 
### Untouchable friends

Tan Dan about Bhangi sweepers in feudal Rajasthan

By Son Lal

Copyright 2013 by Son Lal

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This is a work of fiction. The names and characters come from the author's imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. Similarly, the locations and incidents in this book, which might resemble real locations and events, are being used fictitiously and are not to be considered as real.

*****

Untouchable friends

Tan Dan about Bhangi sweepers in feudal Rajasthan

The neglected life of an ageold caste in a desert region with strong feudal attitudes and ritual barriers. As narrated to his friend Son Lal around 1980.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 Tan Dan

Chapter 2 The Bhangi caste at Chelana

Chapter 3 Baya and the other sweepers at Chelana

Chapter 4 Toilets cleaned by sweepers

Chapter 5 The sweeper families at Chelana

Chapter 6 Bhangis and village politics

Chapter 7 The Bhangi baskets

Chapter 8 Badri, the Bhangi boy at Jodhpur

Chapter 9 Various aspects of the Bhangi caste

Chapter 10 Discrimination in between untouchable castes

Chapter 11 Bhangi religious thoughts

Chapter 12 The Lal Guru worship

Chapter 13 Cremation and burial

Chapter 14 Ganga water rites

Chapter 15 The prestigious death meal

Chapter 16 The Chandals

Chapter 17 Tan Dan about outcasting Hindus

Supplements

Indian words used in this book are explained here.

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### Chapter 1 Tan Dan

In Rajasthan, a dry part of northwestern India, women and young girls of the Bhangi caste have worked as sweepers for generations. Also in Tan Dan's home village. Tan Dan has followed Bhangi life with keen interest since his childhood, and in this book he gives his version of a life very little known to many Indians, although sweepers are seen everywhere. For him they are friends, not untouchables. Many narrations are based on his experience in the 1970s.

Who is Tan Dan?

Tan Dan Detha was born in a farmer family of the Charan caste in 1943. His native village is Chelana in Jodhpur District of Rajasthan in northwestern India. Tan Dan has lived in the midst of his strongly traditional environment all his life. He is a critical observer rather than a follower of that tradition.

Who is Son Lal?

Son Lal is my pen name. I was born in a Scandinavian country of northern Europe in the early 1940s. I have lived in India off and on for fifty years, since I first arrived to the Gateway of India at Bombay by ship in 1963. In the 1970s I met Tan Dan. We soon found we shared many views on the world, and had the same curiosity of village life. I saw a chance to learn how he experienced his rural environment. He did his best to explain, and I am grateful to him for having shared his knowledge and thoughts with me.

How this narration was done

Tan Dan told in English and I typed, while we sat together in long sessions. His many photos became a starting point for our discussions. We formulated the sentences together. Sentence after sentence, day after day. Most of it we wrote around 1980, but some additions were made in later decades. Afterwards I have edited the material and supplemented some sections with information from elsewhere. Still, it is Tan Dan's voice that is heard on these pages. It is a personal narration by a village farmer, and has no connection to any university.

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### Chapter 2 The Bhangi caste at Chelana

The touchable Hindu castes that dominated Chelana in the feudal time were Rajput, Baniya and Brahmin. Also the Charan caste was strong. In the 1970s there were about twentyfive touchable castes in the village and twenty untouchable ones from the pont of view of the highcaste people. The total number of untouchables in the Chelana area was about one fifth of the total population.Bhambi was the biggest untouchable caste at Chelana with about forty families. The Bhangi caste of about ten families was a small part of the village population. Many untouchable castes were even smaller with only one or a few families.

Bhangis at Chelana and elsewhere in Rajasthan were also called Harijans by other villagers and in recent years many Bhangis have started to call themselves Valmiki. There are Bhangi families who have stopped doing any kind of sweeper work, having entered a middle class professional life. They are few compared to those Bhangis, who still rely on sweeper work for their livelihood, but they are bound to become more in the future.

Only Bhangis have sweeping as a traditional caste profession in western Rajasthan. Some persons living far from the reality of the sweepers maintain that sweepers have no caste at all. Nevertheless, it is a caste with a well established gotra system, as will be shown later on in this book.

In these narrations I will use the name Bhangi, which is the ageold name of this caste. It is nothing wrong with that name. The fault is at those who treat Bhangis as untouchables, and have contempt for those who help others in the society by cleaning their streets and toilets and carrying out many other useful tasks.

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### Chapter 3 Baya and the other sweepers at Chelana

Baya was eleven years in 1977 and already a fullfledged sweeper. She carried out her duties according to ageold village customs. The villagers treated her as an untouchable. Baya and her mother worked in a number of mohallas including that of the Charan, Mali, Rajput, Dakot, Brahmin and Muslim. Tan Dan's family was one of her clients. He followed Baya in her work one day in December 1977. We will start this book about Bhangi sweepers by showing what Baya did that day.

When Baya woke up at sunrise, she started to sweep her houses as soon as she was out of bed. That was her habit. Her mother prepared tea. The milk they got from their goat. After chatting a little with her neighbours, Baya went off to her duty, just half an hour after she had woken up.

The Bhangi families had nine houses in a row at that time, and Baya's house was in the middle. Baya lived there with her parents, brother, sister and a goat. December nights are chilly at Chelana. Men and animals alike shiver of cold and the sleep is uneasy and incomplete. Also for the family goat lying in the angan. When the sun rays started to warm up the body of the goat, she felt comfortable at last, and drowsed, undisturbed of Baya's energetic sweepings.

Baya collected the dust and dirt of the angan in a small heap in which there were also goat droppings. This fertile dust she put on a kunda, i.e. an iron pan, and carried it to the partition wall between the Bhangi and Gavaria Banjara mohallas. There the Bhangi families kept compost heaps, one for each family. When it had become fertile soil they sold it to Tan Dan and some other irrigation farmers with papaya fruits plants and vegetable nurseries on a small scale.

Baya's hens

In a corner of the mudwalled house compound, there was a big clay pot, _matka_ , in which Baya's family kept their hens during the night. As the deshi hens kept by the Bhangis were so small, there was enough space for two or three of them. During the night Baya put a stone slab over the open top of the matka to prevent attacks from small wild predatory animals such as wild cats, dogs, and foxes. Also mungoos killed hens.

At Chelana only Muslims and Bhangis kept poultry birds. People of most other castes did not like eggs at all. They considered poultry husbandry a dirty habit and anti-religious. Brahmins and Baniyas told it was against the principles of ahimsa, non-violence, to eat eggs. Eggs were called _murgi ke bacche_ , i.e. the hen's children. For the egg to be fertilized the hen must have had sex with a cock, which not always is at hand, though. Orthodox Hindus do not want to consider that aspect.

The poultry bird flocks of the Bhangis are often small, just a few hens. One or two matkas are often enough for a Bhangi household. Occasionally it happens that the flock increases in size, up to a dozen hens or so. Then the Bhangi family make a small poultry shed of stones and wood, but the big flocks seldom last long. Predatory birds like hawk and eagle ( _cheel_ ) as well as crows reduce their numbers and so do diseases. After some time the matka pots may be used again as a handy shelter.

The small deshi murgi hens run around on their own anywhere. They can stand hardships and know how to feed themselves without any help. The eggs of these hardy birds are extremely small, though.

Still, such a small egg is more expensive than a big egg from a poultry farm near towns. Common people believe, there is more power in the small deshi eggs, than in the big ones sold at the bazar.

Baya as a sweeper

She left her house after having cleaned her own house, having had a morning chat with her neighbours and a breakfast with tea and stale bread. Some of the family's small hens followed her for a while, when she left. Then she walked away with her broom and her basket along the sandy village lanes full of limestone pebbles. In between stonewalls, some greenery of thorny bush, low thatch-roofed houses and big houses with roofs of long stone-slabs. She would sweep in front of the houses allotted to her family as _jajman_. Baya's family had in its _jajman_ some seventy to eighty houses all over the village.

Baya made two rounds. On her first round Baya swept, cleaned and remove dirt at her jajman houses. Then she had another round for collecting her reward - a stale _roti_ bread from each house. The sweeping and the subsequent roti collection work took about five to six hours. Most days Baya was home again at about noon.

Baya at some jajman houses

After a few hours Baya and her mother came to the house of one of their jajman clients, Raghunat Singh. He sat on a chair at the opening of his _angan_ yard (in Marvari called _chauk_ ). Beyond that opening Baya and her mother were not allowed to go, as they were considered untouchables. No Bhangi was allowed to enter the _angan_ of any Savarn Hindu.

The area the Bhangis should sweep every day is the area outside the angan opening. Perhaps ten square metres. The area is called _buvaro_. It is for sweeping that place, they get a _roti_ bread of this _jajman_ family every day. Baya stood waiting outside Raghunath Singh's house with the basket for collecting roti on her head.

Raghunath Singh, the owner of the house, was a Rathore Rajput. He had been employed in the army as an officer of low rank, not much above an ordinary soldier. He had to leave, when he got paralysis. After that he mostly sat at home living on his army pension. In addition he rents out portions of his house, which is bigger than he need for his own family. Raghunath Singh also got an income from renting out his agricultural land.

He was married and had a few small children from his second wife. His first wife had died many years earlier. At Chelana it happens now and then that women die from their husbands, when they are still in the middle of their life. Although they are a few years younger than their husbands, as a rule, it is common that the wife dies before her husband. It is also common that the widowers marry a second time. As for Tan Dan's own relatives, his father Tej Dan remarried after his wife died, Tan Dan's brother Nathji also. Tej Dan's wife died of small-pox and Nathji's out of pneumonia. Chiman Dan's wife is dead. Chen Dan has remarried after his first wife's death. Prabhu Dan was looking for a new wife after his wife had died. They all belonged to Tan Dan's Detha Detha clan at Chelana. On the other hand, Charan wives who become widows are forbidden by custom to remarry.

A part of the reason for the high mortality among middleaged women compared to that of middleaged men could be that women face bigger hazards with regard to their intimate hygien, for example at child birth.

*

Then Baya went to Chitarji's house. She waited for a _roti_ as a payment for her work, standing in the lane outside Chitarji's house. She used to receive the _rotis_ one by one in her _odhni_ head cover cloth, and then put the flat round bread cakes in the big basket she carried on her head, when there were a few of them.

Chitarji was a Rajput Daroga, a group that in the feudal age were servants and concubines to the Rajput families in the village. In Chitarji's house there happened to be a Rajput boy on visit. He lived in a Rajput house next door and was of the same age as Baya. Somebody of the house handed him a roti and told him to throw it to the sweeper outside. That he did from a distance.

He threw the roti into her odhni cloth instead of handing it over in the normal way, as Baya was untouchable to him, being a high ranked Rajput. By throwing the roti to her, he escaped ritual pollution. If they would hold the roti at the same time, pollution would be transmitted from Baya through the roti to the boy, according to popular belief.

*

The same year, 1977, Tan Dan was present when Pelad's daughter, another Bhangi girl, got a _jajman_ roti thrown to her by the wife of a _bhambi_ household. She was the wife of Ladu Ram, a smallscale farmer. Ladu's wife threw the roti to the Bhangi girl, as she did not want to be touched by her. Those of the Bhambi caste treat the Bhangi sweepers as untouchables to them, although both Bhambis and Bhangis are untouchables to most other villagers. By discriminating against Bhangis such as this girl, the Bhambis tried to get prestige in the eyes of other villagers. For them it was important to show that they were not the lowest caste.

Some sweeper women Tan Dan met in the 1960s and 1970s

Tan Dan had many memories of the Bhangi women he met at the Chelana village lanes in the 1960s. Women going around with baskets, iron _kundis_ and brooms.

A few years later, in the early 1970s, Tan Dan got to know a teenager sweeper girl with two small sisters who used to come along with her on the sweeping rounds in the forenoon, as there was nobody at home to take care of them at that time of the day. They carried the empty iron pan for excreta, and she kept on her head the big basket for bread from the _jajman_ clients. She was a thorough worker and swept beautiful patterns with her broom. She worked hard out of habit.

In 1980 Tan Dan met Madan Ram's daugther-in-law married to Tamba Ram, who worked as an agricultural labourer. Their daughter of about eight years carried a fairly small basket for bread, and her mother the broom and the iron kunda tray. Tamba Ram's sister was also married, but she still lived at Chelana waiting for her husband to bring her to her sasural village. As she was in her early teens, her muklava was near. Meanwhile she enjoyed the company of her friends in the Chelana Bhangi mohalla. She used to be together with Baya and Vimla, who also were married girls waiting for their husbands and the muklava feast. Thirteen or fourteen years of age.

Now and then they met out in the village while at work in the forenoon, and had chats in the lanes of the mohallas, where there jajman clients lived. Charans, Mali farmers, and the Rav genealogists for the Brahmins.

While chatting they kept there iron kundis on their heads, evidently so used to the kundi and the broom in it that balancing was no problem, even if they did something else. Vimla and Baya were accompanied by one sister each, but they were so small that their company was more a kind of child care than help in the work. Only four years. Vimla's sister wanted to show Tan Dan that she could carry bread baskets, too. First she put the ring of cloth on her head as support and on it the basket. The two small girls were keen on carrying out whatever task given to them, as they enjoyed the company of their big sisters and were happy for a little praise now and then. They learnt the work from imitating the grown-ups, thinking it was a funny game rather than a drudgery.

Tan Dan met in a village lane Harman Ram's eldest daugther. She was in her teens and lived in the second house from east in the Bhangi mohalla row. She had been sweeping at some of her family's jajman houses. It was a part of her job to remove the shit from the toilet, and that she did with the iron tray she keept on her head, the customary way for village women to carry things.

