshan and I found a room for the night above a tea stall. The next morning, we boarded a bus that would take us back to River Town. My plans to track down epic traditions had come to a dead end.

  GUJARS

  ON THE WAY BACK to River Town, the bus approached the area where the Gujar woman had boarded the day before. I saw a handful of Gujar men at a roadside tea stall and called out for the bus driver to stop. Roshan looked at me in disbelief when I said I wanted to talk to the Gujars. He took his forefinger and made a slashing motion across his throat. Too late. The bus had pulled over to the side of the road and the conductor was headed our way. Roshan took one look at him and must have decided that it was safer to take his chances with the Gujars and a cup of tea than to deal with the conductor.

  We got off the bus and headed for the tea stall. The Gujars avoided us as we sat down at a table across from them. There were three men with brightly colored cloth wrapped around their waists and thrown over their shoulders. They wore loose fitting shirts and had full beards. One of the men, the oldest one, had died his beard red with henna. Over to one side sat a woman with heavy bracelets on her wrists and ankles and a large pendant hanging from her nose. The men were huddled together and offering conflicting information to a government official trying to collect census information. They spoke to the census taker in Hindustani and among themselves in their own language, Gujari. Talking amongst themselves, they would break out into hilarious laughter, before turning back to the census taker to provide the names and numbers of tribal women in their camps. I learned later that most of the names they offered referred to various parts of the female anatomy, which they apparently concocted in the Gujari language and then offered to the census taker to throw him off track. After a while, they grew bored with the census taker and turned their attention to us. One of them asked where I was from, and I told him that I was from the U.S. He sat down at our table and several others joined him. I asked them where they were from and they said they were the descendants of kings who had been forced out of their homes in Rajasthan and forced to roam around with their animals in the jungles and foothills of the Himalayas. They told me how, in the summer, they slept out in the open with their animals in the mountains and, in the winter, how they lived in temporary thatch shelters in the jungle. They complained about the government destroying their huts in the jungle each summer, when they left the jungle and herded their animals into mountain pastures. Each winter, when they returned, they had to start all over to build their shelters in the jungle. “Why won’t they just leave us alone?” one of them said, looking at me as if I might have the answer. Another entered in, “It’s dangerous in the jungle. Tigers attack us and we have no weapons. Only sticks and stones and our dogs to keep wild animals from devouring us. And in the summer, when we are up in the mountain pastures, the bears maul us on a regular basis.” All of this discussion seemed to be a prelude to what came next. “We need guns and ammunition. Will you bring us some?”

  A jeep pulled up to the tea stall and two men in military uniforms got out. They sat down at a table a little distance from us and glanced over at us. The Gujars stopped speaking Hindustani and began to converse among themselves in Gujari, glancing suspiciously at the soldiers. The men in uniform finished their tea and drove off in the jeep, much to everyone’s relief.

  One of the Gujars asked if I would like to see where they lived. I said I would like that. The image of Roshan slashing his forefinger across his throat momentarily crossed my mind, but I felt no danger as I followed the man along a path into a thick jungle of trees. Down in a ravine were several Gujar women tending their buffalo. They would take the buffalo milk to town and trade it for other necessities. They grew no crops themselves and considered it beneath them to be tied to cultivating a plot of land. We eventually came to a cluster of dome shaped thatched huts which served as their winter homes. An angry looking, underfed dog snarled and bared his teeth until someone whistled and shouted at the dog in Gujari.

  I spent about an hour with a group of very hospitable and gentle men, listening to their accounts of the upcoming gathering of Gujars from throughout the jungle. They would celebrate marriages and prepare for their long journey into the mountains as soon as the weather turned warm enough. I imagine the Gujars traveled into sensitive border areas, perhaps traveling into Pakistan. Their nomadic life style was obviously a threat to the government, which would rather have them settle down where, at the very least, they would be able to control them. And what about those guns and ammunition they requested? Were they really to protect themselves from wild animals or to prepare themselves to fend off the government from their efforts to settle them?

  We finished our discussions and they led me back to the tea stall where Roshan sat with a worried look on his face. Before leaving me at the roadside, the tribal headman invited me to join them on their trek into the mountains, something I desperately wanted to do. He left me with an address where he could be reached and said, “God willing,” we would meet a
gain. Several years later, I was awarded a research grant to study the Gujars, but the Government of India refused my request for a visa and I was not allowed to study them. I always regretted that I didn’t take up the offer to travel with them when the headman invited me.

  We boarded a bus headed to River Town, and when we arrived, bhabhi and Pat wanted to know how many husbands the village women had and “did you bring any husbands back for us?” They were disappointed to hear that we weren’t allowed to visit the village where the women had more than one husband as was the practice in the epic Mahabharata. But for me, the visit with the Gujars more than made up for it.

  THE SWEET SHOP

  THE SNAKE CHARMER ARRIVED at the front door with my biin. He played a few notes on it before handing it over for me to admire. With its highly polished brass pieces, attached with bee’s wax to the decorated gourd, it was a piece of art. “Would you like a cobra to practice with?” he asked, and pointed to a sack on the ground. “No thanks.” The snake charmer slung the sack over his shoulder and moved down the lane, towards chowk bazaar. I couldn’t wait to try out my new instrument, and spent the next few hours trying to figure out how to keep playing a sound, like the snake charmer did, without stopping to take a breath.