She looked well fed, Tan Dan thought. The Chelana Bhangis had plenty of meat in the house all the year round, although from dead animals.

Bhambis, on the other hand, were visibly underfed. The reason for this difference could be that the Bhangis get plenty of carcass meat, whereas the Bhambis did not eat that ample source of protein food any longer. As Tan Dan remembers from his early childhood, the Bhambis were not as thin looking before 1952, the year they left leather work.

Evidently, the Bhangi families had no shortage of bread either, considering that a sweeper family got one roti every day from every house they served, which meant many dozens of roti bread daily. Baya's family, for example, had some 70 client households. Probably the jajman roti were sufficient in number for all Bhangis at Chelana to get at least two or three stale rotis thrice a day.

How the Chelana sweepers shared the work

Thirteen Bhangi families lived at Chelana in 1980. They had in total about eight hundred jajman families all over the village. A few generations back the thirteen families had been one. As the families belong to the same clan, they themselves divided the households in the village into jajman groups. With the growth of the Bhangi clan, they changed their jajman relations now and then, but their jajman families did not bother much, if the work went on all right. Compared to other jajman relations in the village it was not so close, as the Bhangis were kept at a distance, being considered very untouchable.

Sweeping the entrance area of the house yard

The main work of the Bhangi woman was to sweep the house compound around its entrance and at the walled open space in front of the house called _angan_ , in Marvari _chauk_. The area to be swept was called _buvaro._ Most house yards were walled, except at some houses of poor families. There the Bhangi swept a little around the entrance of the cottage.

The rest of the house compound, _bharo_ , the Bhangis did not sweep. They never swept the house and its _angan_ (house court), as these places were too private for untouchables to enter.

The daily bread to the sweepers

The sweepers used to take two rounds to their clients. In the first round they worked as sweepers. Then they came back to the same houses in order to collect the _buvaro ri roti_ , a bread left over from the last meal.

Before returning they used to clean themselves a little, wherever they could find some water. Sometimes the Bhangi woman was accompanied by a small girl who kept the bread basket. Then it was enough to make one round.

The sweeper shouted outside the house: "Roti do, sa!", which means, "Please give bread, Sir." Sa has about the same meaning in Rajasthani as Sir in English, i.e. that of showing respect and politeness to seniors.

The payment for the _buvaro_ sweepings was always one roti per jajman household, and had been so for a very long time, Tan Dan told.

That practice continued regardless of increasing prices and changing economic circumstances in the society at large. Unfortunately the food habits among the jajman families tend to change in an unfavourable direction. When wheat became common as a result of increased irrigation facilities and more high yielding varieties, then many villagers started to eat wheat bread instead of that of pearl millet. People in the cities used to eat unleavened wheat bread of a smaller size than the big, heavy bread of pearl millet. Such bread was called _sogram_ , whereas the small, light wheat bread was called _phulka_ , i.e. that which blows up, inflates. It was also called _chapati_ in north India.

Baniyas and the Thakur village lord family had long eaten _phulkas_ at Chelana, a habit envied by the village commoners. In the 1960s and later other villagers got a chance to imitate them, due to the production increase of new high-yielding wheat varieties getting plenty of irrigation water and chemical fertilizers.

Persons of many castes made it a habit to eat wheat _chapatis_ , partly because it was tasty and partly because it was modern and urban. Therefore, the pile of _jajman roti_ brought home by the Bhangi women every day in their _kharolia_ baskets became thinner and lighter, especially after the rabi harvest at the start of the hot season.

In 1981 big thick traditional bajra rotis were still baked by Jats, Malis, Kumars (potters), Sirvis, and other castes of the working class, but Charans such as Tan Dan's relatives had more and more joined the camp of the wheat eaters. These were the Rajputs, Baniyas, Brahmins, Sonars and a lot of other small castes who claimed to be high. Among these were also the Sads, the temple priests at Chelana. Persons of these castes with school education and urban contacts mostly preferred small chapatis to the big rotis. They did not want to be looked upon as _ganvar_ , village rustics, Tan Dan thought.

Also Chanda, Tan Dan's wife, who had been used to big rotis from her childhood at her native villages Kanpura and Rojas, preferred the small wheat _chapatis_ to the big _sogram_ bread. Sometimes she had arguments with Tan Dan, who insisted that she should make big rotis, at least to him. That he also got. But visitors used to get the thin elegant wheat chapatis, as most visitors were Chanda's in-law relatives, and they considered it backward and old-fashioned to eat big _sogram_ baked of grey pearl millet flour (bajra).

The price of one roti per jajman household was the same for rich and poor customers, which may seem unfair. For one thing, there was more work to do for the sweepers at the houses of rich people. The _buvaro_ area to be swept was usually bigger. Secondly, the light wheat phulka of better-off people was less valuable than the thick and wholesome roti the sweepers got from the working class families. Moreover, one roti was a small outlay for a well-off family, but more difficult to part with for really poor villagers.

The annual grain received in barter for removing shit from toilets

The main job of the Bhangi sweepers was to sweep the _buvaro_ part of the jajman house yards. The daily bread called _buvari_ _ri roti_ they got for that task. At some houses the sweepers also removed shit from toilet enclosures, and for that work they got an extra payment called _bharod_. It used to be paid in kind once a year in the autumn. Sometimes money was given.

_Bharod_ means a full year's payment. In-kind payments given several times a year were called _bhirat_.

Up to the 1950s there was just one harvest a year at Chelana, the kharif harvest of bajra cereal and some hardy pulses, which were fed by the monsoon rains and harvested in October. Hence, it became a common practice to pay the sweepers their _bharod_ grain in that season. The practice continued also after the production pattern in Chelana agriculture radically changed in the 1950s, as farmers started to exploit underground water by mechanized irrigation.

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### Chapter 4 Toilets cleaned by sweepers

Tarat, the traditional Chelana latrine

As most _jajman_ households did not have any latrines, the task of cleaning latrines took less time for the Bhangi women than sweeping the _buvaro_.

_Tarat_ is a dry toilet where people shit on the floor. There is not pit. The sweepers remove the shit from the floor of the _tarat_ , a small walled enclosure with no roof. In the most remote part of the house yard, the _bharo_. Such _bharo_ house compounds (in Hindi _ahat_ ) are usually surrounded by a stone wall, and the _tarat_ toilet is usually attached to that wall. Most of the _tarats_ were in the Rajput and Charan mohallas.

The _tarat_ latrine out in the _bharo_ house yard was only meant for women or sick persons. By tradition it was used especially in those feudal castes, where women were in parda, the Rajput and Charan castes. Menfolk of all castes went out to the fields instead.

The urination place at Chelana homes

In most houses of Chelana there is a small place in a remote corner of the house itself used for urination, _peshab_ , straight on the ground, in a squatting position. It is sometimes a small enclosure, but could also be an open drain. Such a place is used at night for _peshab_ by all in the household and at daytime by the women only. Small children also poo-poo there. The shit is removed by the mother of the child. The Bhangis have nothing to do with the _peshab_ place, in Marvaro called _nardo_. The _peshab_ is absorbed in sand, but still it often smells. The penetrating smell can sometimes be felt in other parts of the house as well.

The early morning walk to the fields

Menfolk from all castes normally went out in the fields with a _lotha_ or a small tin pot full of water. Women of castes without the _parda_ custom did the same. They went out in the early morning at dawn, when darkness still provided some privacy for latrine. From childhood the villagers learnt to clean themselves after latrine by splashing water vigorously around the anus without touching that part. It was the common practice all over western Rajasthan. They did the washing with their left hand only.

As the anus was not touched the hand and the lotha did not get dirty, Tan Dan told. According to him, any lotha could be used for the latrine trip. But it was thoroughly washed afterwards.

To go to the fields for latrine is called _jangal jano_ , "to go to the jungle". To the open wasteland around the village and to nearby crop fields. Nowadays there are cultivated fields almost everywhere, so wasteland patches suitable for having a shit has become scarce. There are a few bushy places here and there, but very little is left of the earlier vast extensions of desert shrub jungle with plenty of wildlife.

Although the faeces crumble after some time due to strong sunshine, it is quite unpleasant to have such unwanted leavings here and there in open areas. You have to mind your steps. A growing problem with growing village population. Some upland grounds with beautiful view and fresh air suitable for a walk have become veritable out door toilets with faeces all around.

Baniyas did not have tarat latrines

Although Baniyas was a high caste with many well-off merchant families, most of them used to do latrine in the outskirt of the village, just like other villagers. Also the Baniya women. It was their habit. Baniya women and some others used to sit in the middle of a certain village lane in the early morning, when it was still dark. It was difficult to pass there also in daytime due to the faeces and the smell. It has been like that for decades in that lane. The villagers accepted the disgusting place as something inevitable. Unfortunately, it was a busy lane used for going to and fro to the village fields. Public toilets in the village might have been useful to these Baniya ladies, but has never been seriously considered.

Baniya and Sonar families were by tradition merchants and goldsmiths, respectively. They often kept wealth which they wanted to protect and hide. Therefore, they lived in _havelis_ , big strong stone houses with iron rods in the windows. The angan courtyard was an integrated part of the well protected house. On the top of the angan there were iron rods to keep out burglars.

Their houses were well built, but they had no need of a big _bharo_ compound around it, so they did not have any _tarat_ latrine either. Nor did they have any latrines inside their houses with the exception of the two richest Chelana Baniya families, who built bungalows of an urban type in the 1970s. These exceptional houses had urban type of toilets, too.

The task of removing shit

In about two hundred houses of mostly Rajputs and Charan families there were _tarat_ toilets, which the Bhangi women used to clean in the following way:

The sweeper had a flat iron pan, the _kunda_ , on which she spread a thick layer of ash and sand mixed. They put the excreta on it with the help of a broken clay piece called _thikri_. They did not bring it along. Instead they keep a _thikri_ for each house at the latrine itself or nearby at some hidden place, out of sight of the householders and their children, so the children may not play with it. The Bhangi woman brings the _thikri_ herself.

As the shit lies on a layer of sand and ash, the iron pan does not get dirty, when the latrine is cleaned. After every two or three _tarats_ and houses, the sweeper dumps the shit at some place outside the mohalla of the jajman client. At some bushy dirty corner nearby, but out of sight.

Heaps and pits of human faeces

The dumping places for shit were in many cases close enough to the houses to be a health hazard. Diseases could spread through rats and flies moving around all over the area, and perhaps carrying pathogens. Most villagers did not look at it that way, though, as they believed in religious and supernatural reasons for diseases and health problems, but had never heard about bacteria and were sceptical to that kind of explanations.

Swarms of flies were a part of their daily life, and people had learnt to be patient with them. They did not bother much, except when somebody tried to kill them, thus creating _himsa_ (violence), which is considered _pap_ (sin). Killing rats was as much a sin as killing a fly, as the popular god Ganesh had a rat as his vehicle, and he used to be depicted together with a rat.

The heap at the old poultry house

In the 1990s Tan Dan lived in a house in the new Detha mohalla at the very edge of the settlement area of the village. He had lived there since 1973. That year he returned from Jodhpur, where he had rented a farm for a few years. In 1973 he started to live in a building, which earlier had been a godown of the Detha Brothers Farm. In the 1960s Tan Dan had started two animal husbandry ventures there, poultry and piggery, as a part of the Detha farm. It stopped after some years, partly due to the resistence from his relatives.

When Tan Dan returned from Jodhpur in 1973, he converted the room where he had kept his poultry birds into a kitchen. Outside the building, close to the old poultry room, the Bhangis used to empty their kundi iron pans full of shit from _tarat_ latrines of Detha houses in the vicinity. It was still a fairly wild shrub jungle area outside the Detha well. Hem Dan's house was about 70 to 80 metres away from the heap of human faeces, which had piled up close to Tan Dan's former poultry house during the years he lived outside Jodhpur. Hem Dan never bothered about that possible danger to his health, though, as he did not know about bacteria. He and his wife were pious Hindus who used to sing religious songs every fullmoon night from evening to sunrise. They believed more in the power of God and demons than in bacteria. Still, when Tan Dan became their neighbour, the Bhangis had to find another place for piling up the shit they removed from their jajman houses, and that was an advantage to Hem Dan and his family, although they did not know about it.

Shit removal in towns

Removing shit from private latrines in towns and kasbas is a much heavier work than in villages, at least in western Rajasthan. In towns the Bhangis have to remove heavy loads of human excreta from the iron pans on their heads to hand-trolleys, into which they dumb the shit. Then the trolleys are pulled away to dumping places somewhere. With a lot of toil.

Tan Dan saw Bhangis moving around with their trolleys full of nightsoil in the busy streets of the Jalagarh kasba in 1995. They went from house to house filling and emptying their _kundi_ iron pans, which the sweeper women kept on their heads. The same way and technique that had been used for generations.

Commercial compost-making of the Chelana Bhangis

As for Chelana village, the shit removed from the jajman houses was put in out-of-sight places close to the mohallas of their jajmans. After some time these heaps decomposed, and the shit had crumbled into dry humus matter in the strong sunshine and heat.

Around 1980 Bhangi families at Chelana sold compost as fertile soil to some farmers. The sandy desert soil is deficient in organic matter, which hampers crop production, especially after the introduction of intensive agricultural techniques using chemicals and tractors. Compost out of decomposed Bhangi sweepings can be useful on irrigated patches of high value crops. In 1973 Tan Dan asked his friend Madhan Bhangi, called Madhobhai by all villagers, to make compost heaps at the Bhangi mohalla and sell the stuff as manure, _khad_ , when it had become mature soil. Tan Dan wanted the compost for his vegetable land, especially for the cauliflowers.

For this compost work Madan used to clean extra places in the village where and when there were garbage of a nutritious kind. For example, under shady trees where animals made droppings and at the village bazaar.

Madhobhai's heap of decomposed garbage became excellent organice manure, _khad_ , suitable for vegetables, Tan Dan told. He paid for it, and when the other families got to know that Madhobhai could earn money on the wastage, they also got interested in making compost for sale to farmers. Madan died in late 1977, but his family continued the business, as it provided the family a good supplementary income.

Making _khad_ for sale out of the garbage from sweepings became a regular practice among all the Bhangi households, as the need of adding organic matter to the loamy desert soil increased in the 1970s, due to the expansion of mechanized irrigation cultivation from deep wells. More tractors meant less livestock. Tractors can do many things, but they can not provide dung as the oxen could.

Several farmers realized the advantage of buying organic manure, to improve the fertility of the soil. It was useful, especially for the irrigated crops in the winter season.

The need of organic manure was biggest on patches with horticultural crops. The Bhangi households sold the compost heaps in November each year, the beginning of the Rabi season. At that time time the heaps had kept accumulating since previous year. Then they started to collect garbage for a new heap. Some of the Bhangi households sold many bullock carts in a year. Around 1980 some Bhangi families earned several hundred Rupees in a year in the compost business.

Mangla Ram, the tailor who did not observe untouchability rules

Madan Ram, or Madhobhai, was a gentle person and he was a good friend of Tan Dan. Madanji was the poet among the Bhangis. Tan Dan liked his poems, which were all verbal, as Madanji like all other Bhangis of Chelana was completely illiterate.

Madanji died in autumn 1977 out of paralysis. Then he had reached old age and was one of the family heads of the Bhangi clan at Chelana.

Once he told Tan Dan about Mangla Ram, a tailor who had lived at Chelana in the 1940s, when Madanji was still a young man. Mangla Ram, the tailor, had an unusual attitude to be a villager living in such an isolated place as Chelana, because he believed in social equality between all persons and did not bother about caste and ritual prejudices. He did not like to see the humiliating work of Bhangi sweepers. He preferred to clean his house himself. Therefore, he did not have any jajman relationship with the Bhangis.

Madan Ram and the other Bhangis resented that Mangla Ram did not use their services, because they lost a client and thus a stale roti per day, the usual pay to the sweepers. They thought it was mean of Mangla Ram, and considered him a miser. They did not know his real reason for cleaning the house himself.

In those days Madanji's father Labu Ram Bhangi worked at the Thikana, where he took care of the horses in the stable. Madan was a young man who helped his father, sometimes. One day he saw a dead kitten in the stable. It was the duty of the Bhangis to remove small animals who had died within the village. When Madan's father told him to take the cat away, he thought he would teach a lesson to Mangla Ram Chinpa, the tailor. He lived at a house close to the open space outside the _Thikana_ gate. He threw the dead kitten in the drain in front of Mangla's house. Then Mangla would have to call a Bhangi to get it removed, Madanji thought. Mangla would realize the importance of the Bhangi sweepers. Next morning he found that Mangla had picked up the cat and thrown it away himself without any hesitation. Madan Ram Bhangi could hardly believe it: "Why did you do such an unclean work", he asked. "Don't you know it has to be done by untouchables like me?"

Mangla Ram replied: "If you can throw the cadaver away, why cannot I do it myself." He did not have any feelings of pollution, he told. As for being a jajman client to a Bhangi family, he explained to Madanji, it was not because he was a miser, that he did want any Bhangi to work for him, but because he did not want anybody to work for him in such a humiliating way. He did not like a degrading _jajmani_ relationship with somebody removing shit and dirt.

It was not his intention to create difficulties to any Bhangi in earning a livelihood, Mangla Ram told. "As I am a tailor I can stitch you a shirt, whenever you like", he promised Madanji.

"And so he did. Many times", Madanji told Tan Dan. "Free of cost."

He always respected Mangla Ram very highly after that day.

*

Mangla Ram got by time increasingly impopular among savarn Hindus at Chelana for his refusal to observe conventional caste rules. Sometimes he was slapped and given blows outside the Thikana gate. And he was threatened several times. At last he shifted to Jalagarh, where he worked as a tailor for many years. He died about the same time as Madanji, i.e. in the late 1970s.

Mangla Ram was a Chinpa by caste. The traditional caste profession of the Chinpas was textile printing. They coloured the cloth with wooden blocks. Hence, Mangal Ram did not belong to the tailor caste Darji, although he worked as a tailor. People of that caste used to call themselves Suiya Darji, i.e. needle tailors, to avoid getting mixed up with tailors of a lower ranked caste such as Chinpa.

In the old days Suiya Darjis mainly sew the clothes of royals and other rich people. Common people living in villages did not have much to stitch, as they mostly used square-sized cloth such as _dhoti_ , turban and _khes_ , Tan Dan told.

However, there are several traditional clothes of ordinary Rajasthani villagers which require the work of a tailor. Such as the female blouse used all over western Rajasthan and elsehwere. Kurta pyjama are also old traditional clothes which require stitching, although poor villagers mostly used dhoti instead of pyjamas and other kind of pants. Ang-rakhis shirts, in the 1970s still used by traditional Charan men further to the south-west, at Sanchor and in Gujarat, also required stitching by needles.

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### Chapter 5 The sweeper families at Chelana

The development of the bhaipa since the 1940s

Baya, the sweeper girl, had a greatgreatgrandfather called Sheraji. He was the ancestor of all Bhangis who lived at Chelana in 1980.

Sheraji lived in the early 20th century, at the time of Jugti Dan, Tan Dan's grandfather. Sheraji had died before Tan Dan was born. In those days the Bhangis lived at the southern edge of the village settlement area. Then there were more Bhangi families at Chelana than that of Sheraji, but none of the families who lived in the village in 1980 hail from them. It is likely that Sheraji had relatives who moved to other villages of the area to work as sweepers there, because Tan Dan have been told by Chelana Bhangis that they belong to the same kinship group as the Bhangis of three other villages of the area.

Hence, the whole Bhangi mohalla is one bhaipa (clan). In 1980 nobody of the grown-up men of the Bhangi group at Chelana were more distant relatives than second cousins. Tan Dan had met all of them, but not Sheraji.

The shift to the new mohalla

In the 1950s there were two Bhangi families in the village. Both of them were big joint families with several grown-up sons. The heads of these families were Labuji and Bhikaji. Labuji was the Bhangi feudal servant of the the Chelana Thikana, who worked at the stable. As a feudal servant he was ordered to carry out various nasty duties, such as mishandling villagers who had broken feudal customs.

It was Labuji who gave Harji Bhambi a shoe-beating and plucked his hair on the order of the village Thakur around 1950. The cruel treatment was a punishment for disobeying an established feudal rule. According to that rule all low caste people of the village should keep a cleanshaven strip on their heads, as a sign of submission and meekness.

Both the Bhangi families lived a wretched life in filth and poverty. Their congested mohalla was situated in between the Bhambi mohalla and Jugti Dan's big farm house.

They lived in the Marvar world of feudal rule, caste inequality and untouchability. It was taken for granted that Bhangis should live a life in stark poverty and great misery. In the 1950s times changed, fortunately, and a new age slowly dawned also in the remote village of Chelana. Situated in desertlike surroundings in between the two towns of Jodhpur and Ajmer, more than 160 kms apart.

The tight grip of the feudal elite in Rajputana loosened over the working class they had exploited so badly for such a long time. From 1952 onwards the humble agricultural tenants became more and more confident landowners.

From the central Government of newly independent India a stream of welfare schemes were handed over to the bureaucratic machinery on state and district levels. Schemes were made for building stone house colonies for various untouchable groups which from the 1950s were called Scheduled castes in the official language.

In the late 1950s the Rajasthan Government had a house building scheme for people of the Bhangi caste. It was the Harijan Colony Settlement Scheme.

Any _gram panchayat_ , that means democratically elected village council, could apply for funds for building stone houses for families of the Bhangi castes in the village. It was interest free loans, which should be paid back by the new house owners in due course. At the initiative of Ravi Dan, the Chelana sarpanch and Tan Dan's elder brother, money was obtained, a building contractor called. A line of eight solid one room stone houses was erected in the wasteland at the northern outskirt of the village. Beyond the Rebari mohalla and that of the Ganvaria Banjara, two nomadic groups who in the 1950s started to settle at Chelana on their own intitiative, as the village had come alive and kept expanding due to the start of mechanized irrigation farming.

The two Bhangi families shared the eight attached houses half-half. The western half of the line of houses was allotted to Labuji's family, and Bikhaji's joint family got the eastern houses. The kinship group kept growing and in 1981 there were thirteen families of husband, wife and children. A few houses had been added, and the families still had sufficient space. But the families continued to expand.

At Chelana all Bhangis lived in the new mohalla for several decades, before any family tried to settle anywhere else in the village. The small land of the old Bhangi mohalla in the south they sold to some neighbouring Bhambi families. In the early 1990s the place still looked abandoned, full of filth and fences of dry thorny twigs for domestic animals. All the Bhangis felt it was a great step forward to shift to airy stone houses from their dirty thatch-roofed huts.

The villagers regarded Government facilities provided under such welfare schemes as grants rather than loans. Nobody thought the government would ever try to recover the loans. They thought so until Indira Gandhi declared of Emergency Rule in 1975. All of a sudden discipline and strictness was emphasized in the development programs and in the society at large, and even the Bhangis could feel it, as they were reminded a few times to pay back their loans. A few of the families had paid back a part of the loan up to 1981.

The Bhangis felt grateful to Ravi Dan, although the money and the execution of the work had come from the bureaucratic machinery of the Rajasthan government. The role of Ravi Dan and his supporters in the gram panchayat had indeed been decisive for getting the money from the Government in the 1950s. Ravi Dan was a young active progressive farmer participating in local politics on the Congress side. In several other villages of the Chelana area no schemes of this kind was implemented at all, especially in villages in which the old feudal lords continued to rule.

It happened that the former village lord became the chairman of the village council. The Thakur became the Sarpanch. It was possible in villages where the Rajputs constituted a large part of the village population. In such villages low ranked castes such as Bhambis continued to be very meek and obedient and also voted for the Thakur in Gram Panchayat elections, although it was very much against their real interests.

The low castes including the Bhangis continued to be supressed by the elit in the next few decades in spite of formal village democracy. Especially in villages with ex-jagirdars of the Rajput caste capable of adjusting to the new age. Some Thakurs managed commercialized large farms, and continued to be in a strong social position by deepening their urban contacts. Tan Dan guessed that also in such villages money was allotted for the construction of Bhangi houses under the welfare scheme, but misappropriated somehow, without the Bhangis in such villages even being aware of the existence of such a scheme. At any rate, according to Tan Dan, Chelana was one of the few villages in the area where a new well planned Bhangi mohalla could be seen during these years of the late 1950s. Built by Government funds. Although the scheme was meant for all villages in Rajasthan with a substantial Bhangi population.

Most men of the Bhangi caste did not work regularly as sweepers

Most women of the Bhangi families at Chelana worked as sweepers at private houses, but their menfolk did not, except on those rare occasions, when no women of their household could go. For example, when they were were sick.

It was more common that men worked as sweepers at public places. Then they were employed by some organization which paid them wages. For example, Bhangis were employees of the municipality for cleaning streets in towns and kasbas. Both men and women did such work. Sometimes husband and wife worked together.

Still, women used to stand the drudgery of sweeper's work better than men. By tradition it was their task to take care of their own family and household, and that might have fostered them to greater responsibility and maturity than men showed.

Madan Ram's son Tamba Ram and his wife illustrate that. They both got jobs as street scavengers at Pipar, the kasba to the southwest of Chelana. Tamba Ram left after some time, but his wife continued the work which brought cash to the family. Tamba Ram sometimes lived at Pipar together with his wife, and sometimes alone at Chelana. Off and on he worked as an agricultural labourer, but on the whole he was unemployed. Most of the time he sat at home. He was often drunk.

Chelana Bhangis as sweepers at the Muslim Id festivals

At the two Id festivals of the Chelana Muslims each year, Mithi Id and Bakra Id, the Bhangis by custom swept the _namaj_ ground, the praying ground, where all Muslims of Chelana made a collective prayer. The place for doing _namaj_ , i.e. prayer, was called _idga_. At Chelana the _idga_ was situated between the village bazar and the village tank. The idga was a simple wall monument in the open and the praying ground in front of it was just a small barren field.

Although in most cases it was the Bhangi women who worked as sweepers, on this function the job was only performed by Bhangi men, because this Muslim function was only attended by men.

The _namaj_ prayer was carried out about ten o'clock in the morning on the day of Id. After the namaj meeting was over and the assembled Muslims were about to disperse, the Bhangi men kept standing here and there in the midst of the happy, talkative crowd, waiting for their reward. They just stood their without saying anything. Now and then some of the departing Muslims stopped at a Bhangi and gave him a few coins. Most of them only gave five to ten paisa. Occasionally some pious or generous Muslim could give as much as a Rupee.

When all the Muslims had gone, the Bhangi men got together and pooled their money. They shared the money in equal amount, after a lot of counting and calculating. They were five grown-up men, some young boys and a few children sitting in the shade of a stone wall of a Rathore house yard on their way back to the Bhangi mohalla. Tan Dan's friend Devi Ram, who worked as a bundle lifter at the magistrate court at Merta, and his brother Jabru. There was also Vimla's father Harman Ram and Pelad , the most senior person of them all, being in his late forties. Handling money was normally done under the leadership of the eldest person of a kinship group.Therefore Pelad led the work of dividing the money.

New jobs for Bhambis

The old organizations in feudal western Rajasthan were meant to control people and to extract something from them. Such as Thikanas and caste panchayats. In the 1950s a new kind of village organizations started, which had the objective to provide some kind of service to the villagers. To help them somehow instead of suppressing them. Such as schools and hospitals. Post offices and agricultural marketing cooperatives.

The Gram Panchayat, i.e. the village council, could arrange these facilities through Government officers who provided funds and facilities. That is how simple villagers gradually realized that the power to get things done had shifted from the village _thakur_ at the _thikana_ to the Sarpanch and his Gram Panchayat.

Some of the Bhangis such as Labuji had been employed as a kind of serfs at the Thikana, the feudal centre up to the early 1950s, but from the late 1950s the new peasant leaders of the village, Ravi Dan and his friends, arranged employment for a few selected Bhangis at some of the new institutions, which were about to start in the village. Ravi Dan told the Bhangi _bhaipa_ (kinship group) that the Gram Panchayat could arrange two permanent jobs for them, one at the secondary school and another at the village hospital. The two Bhangi families of Labuji and of Bhikaji could select one young man each for jobs as _chaprasis_ , i.e. watchmen-cum-attendants. It was a servant kind of job with low status and a small salary. Still it was very attractive for villagers such as Bhangis, as it meant a regular income without hard labour.

The elders of the Bhangi caste decided that Labuji's son Sugna Ram should work at the Chelana hospital, and Bhikaji's grandson Matadin at the village school.

The Chelana hospital started to operate in 1960. It was a small one. It mainly functioned as an open dispensary, but there were beds, too, both in the male and the female ward. On average some fifteen to twenty persons stayed there as hospitalized for a few days.

After having worked at the Chelana village hospital up to the 1970s, Sugna Ram got a job at a dispensary of another village for some years. In the 1980s he became a chaprasi at a hospital at Jodhpur.

Matadin, the Bhangi who got a job at the Chelana school, continued to work there until his retirement. The school kept expanding all the time since its modest start in the late 1940s. Around 1955 it got its own school building, then a middle school was added and in 1959 the Chelana Secondary School was started. Matadin and the other three Chaprasis of the secondary school were recruited at that time. Matadin was the only one who belonged to a schedule caste. As a Bhangi he was untouchable to the whole staff of the school, and to the students as well.

Until 1980 Matadin lived with wife and children at his father Udaji's house at the Bhangi mohalla at the northern edge of the village. He had many brothers and the house was getting crowded. In 1980 he built a house on a plot at the new housing area near the school in the south. The plot was just a part of a bushy wasteland up to which the village settlement area had not yet reached. He had been promised that plot several years earlier by Ravi Dan, the sarpanch. At the 1978 Gram Panchayat election, Satya Narayan became elected new sarpanch, i.e. chairman of the village council. He belonged to the other side in village politics. As he was opposed to the actions taken by Ravi Dan generally, he was not keen on helping Matadin to solve his housing problems. The Gram Panchayat decided that Matadin had built his house without permission, and ordered him to pull down his house, as it was unauthorized. The two parties of the Gram Panchayat kept discussing about it, and no action was taken, but the threat remained for many years. Matadin's family still lives there.

The house was situated in a new housing colony of mixed castes to the south of the Merta-Jalagarh road, which in the 1980s had become very busy full of heavy vehicles from near and far, especially trucks for the limestone industry of the area. That industry kept growing all the time. In the 1990s there were even cement factories in the area pouring out a thick smoke. A major source of new wealth and environmental pollution.

Devi Ram, the bundle lifter at Merta

Matadin had a brother called Devi Ram. He was one of the very few Bhangi children, who went to the village school around 1960. An important reason for letting him study was probably, that his elder brother Matadin was employed at the school. Devi Ram had a pleasant personality, and after he had finished school, he got a job as a kind of chaprasi at the tehsildar office at Merta. His job was a little more advanced than an ordinary chaprasi work, as he had to be literate.

He moved around papers, files and other material of the _patvaris_ in the Kanungo's office, which was a part of the _tehsil_ office for the Merta area. He had to put files on the right shelves and lift bundles of paper, which could be heavy. Hence, the title of his job: bundle lifter.

He had a house in the Bhangi mohalla at Merta, a fairly big housing colony in the middle of the town. Tan Dan visited him there now and then, as they remained good fiends, helping each others in various ways.

At school Devi Ram was a class mate of Tan Dan's young brother Ratuji and also of Genvar Ram, a Bhambi boy who had been good at school, but got his life spoilt by a fraudulent court case that went on for years.

Bhangi tractor drivers

Devi Ram had two brothers who were tractor drivers, Jabru and Kalyan. They belonged to the young men at Chelana who got the opportunity to learn tractor driving from the 1950s onwards, when mechanized irrigation farming was introduced in the village. They became skilled labourers in high demand in the agricultural peak season and therefore better paid than ordinary labourers.

In 1980 there were about thirty men at Chelana who worked regularly as employed tractor drivers. Others drove now and then, especially at peak seasons. They were both hired labourers and young men belonging to farm families.

Four of the tractor drivers belonged to the Bhangi caste. Among these were Jabru and Kalyan mentioned above. Both of them used to be hired by Detha farmers.

The third Bhangi tractor driver was Dula Ram. He had a share in a tractor which to the major part was owned by his maternal uncle, a cattle bone contractor at Rian. Dula Ram was the son of Sugna Ram, the chaprasi at the village hospital, and his grandfather was Labuji, the feudal serf at the Thikana stable. Dula Ram and his father lived in the second house from the west in the line of attached stone houses which constituted the whole the Bhangi mohalla.

The fourth Bhangi tractor driver was Chetan Ram. He was the father of Baya, the young sweeper girl we followed through the village on her tour to her jajman families. Chetan Ram died in late 1994. His younger brother died twelve days after him. They had both been alcoholics for many years, when they died at the age of 45 and 42 years. In the 1990s Chetan Ram had his own tractor, which he and his sons mainly used for transporting stones from limestone quarries to lime kilns. His sons continued to operate the tractor after Chetan Ram's death.

The expansion of the limestone industry at Chelana has meant plenty of job opportunities to poor depressed groups in the Chelana area, as the case of Chetan Ram's family showed. Therefore they were less in the clutches of the village elite than earlier. But the old feudal relations continued out of habit and tradition for many decades. Chetan Ram, for example, used to keep company with Rajputs, although he hade a very subordinate position in their company.

Chetan Ram learnt tractor driving as a teenager, when he worked as an agricultural labourer at the farm of Praduman Singh, a skilled farmer of the Rajput caste and a good friend of Ravi Dan, the village sarpanch. Praduman Singh himself taught Chetan Ram the technique of tractor ploughing, and how to maintain the tractor. It happened in the 1960s, when also Tan Dan learnt tractor driving.

Chetan means 'he who is awake, he who is conscious' in both Hindi and Marvari, and Chetan Ram was quite a bright boy in his youth. He became a talented tractor driver, according to Tan Dan, who thinks that Chetan Ram might have been one of the ten most skilled drivers of the village. As for operating the tractor in the field, in making straight rows in ploughing and planting etc.

The reason why Chetan Ram became like a family driver at Praduman Singh's farm in the 1960s might have been that Chetan Ram's family had an old jajmani relationship to Praduman Singh's family with regard to sweeping etc. Tan Dan was not sure. Chetan Ram got the opportunity to become a tractor driver rather than his brothers, as he was the eldest brother. The others were still too small.

In the 1970s, Chetan started to drive tractors for Mehar Dan, the first sarpanch at Chelana in the 1950s, and one of Tan Dan's cousins.

In 1981 Chetan Ram had not worked regularly as a tractor driver for five years. He only worked in the peaks of the rabi and kharif seasons. Then the farmers wanted their fields ploughed and sown as fast as possible and skilled tractor drivers were in high demand. Their wage was therefore 15 to 20 Rupees per day, whereas in the lean season tractor drivers only got eight to ten Rupees per day.

Chetan Ram got into more and more leisurely habits. He only worked for some three or four months per year in total. The rest of the year he was idle, sitting at home or meeting young people of the Rathore mohalla. He got into the habit of drinking liqour together with them. They drank, whenever they managed to get hold of alcohol. They bought from the government licensed liquor shop or, more often, from those who distilled liqour at home, and sold at a very low price. Around 1980 they only charged two to three Rupees per litre for their illegal liqour.

Chetan Ram's Rajput friends accepted his company, but did not forget he was an untouchable. They served him in a special mug, which he had to take care of himself. They used him as a servant and messenger, and called for him, whenever something was to be done. Chetan Ram got exploited, but he thought he gained from his Rajput company, too. In the eyes of other Bhangis he was a distinguished person with powerful friends. Although he was neither old nor mature in character, his caste fellows considered him to be their leader, and he often acted as the spokesman for the whole Bhangi mohalla.

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### Chapter 6 Bhangis and village politics

Chetan Ram and politics

In March 1977 a general election to the Indian Parliament in New Delhi was held all over India. The ruling Congress Party had become impopular after two years of emergency and a rough family planning campaign headed by Sanjay Gandhi, son of the prime minister, Mrs. Indira Gandhi. The opposition, headed by the Janta Party, had good hopes of getting into power. In the Chelana area the election campaign went on for several weeks in February. Jeeps with loudspeakers and party flags drove around spreading messages. At Chelana the villagers were as usual divided in a Pro-Congress and an Anti-Congress camp. The Dethas, headed by Ravi Dan, was for the Congress and Indira Gandhi, whereas their old foes among the Rajputs and the Baniyas supported the Janta Party.

Bahadur Singh strongly supported the Janta Party. He was a Rathore youth of the Chelana village who studied law at a Jodhpur college. He had been enrolled by the Janta Party as an election campaign worker, and he did his best to persuade the Chelana villagers to vote for that party.

Chetan Ram's liqour drinking Rajput friends were all for Bahadur Singh and his Janta Party. That is how Chetan Ram started to propagate for the Janta party, too.

He himself might not have had much preference for any party, as ideologies and party programs were practically unknown at Chelana, apart from the family planning campaign led by Sanjay Gandhi.

About that campaign there were many rumours at Chelana, but few persons had any first-hand experience, as there were no raids for sterilizing menfolk at Chelana itself. People came to know about raids by family planning teams at small villages in the region, as well as at Jalagarh and Anandpur Kalu. People had been caught on the roads. Therefore migrant labourers and others were reluctant to visit their home villages, as long as the family planning campaign was going on.

Next year, in 1978, there were elections to the Gram Panchayats all over Rajasthan. In earlier village council elections Ravi Dan had become sarpanch without difficulties, but the confidence of various big and medium size castes in the village had grown. This time they wanted to put forward their own candidates rather than rallying around the Dethas in a united front against the the former feudal elite, as they had done in the 1950s and 1960s. Neither the Jats nor the Muslims were likely to vote for him. Realizing that his chances had become smaller this time, Ravi Dan decided not to contest as a sarpanch (village council chairman), but as an ordinary panch (village council member) at the election ward of the Detha mohalla. Instead the Dethas and their allies in village politics put forward Praduman Singh as their sarpanch candidate. He was a Rathore of an influential ex-jagirdar family, and that could attract Rajput voters. Although Praduman Singh's family was a Rajput one, it had old bonds of friendship with the Dethas. A few other powerful Rajput families had been their common foes for generations. Especially Bhan Singh's family, as we have told in the section about dacoit robber bands in the Chelana area up to the 1950s. Also the Rathore family of Bahadur Singh, the law student, had been hostile to Praduman Singh's family for a long time.

In the 1977 parliament election Chetan Ram had been with the Rajput group in village politics against the Dethas, but one year later he had changed side. He supported Ravi Dan's party in their campaign for Praduman Singh. When Tan Dan asked Chetan Ram how it could be that he had changed from one side to the other, Chetan replied that this was an opportunity for him to show his affection and gratitude to Praduman Singh, his old master and wellwisher, who had taught him everything about tractors.

Therefore he propagated for Praduman Singh among his caste brethren, in spite of the objections from his Rajput liqour drinking companions. They were all for Satya Narayan, the rivaling sarpanch candidate.

Chelana Bhangi mohalla voting pattern at 1978 village election

At the Bhangi mohalla there was one more young tractor driver, who kept company with young Rajputs in the same way as Chetan Ram. It was Dula Ram, the son of Sugna Ram, the chaprasi of the village hospital. Dula Ram partly owned the tractor he was driving, as we have told earlier, and therefore he felt a little more secure than most other Bhangis. Like Chetan Ram he was something of a leader within the Bhangi community.

Dula Ram had no special bonds to Praduman Singh, and gave the other candidate, Satya Narayan of the Brahmin caste, his active support. Mainly because Satya Narayan was the candidate of Bahadur Singh and many other Rajputs with whom Dula Ram wanted to be associated in the eyes of his fellow Bhangis.

Dula Ram was the grandson of Labuji, and Chetan Ram the grandson of Bhikaji. These two branches of the Bhangi bhaipa at Chelana often had somewhat different inclinations in village affairs.

Since the days of Labu Ram's family had been close to the Rajputs of the village Thikana. The Thikana Rajput families were their most important _jajman_ clients. Labuji's offspring used to be on the Rajput side in village matters out of a feeling of obligation rather than conviction. These families lived in the western half of the eight to ten houses built on a line in the Bhangi mohalla.

Those who lived in the eastern half of the mohalla were the children, grandchildren and greatchildren of Bhikaji. They had a closer relationship to the Dethas, partly because Dethas were their jajman clients. They also had some Rajput families as their jajman clients, including that of Praduman Singh. Families who were friendly to the Dethas.

Two of the houses on the eastern side had been in favour of the Dethas in village politics since the 1950s. Headed by Harman Ram and Pelad. They felt grateful to Ravi Dan for helping them to get the stone houses constructed in the new Bhangi mohalla. Also Udaji's household were old supporters of the Dethas. Two of Uda Ram's sons worked as tractor drivers for Detha families in the 1970s.

(Kalyan for Naru Dan, Jabru for Sumer Dan's family. Naru Dan and Sumer Dan were both employed in Government offices in subordinate positions for several years, but their families lived at Chelana all the time. They were two of the fourteen partners in the Detha Brothers farm in the 1950s.)

Also Chetan Ram and his brothers lived in the eastern side of the mohalla. Their support to the Dethas was less stable due to Chetan Ram's attempt to play a modest part in village politics himself.

Hence, the election had divided the whole Bhangi mohalla in two parts, as all members of a family voted for the same candidate. On the day of voting Dula Ram, his father, his paternal uncles, and all their women voted for Satya Narayan, the sarpanch candidate of most Rajputs and the savarn Hindu elite. So did also the other voters of the western houses of the mohalla, whereas all grown-ups in the eastern houses voted for Pradhuman Singh. The election day was like a folk festival, with all villagers dressed up in their best clothes. The Bhangis did vote, they even enjoyed the excited atmosphere, but the outcome of the election did not concern them much. Praduman Singh lost and Satya Narayan become the new sarpanch, but the people of the Bhangi mohalla showed very little reaction. As the Bhangis were not emotionally involved in the game of village politics, nobody felt bitter about the result and no rift was created within the caste. Chetan Ram and Dula Ram continued to drink with their Rajput friends as before.

Madhobhai, a Bhangi poet liked by the villagers

Madan Ram was also called Madhobhai. He was a Bhangi of the Gharu gotra like the other sweepers of Chelana, as they all were related. He was a good poet.

Madan Ram was of about the same age as Ravi Dan, both were born in the 1920s. He died in the late 1970s.

Madan worshipped Lal Guru, a deity popular among Bhangis. Although not literate, he was nevertheless awakened and enlightened, Tan Dan thought.

Before the Harijans moved to the new line of houses around 1960, they lived in the old Bhangi mohalla, which was close to the original Charan mohalla, where Budh Dan had settled and his sons Jugti Dan and Kiman Dan grew up in the 19th century.

The old Charan mohalla was only some fifty metres away from the edge of the old Bhangi mohalla. In the middle of the old Charan mohalla there was a _hathai_ , a place where menfolk got together. It belonged to the Mehru clan. At that _hathai_ Charan men used to sit and talk in the evenings, also Detha Charan men. They recited Dingal poems popular among Charans. People of other castes could come and listen. Untouchables such as Bhangis were also allowed, but the rules of untouchability were strictly observed. Madan used to come in the evenings. He was handicapped in one leg and had difficulties to move. He worked as an agricultural labourer in spite of that, but he could not do any sports and he could not run.

Madan liked to hear Charans recite their poems. He used to come and listen in the evenings, when the recitation started. He also made his own poets having heard various poets of the Charans.

After village democracy was introduced at Chelana in the 1950s, the Gram Panchayat arranged general meetings to which all villagers were invited. Menfolk, of course. These meetings were called Ramasama, and they were held twice a year on the day after Divali and Holi. Everybody used to come to tell his ideas and problems.

On such occasions Madan used to recite his own poems about village affairs. For example disputes among rivals about irrigation land. He told who was at fault, and who should be lenient. In these poems he told his opinions and gave his suggestions.

He also described the geography and nature of the area in his poems.

(Told by Tan Dan in 1999.)

Vimla's small brother

Harman Dan and his wife had three daughters in 1980. Vimla was in her early teens and the other two were about five. They used come along with Vimla on her forenoon sweeping rounds in the village. In 1977 Vimla also had a small brother, who was the darling of his mother. When in July 1977 the girls by chance got the opportunity to learn the basics of reading and writing at Vimla's home, Vimla's mother also let her baby boy try a little.

The Bhangi mohalla was situated in the extreme north of the village, at the edge of the flat wasteland over which cold winds from the north kept blowing in the winter. The wind blew from the snowy mountains of the Himalayas across the north Indian Plains. The line of houses, where the Bhangis lived, was very much exposed to it, especially as the solid stone houses had windows and door openings, but lacked window panes, window shutters and doors. So the cold breeze kept blewing through the house, and the winter nights can be chilly in the desertlike western Rajasthan.

He got pneumonia and died. Like many other small children in the Chelana area the small boy died due to winter cold. Vimla's mother was so much lost in him, that his death became very difficult for her to accept. She had many daughters, but he was her son, the future of their family and her support at old age.

Later on she got another son.

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### Chapter 7 The Bhangi baskets

The Bhangi sweepers used baskets and iron pans for removing the dirt from the houses of their jajmans. The garbage basket was used for collecting the sweepings at the _buvaro_ area outside the house of the jajman clients. Shit from the toilets was carried away in iron pans called _kunda_. The women used to carry the _kundas_ on their heads. The _kunda_ rested on a ring of cloth.

They came along either with the garbage basket or the kunda iron pan, not both at the same time, as they were used at different places and had to be kept separate. The basket used for garbage is called _chajla_ and has only three vertical sides. The fourth side is open, as the garbage material is loaded and discharged into the basket tray from that side. Then the sweeper carried away the garbage sweepings with that basket.

The _chajla_ basket was also used by the villagers in general for cleaning grain at their homes and by farmers at the threshing ground for winnowing the harvested crop. These baskets they bought from the sweepers.

Vimla and Baya and the other Bhangi women kept both pans and bread baskets on their heads, but the _chajla_ basket for the sweepings they carried at their hips, as it was a wide basket and a support for the broom they used at the buvaro area. For the _tarat_ toilet they kept another broom they kept in the _kunda_ iron pan.

The roti bread from their jajmans, they carried home in a basket called _chabdi_ in Rajasthani. When Tan Dan accompanied Baya one forenoon in December 1977 she carried home the bread from the jajman clients in a big and beautifully made basket decorated with coloured strips. Such a _chabdi_ basket, closed on all four sides, is also called _kharolia_.

There are even bigger baskets of this type used for keeping fodder. They are called _khari_ in Rajasthani. The _khari_ fodder basket is always of the same size. It is used as a measurement unit throughout western Rajasthan. Fodder prices are calculated in Rupees per _khari_. Except fodder grain stalks, which are calculated in bundles. ( _Kharolia_ baskets, the _chabdi_ , were not used for measurement.)

Who made the baskets and out of which material?

The strong Bhangi baskets mentioned above were done by certain Bhangi families, who had specialized on making baskets of _sarkanda_ and some wood of the _beri_ tree. The baskets were tied with sinews and hide strips made into cords. Also other parts of the dead cattle might have been used as strings, such as blood vessels.

The reed baskets were only made by Bhangis in western Rajasthan, but baskets of wheat straw , and straw of some other cereals and wild grasses and bushes, were made by individuals of many castes depending on skill and aptitude. Also Bhir Dan, Tan Dan's cousin, who was a pioneer in well irrigation, made baskets as well as other handicraft work such as carpets and _charpai_ beds.

Madan Lal Gharu, also called Madhobhai and Madan Ram, was very good at making baskets. A skilled craftsman. Tan Dan followed his work in the 1960s. He tied the baskets with strong cords, probably sinews made into strings or perhaps blood vessels from cattle carcass. He kept bundles of such cords in his hand while working.

Basically the Bhangis made the baskets for their work as sweepers, but the baskets were sturdy and durable and in demand by other villagers, especially farmers, who used the baskets for winnowing grains and also for storage.

In some villages Bhangi basket makers sold their baskets at big cattle fairs, melas. That was done by basket-making Bhangis near Butati village. Tan Dan went their in the 1970s. To Paldi village on the way to Nagaur from Merta. There he met a basket-maker at work, who belonged to a Bhangi clan well known in the whole region for their skill in making baskets.

The skilled Bhangi craftsmen of Butati village

Basket-making and broom-making are traditional handicrafts of the Bhangis in western Rajasthan. The Bhangis of Butati village were skilled in making both. They knew how to make very strong baskets of the wild sarkanda reed. So strong that a horse could put both his front legs on such a basket without breaking it. Then half its weight was on the basket. Tan Dan saw such a demonstration himself, when he visited their village after having met them at a _mela_ , a religious fair at Jalagarh held in 1981. There these baskets were sold.

Butati is a much smaller village than Chelana situated nine kos, i.e. 27 km north of Merta. At Butati village about six Bhangi families lived. The menfolk of these families had adopted the work of basket-making, and brooms, as their speciality, while their womenfolk continued with the usual Bhangi sweeping work for their jajmans.

The husband of the family Tan Dan visited at Butati in Februari 1981 tied the reeds of the basket tightly with material from dead cattle. It was a part of their _jajman_ duties to remove the animals and take care of the carcass.

For tying he used strings of leather and for finer string he used the 'nerves' of dead cattle. ( _Nas_ , it could be veins or sinews, but hardly nerves in the real sense.) A young relative showed Tan Dan how a _chajla_ winnowing basket was made of two layers of sarkanda reed, going in right angle to each others for additional strength.

The Butati Bhangis mainly sold their baskets and brooms at the melas within the radius of perhaps fifty miles, going themselves to the melas with these items by hiring a camel cart or a tractor trolley. At the mela they sit among their brooms and baskets all day long. Their sale effort is a small marginal activity of the melas, many of which are cattle fairs.

Some of the melas are religious fairs meant for commemorating some saintly person or deed, or some god. For example the _nausati_ mela at Jalagarh, which celebrates the memory of the heroic _sati_ of nine queens of Raja Bali, once the ruler of a local kingdom. They burnt themselves to death on his funeral pyre, according to the legend, and that is the _sati_ deed admired by the villagers as something brave and heroic. The nine _satis_ are worshipped as deities.

At Merta Road there is once a year a big religious mela to celebrate the memory of Parshvanath at a Jain temple built in 8th century A.D. At the open ground outside that big fortified temple, a mela is going on for five six days, attracting _lakhs_ of people.

Thus the Butati Bhangis sold their basket and brooms at some of the twenty to thirty melas held every year within their reach. At Merta, Nagaur, Riyan, Dadod, Jalagarh, Asop etc.

Most of the year they were busy either making these items in their home village or selling them at the melas. They sold a small part in the village itself on order.

The Bhangis of Butati have had this habit for a long time. They were known for making very strong baskets. People used to say that their baskets were so strong that even a horse could step on the basket with his front legs without breaking it. It is due to this reputation all over Nagaur district and adjoining parts of Pali and Jodhpur districts that they could sell so much at melas. In 1981 they got from five to twenty Rupees per basket depending on size and quality.

They made very good brooms, too. Their brooms were made of stalks of the _sarkanda_ reed cut slantwise in such a way that the sweeping surface becomes big while sweeping.

This broom is more efficient and practical than the usual village broom made by people of other castes. The ordinary village broom is mostly just a small bundle of the thin top of the reeds, thus sweeping with only a small surface. It often sheds parts of the earheads.

Kalyan, the tractor driver who was a basket maker in the lean season

This mela going habit for selling handicraft was concentrated to only a few villages within the region. In these villages there were unusually enterprising and industrious craftsmen. The Chelana Bhangis were not among them, but some men of that village made good baskets too, such as Madhobhai and Kalyan.

Udaji's son Kalyan used to be employed by Naru Dan's family as a tractor driver. Not all the time, though. He also made baskets. Kalyan and the other Bhangis made baskets of about five to six different sizes of two basicaly different types. The _kharolia_ basket, closed on all sides, in which items are kept, and the _chajla_ basket, which is open on one side and is used for winnowing and grain cleaning. That is how the villagers used them. The sweepers used them in their work.

A moderately trained basket-maker such as Kalyan Bhangi can make about three baskets in two days, getting perhaps seven to eight Rupees per basket. After deducting costs for raw material and transport he might have about seven eight Rupees per day on this basket-making work in 1981. He did this work in the hot season, in the month of April, when there was not much agricultural work to do on Naru Dan's farm.

In the lean season he thus became a basket maker, earning a supplementary income by selling baskets to other castes, mostly _kharolia_ baskets. Big baskets used for handling fodder and hay, even bigger than the one Baya used to carry on her head when collecting bread from her jajman clients.

When Tan Dan met Kalyan in his angan at the Bhangi mohalla in 1981, he was about to make three kharolia baskets, two small and one big. Normally such basket-making work is done in batches of three.

He used _sarkanda_ reed bought at Merta and hauled to Chelana by tractor trolley or by some other means, depending on opportunity.

The families of the Ganvaria Banjara caste had their houses south of the Bhangi mohalla, on the other side of a high wall used as a partition. The Ganvaria Banjara menfolk made several items of _sarkanda_ reed, but not baskets. Selling products made of sarkanda such as _chick_ curtains was their major occupation. Kalyan could have bought some reed out their stock, if they would have charged reasonable prices. Instead they put the price very high, evidently with the intention to have nothing to do with the untouchable Bhangis.

*

The Ganvaria Banjara lived in 1981 in straw huts, being poor, although perhaps a little bit better off than the Bhangis, having more and better food to eat, although worse houses. They were of nomadic origin and were habituated to straw huts. The Ganvaria Banjara treat their Bhangi neighbours as untouchables, although they were a very low-ranked caste group themselves in the eyes of savarn Hindus. Grownups of the Ganvaria Banjara group did not allow their children to visit the Bhangi mohalla. One Ganvaria girl was very curious to find out what was going on at Vimla's house, where some training in writing letter was given in July 1977, but she was kept back by her mother, although she, at first, was very enthusiastic about the idea of getting some education for her children.

Polluting Bhangis and non-polluting baskets

The corpses of the removed cattle the Bhangis used for getting meat, after having fleeced the animals. The hides they kept drying near their mohalla up on tree branches out of reach for dogs. They also hang meat in strips for drying.

The skeleton of the cattle and buffaloes were taken away free of charge by the contractor appointed by the Government for each area.

Some of the remaining parts of the cattle corpses were used as strong cords for tying the reed baskets. It is probably because they knew how to make such cords that strong and durable baskets had become a speciality of the Bhangis.

Other Hindus anxious of their reputation did not want to make baskets requiring strings from cattle carcass, but they did buy such baskets from the Bhangis, and used them without any hesitation. Evidently with no feeling of ritual pollution at that stage.

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### Chapter 8 Badri, the Bhangi boy at Jodhpur

Baya, the sweeper girl at Chelana, had a cousin living in Jodhpur. Her name was Indira and she was Badri's best friend.

Sheraji was the ancestor of all the thirteen Bhangi families who lived at Chelana in 1981. He lived in the early 20th century, but had died before Tan Dan was born in 1943. Sheraji had two sons, Labuji and Bhikaji. The latter was the grandfather of Ganga Ram who died young in the early 1970s, leaving his wife and five small children behind. Ganga Ram's widow moved to Jodhpur in search of jobs for herself and her children. She settled in a small Bhangi colony in the eastern part of the town. Her daughter Indira contributed to the household income by cleaning the houses of well-off urban families living in bungalows of the area, although she was only a child. So did also other children of the mohalla. Badri, for example, a small boy and one of Indira's best friends.

Tan Dan got to know Badri in the late 1970s. Badri lived in an old building which earlier had been a stable. It was a part of a housing complex which in the feudal age had belonged to a Jodhpur nobleman, possibly of the royal dynasty. He had kept many horses in the stable, as he was an important warlord. That was long ago, though, during the age when this part of Rajasthan was ruled as a princely state. The previously luxurious palace building was in poor condition. To make some money on the building, it had been divided into separate apartments which were occupied by ordinary Rajput families. The building was in the centre of a large compound which once had been a park. In the 1970s it had been neglected for a long time. The fifteen hectares of wasteland was full of weedy bush and rubbish. It was surrounded by a long wall which had fallen down at several places. The stable was at some distance from the big house in the middle. It had been built in one corner of the compound. There emerged a Bhangi mohalla, where families lived both in the old stable buildings and in huts they had built themselves. In another corner of the compound another lowcaste group of the Ganvaria Banjara caste had established themselves in a similar way.

Badri's uncle

In 1981 Badri was twelve years about. He lived in a room of the stable building together with his uncle and Indira lived with her mother in a small hut in front of it. Badri had lived there since he was five. His mother died and his father married another woman. He left both Jodhpur and Badri. A distant cousin of his father took care of the abandoned child. Badri felt obliged to his uncle, although he had to work a lot for him. He had to make opium drinks for his uncle almost every day. He soaked the dry poppy capsules in water, and then pressed them through a sieve. It was a painful sight for Tan Dan to see Badri busy pressing with his palms the poppy capsules. Badri's uncle had become completely addicted by that narcotic drink. Badri never complained, but Indira and her mother told Tan Dan that he got a bad treatment in many ways.

Indira's mother, Ganga Ram's widow, observed pardah towards Tan Dan. She covered her face with her _odhni_. With five children to support she had a difficult time. Indira herself was bold, lively and outspoken, as girls of her age used to be also in the patriarchalic region of Marvar. She was at the age when women had most freedom and liveliness, in the parda world of western Rajasthan.

Badri as a sweeper

The slum-like Bhangi colony of huts and old stables were out of sight of those who lived in the newly built bungalows in the neighbourhood. The bungalows of the professional class. There lived judges, retired officers of the Indian Administrative Service (IAS), high court advocates, businessmen, factory owners etc. The locality was a part of Jodhpur, a big town with almost half a million people around 1980, and all the time expanding.

As the bungalows were spacious with plenty of rooms to be swept, there was much work for Badri and his friends. Especially, as it was beneath the dignity of high class families to clean their houses themselves. Besides, why to clean your own house, when there were plenty of children around, who wanted work at a very moderate wage?

Two of these children were Indira and Badri. Every morning they went to the well-off people of the professional class to sweep their bungalows. In 1981, when he was twelve about, he had swept bungalows of rich people for five years. Thus he started his professional career at the age of seven. Several other small Bhangi boys also worked in the same way, but they had the support of their families, at least. The whole family was exploited together. It was at least a better emotional support than that of Badri. He had practically nobody, and was forced to work and live as an adult bachelor, although just a child.

He had a number of houses to sweep every day, but there was no permanent bonds between the sweepers and their clients in this part of Jodhpur in contrast to villages such as Chelana, where the jajman relationship lasted for generations. So there was no economic security for the Bhangis working in these new bungalows. In towns, sweepers of streets and other public places were better off in that respect, as they were permanently employed by the municipality.

Badri worked from sunrise up to noon. Then he used to roam around on his own and play as other children. In 1980 he had started to look for job opportunities at the Jodhpur vegetable market in the afternoon. Occasionally a customer let him carry bags and baskets to some vehicle, often a riksha. That way Badri could add some extra cash to his meagre income.

Badri and his employers

Badri lived as a stray individual in a big city, and he learnt from early childhood the importance of being meek and obedient to those who gave money to him, i.e. the owners of the bungalows he used to sweep in the mornings. If not, he might be dismissed faster than he had been engaged.

He was hired for the market price, which was settled through the strong but invisible forces of supply and demand. The bonds of the feudal age had been replaced by the equally crushing commercial forces of the money economy. However, after a few years the market price for sweeping a bungalow became like a fixed fee established by custom and precedent.

In 1980 the price for the work of the sweepers was six Rupees per month and bungalow. Badri swept eight houses every day. Thus he earned 48 rupees per month. Whether the low wage was justified from a social aspect, the educated people living in the bungalows hardly considered at all.

Badri told Tan Dan about the following incidence: A new bungalow family had moved into the locality and Badri offered his services as a sweeper. The lady of the house decided to engage him, but she was not sure about the wage. In reply to her question Badri told he got six Rupees per month from each of the other houses, where he worked. How much the other paid was the only important consideration for her, when deciding his pay. She did not want to pay more than the customary fee for sweepers, feeling to be cheated otherwise.

She did not feel quite sure that Badri had told her the truth. Small boys like him might tell lies out of greed and dishonesty. Therefore, she walked over to her neighbour and asked her how much she used to pay. They discussed this matter in loud voices, which could be heard all over the place, completely unconcerned about Badri's feelings.

When Tan Dan met Badri at Jodhpur in June 1980, the boy was in a happy mood holding money in both his fists. He was on his way home from his morning duties as a sweeper. Seeing Tan Dan he immediately shouted that he wanted to give him a glass of sugarcane juice, something which Tan Dan used to offer Badri, when they met in Jodhpur. A small glass of sugarcane juice cost 30 payse and Badri felt it was within his reach, as he had twenty Rupees in his hands. He was well aware, though, that his money was not to be wasted. He had to give it to his uncle who had allowed Badri to take shelter in his house.

Badri told Tan Dan that the money was his wage for four months. They had not paid him anything for that period up to then out negligence, as they had had more important things to care about. They owed him 24 Rupees but they gave him only 20 Rupees.

Why was not clear to Tan Dan. The family might have cut Badri's pay in a kind of barter, or because they thought he could not count. Perhaps they felt that the full pay would be more money than such a small boy could handle properly.

When Tan Dan heard that Badri had got cheated, he suggested: "Come on, let us go and ask them to pay the rest of the money." That idea did not appeal to Badri, though. He explained to Tan Dan very gently, that it was no good to do like that because: "Then I would be disliked".

The bungalow people of the locality would tell each other:

"He is a wicked boy." _(Badmash hai, muh torta hai.)_

They would tell him:

"You are not fit to come to our compound." _(Hamare yaha ane ke layak nahi hai.)_

"You do not have to come to us in future." _(Hamare yaha ane ki jarurat nahi hai.)_

Badri felt he would succeed better, if he remained meek. By getting other people's appreciation he might get better chances later on.

On another occasion in 1978 Tan Dan met Badri together with his friends, three girls and one boy. They were all going to their various bungalows. It was early in the morning and they hand brooms in their hands. They were ready for work.

Badri and his clan

Although Badri was twelve years in 1980, he had not married unlike most other Bhangi children of his age in western Rajasthan. Child marriage was the rule, not only in the Bhangi caste, but in many castes belonging to the masses. According to tradition, it was the duty of parents to get their children married early, and many parents started negotiations with other families just a few years after the birth of the child. In the case of Badri, though, there were no parents around to take care of that responsibility, just a distant uncle who did not bother.

In spite of that Badri was a part of a _bhaipa_ , a Bhangi clan who hailed from Nilkhedi ten kilometres to the south of Chelana. No families of his clan lived in the village any longer. They had all dispersed. Some lived far away.

In March 1979 all the Bhangis of the local _khera_ met at the Bhangi mohalla of Nilkhedi village. They had been invited to a big feast by some men of Badri's _bhaipa_ , who had gone to Hardvar and carried out the customary death ceremonies for deceased relatives. They had also brought Ganges water to their village, as high caste families used to do. Badri had got a special invitation to the fest. He was one of the most important persons of that function, as he alone represented his family. There was no other left than him. His father did not keep any contact with his caste brethren, after he had remarriage and left Jodhpur. Badri had neither brothers nor sisters. His grandfather was dead, and so was his father's brothers. As Badri was one of the few male persons living within his line of the bhaipa, he was treated with respect in spite of his young age. His caste people thought, it was important for the welfare of the souls of his deceased relatives, that he participated in the rituals of the feast.

The old house of Badri's deceased grandfather was still there at Nilkhedi village, and in that house adults of the clan still kept the _pind_ of Badri's dead relatives. _Pind_ means body, and here it means some small pieces of the dead body which are kept in a cloth bag and brought to Hardvar for submergence in the Ganges river. A necessary rite for helping the soul, atma, of the deacesed relative to go to heaven and then further to a new life. These _pind_ remnants are also called _asthi phul_ , which refers to the ash of the cremated body, but the Bhangi did not get any ash, as they buried their dead instead. So the _pind_ brought to Hardvar in the customary cloth bag by Bhangis did not contain ash but small parts of the body. Such as nails and some tooth.

Some of Badri's relatives had been dead for many years, as it was difficult and expensive to go to Hardvar. Meanwhile the souls of the dead might have roamed around in the village as restless ghosts called _bhut_. Such was the belief.

Untouchables such as Bhangis were not supposed to go as pilgrims to Hardvar, Brahmins thought, but those of Chelana and other villages of western Rajasthan did go there sometimes, as shown in this narration.

The group of men of Badri's bhaipa went to Hardvar in March 1979 and submerged the pind of their relative in the Ganges river. The _pind seravna_. (The merging of the mortal remains into the Ganges river at Hardvar was called _pind seravna_.)

They could arrange the _pind seravna_ ritual at Hardvar, although they were low caste untouchables, with whom the ordinary Brahmin pandas did not want to deal. How that was done Tan Dan did not know for sure. He has been told by a Bhangi at Merta and some other Bhangis that their caste had their own pandas at Hardvar. It cannot have been any panda accepted as such by savarn Hindus, Tan Dan thought. Whether their officiating priests at Hardvar were Bhangis or of some other caste, Tan Dan did not know.

As Nilkhedi was the common link of the Badri's bhaipa, it was natural that the feast for the whole caste was held there. Hundreds of Bhangis got together for the _Ganga jal_ bhoj feast at Nilkhedi for celebrating that the souls of many dead Bhangis of this bhaipa had been liberated by the immersion of the last fraction of their mortal bodies into the Ganges river.

The feast at Nilkhedi in March 1979 with Bhangis of all the 24 villages of the _khera_ was both a death feast and a wedding feast. These functions were carried out on different days. Formally, it was all combined in a big Ganges water feast, _Ganga jal bhoj_. That water the Bhangi pilgrims to Hardvar and brought to Nilkhedi in special pots.

It was controversial and even illegal to have big death feasts, but there was no rule which prevented people from feasting in a big way for having brought Ganges water to the village. They sprinkled Ganges water from Hardvar both on the death meal food and the guests to purify and make sacred in the same spirit as savarn Hindus did, although the whole party belonged to the Bhangi caste.

In the old feudal days, when Rajput warlords ruled the villages with great strictness, or, rather, brutality, the Bhangis would not even have been allowed to touch the Ganges water. There were many ways to punish those who did not obey.

Men of the whole Khera had come together at Nilkhedi. Khera was the local caste organization of the Bhangis comprising 24 villages, including both Chelana and Nilkhedi. Most castes in western Rajasthan are organized in khera units, and all kheras have 24 villages. That is the basic caste organization right from Brahmins to Bhangis, Tan Dan told. However, it is not the same 24 villages for all castes. For example, the Khera of the Bhangis of Chelana comprise villages, which to some extent are different from the villages of the Bhambi khera of the area.

The tasty Bhangi caste feast meal at Nilkhedi. Panch pakvan sweets etc.

Many dishes of tasty food were served at the feast, which lasted for three days. It was an expensive feast and prestigious feast, beyond the means of most Bhangis. Most of it had been paid by one of the men, who had gone to Hardvar as a pilgrim for the _pind seravni_ ceremony, at which small bones of the dead persons were submerged in the Ganges water. He had a good standing within the caste and he owned money, as he had migrated to Punjab with his family, where he worked as a skilled labourer for a good wage, at least compared to labourers living in Marvari villages. It was this man, who had taken the initiative of the feast. He had also invited Badri personally, as he thought it was important to have at least one male representative of Badri's line in the death meal celebrations.

Their feast went on for three days. Some families of the _khera_ took the opportunity to carry out some weddings, as was often the case at large gatherings of this kind, not only among Bhangis but among other common village castes as well.

Combining the death celebrations with weddings was partly a way of going around the prohibition of expensive death feasts, just like the ritual celebrations of Ganges water at the feast.

During these days Badri had a very nice time at Nilkhedi. He was a jolly boy, who liked to have plenty of people around, boys to play with and relatives to talk to, especially as the grown-ups of his bhaipa treated him almost like a grown-up person, although he wore short pants and simple open shirt. The adults of Badri's clan looked upon him as a link to the past and perhaps also as a hope for the future, although he did not get much support in his everyday life, except from his opium-intoxicated uncle, who might have been at the feast, too, but Tan Dan did not meet him.

At the feast Tan Dan saw the Bhangis eat and cook some sweets called _panch pakvan_ and also _mitho_. The five ( _panch_ ) sweets were _nukti, chakki, jalebi , thaur_ , and _ladu_ . They were popular throughout western Rajasthan and other parts of India, too. Other items served at the feast were _charko_ , a spiced dish, _pharko_ , a fried dish, and _phikko_ , a plain mild dish of finely sieved flour, the _meda_. The after death meal was performed to the benefit of Badri's forefathers. By eating the tasty food, Badri felt he served both the living and the dead and had a good time himself.

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### Chapter 9 Various aspects of the Bhangi caste

The unique gotra names of the Bhangi caste

Bhangi gotra names look very different from gotra names of other castes, and do not seem to be related to any known ruling dynasty. For example, Gharu and Dharu, mentioned by Singh, 1990. The Bhangi bhaipa at Chelana belongs to the Gharu gotra. In Marvar, i.e. the old Jodhpur princely state, there were about eight to ten different Bhangi gotras, Tan Dan told. Just like gotras of other castes, they were exogamous units within the endogamous caste, hence, it was only possible to marry persons of different gotras, not two persons from the same gotra.

Some Bhangi gotras have spread over large parts of northern India. For example, Dulgach and Gharu. Tan Dan has met Bhangis of these gotras in Rajasthan, Haryana, Delhi, Punjab and parts of northern Madhya Pradesh such as Joura. Bhangis of these gotras can marry Bhangis of other regions, at least those who belong to these widespread gotras.

Some of Bhangi gotra names might be clan names going back to ancient times. To speculate further, could it be that some of the Bhangi clans of western Rajasthan hail from groups who inhabited the fascinating cities of the Indus civilization some four thousand years ago? For example Kalibangan in northwestern Rajasthan. Could their gotra names be of Dravidian origin, as might also be the case for the language of the Harappan man and his undeciphered script? Could the Bhangis in western Rajasthan be vestiges of defeated warrior clans referred in early Sanskrit hymns?

Tan Dan's explanation of the original purpose nakh names

People of many other low castes have their gotra names associated with the gotra name of the Rajput ruling clan of the area of their origin. Names such as Rathore, Chauhan, Bhatti etc. These names of ruling dynasties are also used as names of the _nakh_ division of many high and low castes in Rajasthan.

Bhangis, though, do not use Rajput gotra names at all, according to Tan Dan. Neither as names for their own gotras nor as nakh names.

Tan Dan told, that in the feudal age the purpose of adding a _nakh_ name to the caste and gotra names of a low or medium caste was to tell with which ruling dynasty the clan in question was associated. The nakh name thus indicated, from which area the clan hailed. For example, a Bhati _nakh_ of a Jat peasant clan living in a Marvar village gave a clue that the Jat clan might hail from Jaisalmer. There a Bhati dynasty ruled.

Kings and castles were in focus of public interest in those days. As people were familiar with the status of these Rajput dynasties in and around Rajasthan, the _nakh_ name of a clan of feudal dependents also influenced the status of that clan.

In the literature it is sometimes stated, that Rajput gotra names of lowcaste groups indicate that these groups earlier were Rajputs, but has fallen in status due to various calamities. That is for example what Ruhela (1968) tells about the Gadolia Lohars. It could be a wrong idea, though. The _nakh_ names of the Gadolia Lohars might only show, that the Gadolia Lohars have been associated to these Rajput dynasties as feudal dependents. It is more likely that Gadolia Lohar caste hail from the Baldia group of castes originating from northwestern India, as well as Sind and Baluchistan.

Brahmin and Baniya castes have no _nakh_ names, Tan Dan told. That way these castes are similar to the Bhangi caste. That is Tan Dan's observation from western Rajasthan.

Bhangis lived closer to their feudal masters than many other marginal castes of western Rajasthan

The lack of nakh names does not mean that the Bhangis lived without any contact with the ruling groups of the society. At Chelana there was a close feudal relationship between Rathores and Bhangis, at least at the end the feudal age, as Tan Dan saw himself. The Bhangi men were used for carrying out unpleasant tasks at the Thikana, and were treated as handy reliable tools by the Rajputs, who exploited their status as weak dependents.

Hence, the Bhangis in western Rajasthan had become a well integrated part of village life in western Rajasthan in comparison to many other caste groups of low status such as Bavri and Shansi.

At least in those villages in Marwar, where there was a feudal elite that used the Bhangis for cleaning toilets and similar tasks by tradition carried out by sweepers. (All Bhangis.) A big part of the Bhangis lived in big cities such as Jodhpur, where there were several bhangi mohallas in various parts of the town. At Jodhpur there lived hundreds of Bhangi families, whereas at big villages there could be a dozen and in small non-jagirdar villages none at all. Such as Jat villages.

Bhangis were also more a part of the closely knit feudal village society in Marvar than the many pastoral groups living on livestock rearing, such as Rebaris and Detha Charans.

At least for Chelana and similar western Rajasthani villages, it is not true that Bhangis in living memory have been excluded from village life, forced to live at some isolated place away from the village. Rather, they had their role in it, suppressed and exploited. Their mohalla was isolated in the outskirt of the village settlement, but they were not treated as a ghost people with whom nobody talked. The Bhangi sweeper women had a lively personal relation to the household members of most castes settled inside the village. They saw their jajman families (client families) every day. In addition, the Bhangi men and women carried out various tasks as feudal menials on the lowest level, mostly of a repulsive kind such as taking away dead animals. (Up to 1952 small animals, after 1952 dead bovines, too.) Some Bhangis also had more pleasant occupations such as making baskets, which they sold at the large cattle fairs of the region.

That untouchables such as the Bhangi Sweepers lived outside the village and lacked social contacts with the touchable Hindus is often taken for granted in the literature. Ambedkar (1948, p.25) writes: "That the Untouchables live outside the village is so notorious a fact that it must be taken to be within the cognizance even of those whose knowledge about them is not very profound." He quotes Manu, the ancient Hindu law-giver, and refers to the shastras in general. Trying to explain why the Untouchables lived outside the villages, Ambedkar writes: "There must have been in Primitive Hindu society, Settled tribes and Broken Men. The Settled tribes founded the village and formed the village community and the Broken Men lived in separate quarters outside the village for the reason that they belonged to a different tribe and, therefore, to different blood. To put it definitely, the Untouchables were originally only Broken Men. It is because they were Broken Men that they lived outside the village." (Ibid. p.31)

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### Chapter 10 Discrimination in between untouchable castes

Discrimination between low castes

The competition between near ranked caste was strong down at the bottom of the caste ladder. Therefore untouchable castes discriminated against each others, in the hope of raising, or at least maintaining, their rank position. For example, comparatively high ranked untouchable castes such as Dakot and Gadolia Lohar tried to keep aloof from the bottom ranked Bhambis and Bhangis in such a way that the savarn Hindus could see it.

Such behaviour and attitudes made all feelings of brotherhood and solidarity among the untouchables very difficult to achieve and easy to break. Dominating groups in the village could prevent unity among the lower castes by showing one untouchable group more favours than the other, thus creating jealousy. Being together with friends of high caste raised the esteem among all villagers.

The desire to avoid ritual pollution was strong also among untouchables, imitating the Brahmins and other high caste Hindus. Degrading others by boycot and exclusion works very effectively in the case of the Brahmins, as ordinary Hindus strongly believed that the cooperation of the Brahmin priest was necessary for their well-being. Most villagers thought they would face misfortunes both in this life and the next, if they did not follow the instructions of the Brahmins. Low caste people might have less success in boycotting others, as they had less necessities to offer others, but that kind of discrimination is very easy to use, and not very risky, if used against social groups with few means to retaliate.

The Bhangis, Ram Devra temple and discrimination

The Bhambi caste of the former leather workers were in charge of the Ramdevra temple at Chelana. The Bhambis were untouchable in the eyes of the savarn Hindus, so the Ram Devra temple and priest were not much in demand for worshippers of high castes. All the same, at the temple the Bhambis discriminated against Bhangis, feeling their own caste was higher. The Bhangis were only allowed to come up to the _barlo chawk,_ the outer half of the temple yard, towards the temple gate. No Bhangi was allowed to step on the inner half of the temple yard or come close to the shrine situated there. The _nijmandir,_ as the inner shrine place is called in Marvari called .

From childhood those of the Bhangi caste in western Rajasthani villages were used to such discrimination. At Chelana it was considered the normal order.

In 1980 there were more than 800 families in the village out of which only ten or twelve were Bhangi families. They were completely in the hands of the village majority. The Bhangis had long ago realized, it was in their own interest to suppress all feelings of self respect and resentment in the company of upper castes.

Bhangis also tried the untouchability weapon

With boycot and discrimination all around, it is not surprising that also Bhangis tried that kind of behaviour against other groups.

Tan Dan has seen Bhangis treat the two castes of Dhobis and Dholis as their untouchables in many villages and towns of western Rajasthan. It was their practice to throw away their food in case the shadow of a Dhobi or a Dholi falls on it. That is what Madhobhai of the Chelana Bhangis told Tan Dan, who also had seen it himself.

Evidently it is an effort to try to improve their status in the eyes of others by imitiating those who discriminate against Bhangis.

The Bhangi sweepers might feel that the Dhobis have a questionable enough profession for being a suitable victime in the game of discrimination, as Dhobis are washermen. They wash dirty clothes for others. To the Bhangis it may look like a valid reason for discrimination, as they themselves always hear, that they pollute others due to their work with filth.

Most villagers think that the Bhangi caste has a lower rank than the Dhobi and Doli castes in spite of this attempt.

Why the Bhangis thought that Dholis are untouchables

The Dholis are by tradition the drummers in the village, and that has nothing to do with dirt. But a myth was created, according to which the Dholis hail from a man, who had sex, after he had died. His son was the first Dholi. Therefore, the Bhangis call the Dholis the progeny of the dead, _murda ri ker ra._

The whole story with all its incredible details Tan Dan has heard from Bhangis living in various places of western Rajasthan such as Merta, Jodhpur, and Ajmer. It was also told by Madhobhai of the Bhangi mohalla at Chelana.

Hence, the Bhangis discriminated against the Dholis, as they thought the Dholi caste had been created in an unacceptable way.

Chelana Muslims observe untouchability towards Bhangis

Chelana Muslims observed untouchability towards untouchable Hindu castes, including the Bhangis. They denied them water and food, although the Muslims themselves got the same treatment from savarn Hindus. Bhangis swept houses, or rather _buvaro_ places, also for Muslims. They gave the Bhangi the customary roti, and also the Muslims had the habit of throwing the bread into the basket of the Bhangi, or into her lap, rather than giving the roti to her in the normal way. Often the _jajman_ client threw the roti from some distance, standing inside the angan, while the Bhangi stood outside the open gate.

Two friends

In December 1979 Tan Dan met two women who worked at an exhibition ground in New Delhi. They worked as unskilled labourers. The two women worked together and were very good friends. They belonged to different castes, but that did not disturb their friendship. They were married women in their twenties and their husbands also worked at the exhibition ground. One of them came from Rohtak in Haryana and wore a tailored dress of textile mill cloth and a thin green _chunni_ veil in a style of Muslim influence common in Haryana. She was a Bhangi by caste and her name was Prem. Her friend Gulabi was a Bhambi girl from a village of Ajmer District in the middle of Rajasthan. Both her _odhni_ and her traditional dress were of reddish orange colours. They had worked together every day for three years, and knew each others very well. In Gulabi's home village near Ajmer discrimination against Bhangis was as common as at Chelana. There Prem would have been treated as an untouchable by the Bhambi family to whom Gulabi belonged.

In Delhi they lived in a slum area with no special caste identity, a too disorderly and anonymous environment for maintaining the caste rules of their home villages. Three years of friendship in Delhi had changed their attitudes to castes and untouchability. There they were just two human beings, trying to live as well as they could. They were nothing more than Prem and Gulabi to each others.

No educational efforts of social reformers or Government propaganda against untouchability had influenced them. Such preachings never reached their ears, in spite of living in the middle of the Indian capital within walking distance of a large number of social thinkers and the intellectual cream of the whole nation. Politicians and scholars held lectures about Mahatma Gandhi and his approach at the exhibition ground, where Prem and Gulabi had worked as labourers since 1975.

In the beginning each of them got four Rupees per day. In 1979 their wage had increased to six Rupees thirty Payse per day. In 1981 Prem and her husband still worked at the exhibition ground, but Gulabi had moved back to her home village in Rajasthan, as her husband had managed to get a job as a mason in a rich Gulf country in West Asia.

Their life style and meek manners were in a most effectful contrast to the style of the Director of the Craft Museum of the All India Handicraft Board, a Muslim lady who drew a four figure salary each month in 1979, according to Tan Dan. She was an alert and confident lady, well dressed and beautiful, also in her own eyes. She drove her car back and forth between the exhibition ground, her office at Connaught Place and her pleasant home in one of New Delhi's welloff housing colonies.

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### Chapter 11 Bhangi religious thoughts

Mother godess worship is common among low castes in western Rajasthan. The Bhangis Tan Dan has talked to about their religion seem to worship her as female godess power, but not very concrete. They call her Mata Devi, i.e. the mother godess. Other names are Jogmaya and Jagthamba. (The fascination of the world and the piller of the world.)

It is general mother godess cult that have been in vogue for ages in the region, and well known to common people living there. It is not a religion for the Bhangis only. When Tan Dan asked them to tell stories of Jagthamba and Jogmaya, they told him stories which belonged to the legends of Karni, Khodiar, and Avad. These three godesses are incarnations of the Hinglaj in mythology of the Baldia group of castes, especially Charan mythology.

The way Bhangis in the Chelana region worship Jagthamba

For the Jagthamba cult there are mostly no temples. A picture of a trishule, the trident weapon, painted on the wall in front of the worshipper, could serve as a home made shrine. He could also select a stone slab of about one square feet, and draw the lines of the trishul on it with some colour. Ghee (butteroil) could also do as a paint. Or, the amulett the worshipper wore around his neck he might put on the ground as a temporary shrine, and start worshipping.

On such an amulett there is often a godess sitting on a tiger with a trishule in her hand. It is meant to be Karni, but the Bhangi worshipper may use the amulett for his Jagthamba worship, not feeling there is much difference.

Norta ritual feast meals for Jagthamba

On first and nineth day of the _norta_ celebration, the families worshipping Jagthamba have a feast meal at midday around twelve to two. At that feast they sometimes eat meat and drink some liquor, starting the feast by offering a small symbolic quantity of meat. That is the custom among Bhangis, including Baya's family, who on that day will buy mutton from the village butcher. That is also done by families of other castes worshipping Jagthamba.

They will not use their own dried meat of selfdead animals, as they offer the first offer small amounts of meat and liquour to the Jagthamba to make the feast sacred.

Among Bhangis and other untouchable castes, meat and liquor are consumed in small quantities as prasad among both men and women. Among the Jagthamba worshippers of higher castes, such as Charans and Rajputs, only men drink liquor and eat meat. The women in high castes cook sweets such as _lapsis_. Lapsis is made of wheat _dallia_ roasted in sugar and ghee, or rather _gur_ instead of sugar among poor people. Also Bhangis and other low castes sometimes eat only lapsis and such sweets instead of meat, although they try to serve liquor to the godess, if possible, with or without meat, as liquor is considered to be very much liked by the godess, and an important prerequisite for a successful worship.

Goat sacrifice to godesses for getting better health

Uda Ram Bhangi's son Devi Lal moved from Chelana to Merta, when he got a job as a bundle lift at a government office in that town. Once he thought that his sons had were in ill health, and therefore went to a Jagthamba temple at Khejarla and sacrificed a goat to the Jagthamba devi mata in the hope that they would improve. In 1976. He invited relatives and friends to the feast. They also sacrificed liquor to the godess. Then they drank themselves.

Tan Dan has only heard Bhangis talking about Jagthamba mataji and not about other godesses such as Chavanda for whom there is a temple in a neighbouring village, where a rebari family sacrificed a goat to the Chavanda _mata devi_ due to illness in the family in the 1970s. The rituals were about the same as for Devi Lal's family with the difference that the members of the Rebari family were vegetarians. Therefore they invited meateaters of other castes, who also drank the liqour together with the Chavanda godess.

Bhairon and Jagthamba are common deities for many low caste people and some of other castes, too. Baniya and Brahmins do not worship these gods on caste basis, only some individuals. They certainly did not participate in the liquor and meat worship of Jagthamba or some other _mata devi_.

Charan menfolk, on the other hand, have had the tradition of sacrificing he-goats and liqour to Karni devi among menfolk. At Chelana women did not participate in their menfolks meat and goat sacrifice feasts, although Charan women at other places still did participate here and there in the 1970s. This way of worshipping is fading out, though, due to a desire among Charans to be recognized as high caste Hindus. Among the Charan women a Hinduization process is going on at Chelana, Tan Dan told in 1981.Goat and liquor sacrifice at the Deshnok temple stopped about 1975, when the Government passed a law to that effect.

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### Chapter 12 The Lal Guru worship

The Lal Guru god of the Bhangis

At Chelana people of low castes ( _shudra_ castes, untouchables) worship all the Gods worshipped by the higher caste Hindus. In addition they worship certain other gods, most of them almost unknown by high caste Hindus. These additional gods, who also are Hindu gods, although inferior to the other gods, have often a special and intimate relationship with one or the other Shudra caste, who worship them as their saviours. Thus the sweepers caste of Chelana and elsewhere in Rajasthan worship Lal Guru as their special god. Lal Guru is a male god. In western Rajasthan he is exclusively worshipped by the Bhangis and no other caste, according to Tan Dan. Very few persons of other castes have even heard about Lal Guru.

The Bhangis at Chelana had a raised platform inside their mohalla. In the middle of the open ground in front of their row of houses. It was built of clay, whitewashed and served as a place of worship, a _than_. On the white platform there were three red clay mounds. Small round heaps. Once in the 1960s Tan Dan's friend Madan Ram Bhangi explained the spiritual meaning of these three mini-mounds. They were the abodes of three divine spirits. The heap in the middle was for Lal Guru. He was a god, or rather, a divine spirit, a mystical power, Madan Ram explained to Tan Dan. The first heap was for Brahma, the second for Lal Guru, and the third for Sati Churi, Lal Guru's wife.

Hence, one of the three heaps at the shrine of the Bhangi mohalla at Chelana symbolized Brahma, one of the three gods in the Hindu tinmurti of Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva. Instead of Vishnu and Shiva the two other gods worshipped at the shrine of the Chelana Bhangi mohalla were Lal Guru and his wife Churi. Such mixtures of various religious ideas were quite common among low untouchable shudra castes such as the Bhangis. Muslim and Hindu rites were freely mixed in several Bhangi religious customs.

In 1975 Tan visited a place near Surajgarh in Gandhinagar district of northern Rajasthan. There he saw a similar shrine with three heaps for three folk gods and a shrine for a local god next to it.

Madanji, the poet among the Bhangis

Madan Ram was known in the village as a hardworking labourer on the irrigation farms of the village. He also worked as a sweeper. He used to sweep inside and outside the Thikana.

Madan Ram was a good poet and an entertaining story teller, Tan Dan thought. Madan Ram used to recite his poems in public village gatherings. Villagers of all castes enjoyed his poems. He died in the late 1970s and his poems disappeared with him. Nothing had been written down, as he was illiterate himself. He used to remember them by heart and present them orally. Nobody of his family remembered his poems well enough to recite them.

Red cocks were sacrificed to Lal Guru, when somebody got sick

Lal Guru was worshipped by sacrificing a red cock to him. It had to be done on a Friday. Not on every Friday, though, but when there was a special reason, such as sickness within the family.

Sickness was probably the most common reason for religious sacrifices. Not only to Lal Guru, but to a large number of gods all over India. In the old days sickness was rampant and mortality was high due to the great poverty among the masses and there were few effective cures against difficult pathogens. Death due to sickness was never far away, which made religious thought and action all the more important in the eyes of the believers.

That the cock should be sacrificed on a Friday might be influenced by the Muslim religion, in which Friday is the most important day of the week.

Lal Guru cult outside western Rajasthan

Tan Dan has met Lal Guru worshippers of the Bhangi caste all over Rajasthan and at many places in Haryana and Delhi (Moti Bagh). Bhangis which Tan Dan met at Jaipur, Udaipur, Ajmer and other places all knew about Lal Guru. Or they called the god by some similar name, as they did in Pattikalyana (eastern Haryana), where this Bhangi god was called Lal Bhekia. As _bhekia_ means outfit of clothes, Lal Bhekia means the god with the red clothes.

However, in 1977 Tan Dan was told by some old Bhangis at Pattikalyana that they had stopped sacrificing cocks to Lal Bhekia a few years earlier due to Arya Samaj influence. During some campaign Arya Samajists had persuaded the Bhangis to reform their habits and customs, which would make them more respectable in the eyes of savarn Hindus. It had happened in other areas of Haryana, too, he was told. It seems the Lal Guru worship is declining, as it is a cult of a low caste. It has become more popular to copy the religious customs of high caste Hindus.

Lal Guru might have the same origin as the Muslim saint Zahir Pir and Guga Pir

Lal Guru is also referred to in the literature. Sherring's "Hindu Tribes and Castes as represented at Benares", quoted by "Campbell Oman, 1908, p.67, tell that

"The Lalbagis once a year erect a long pole covered with flags, coloured cloth, and other things, including cocoa-nuts, in honour of Pir Zahir, or Lal Guru, as he is likewise called. -- In this they are like the low Muhammadans, who worship a similarly decorated pole erected to Gazi-Mian, a pir or saint."

According to Briggs, 1920, p.148, Gazi Mian, who died at Bahraich in 1034, in early life, is sometimes reckoned as one of the Panch Pir, the five Muslim saints worshipped by the Chamars. Chamars and related groups set up five pegs in their homes, and these pegs represent the five saints. (These five Muslim saints came from Mecka to meet Baba Ramdev in western Rajasthan, according to legend told by Durga Dan Ratnu. They got very impressed by Ramdevs ability to carry out miracles.)

The tomb of Zahir Pir is at Bagar, in the district of Bikaner, western Rajasthan. Zahir Pir is well known from the Himalayas to the Narbada, according to Campbel Oman. The Lal Guru cult at Chelana, although quite vague, at least as described by Madhobhai, could be a reflection of the more definite cult of Zahir Pir, alias Zahra Pir and Guga Pir. It is popular in many parts of north India, and was described by English authors who lived in north India around 1900 A.D..

Authors such as Campbell Oman (1908), Briggs (1920), and other authors referred to by them such as Sherring, Crook, and Cunningham.

Here follows a few quotations about the cult and legend of the remarkable Pir:

"The saint Guga Pir, or Zahra Pir, was born a Hindu; but he afterwards turned a Mussulman, in order that he might enter the interior of the earth and bring the snake kingdom under his control. -- The legend of Zahra Pir, or Guga Pir, is one of the most famous in Northern India. He is worshipped to prevent snake-bite and in cases where persons have been bitten by poisonous snakes or by scorpions. -- There is a special festival, known as the Chhari (chhariya) mela, held during the rainy season in honour of Guga Pir. It is very popular amongst the low-caste people in the north-west. This fair is named after chhari, or flagstaff, which is carried in his name. Among the things necessary for the worship of Guga is the "flag", which consists of a bamboo twenty or thirty feet in length, surmounted by a circle of peacock feathers, and decorated with fans and flags and cocoanuts done up in cloth. -- But Guga is worshipped in the hope of securing other boons besides immunity from snake-bite. He is a powerful saint and so is worshipped in behalf of sickly children, and for help in a variety of diseases, and for the removal of the curse of barrenness." (Briggs, 1920, p.152)

Also the famous saint Gorakh Nath occurs in the legend about Zahir Pir, in the version retold by Campbel Oman, 1908, p.150. Gorakn Nath was a famous saint, ascetic and worker of miracles. The Chamars recognized him as a saint in some areas. (Briggs, 1920, p.149)

Guga is still worshipped as a folk god in western Rajasthan, where he is called Gogha. He is worshipped as a protector against poisonous snakes along with Teja, another folk god worshipped especially in the month of Bhadon (August-September) when snakes are most visible, as they come up from the ground, when the cavities in the ground get flooded during the monsoon rains. Another likely reason is that the growing crops and other greenery at that time provide ample food for rodents and other small animals hunted by the snakes. There are many folk stories in Marvari about the interaction between man, snakes and snake gods residing in the underground.

The Bhangis at Chelana did not associate their Lal Guru with any snake cult, though. Madanji worshipped Lal Guru as a divine spirit, a mystical power, rather than as a folk god appeasing snakes, Tan Dan thought.

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### Chapter 13 Cremation and burial

The custom of burying the dead

Burying the dead in earthen mounds and graves is a very old custom in India. It still exists among several low-ranked castes. In the age of ancient Kalibangan of the Ganganagar district in northwestern Rajasthan, it was a common practice in parts of western Rajasthan and adjacent areas. Four to five thousand years ago. It is an interesting possibility, that Bhangis, and other bottom ranked castes with the custom of burying their dead in the ground, might have at least some of their roots in the pre-Vedic culture of the Harappan civilization.

Cremation and burial are both ancient customs

Fire has also been used in Hindu worship since ancient times. It was an important part of the religious rites of the early Indo-Aryan groups, who settled in northwestern India more than three thousand years ago. How the fire sacrifices should be carried out was prescribed in great detail in the Vedic hymns of the Indo-Aryan priests and later on by the Brahmins.

As fire was so important in the savarn Hindu religion, burning the dead bodies of human beings became a natural custom to all those Indians who lived close to Brahmin Hinduism. Most likely, it was a custom the forefathers of the Indo-Aryan settlers had adopted already when moving around as pastorals in the inner parts of Euroasia, many thousands of years ago.

The use of fire among Hindus

The villagers used three different types of ritual fire called _havan_ , _dhup_ and _jot_.

Havan was used by Brahmins presiding over ritual ceremonies as pandits. It was a sacrificial fire. A major ingredient poured into the havan is butteroil ( _ghee_ ). Tan Dan has seen a highly variable amount of _ghee_ being sacrificed into havans, depending on the importance of the occasion and the wealth of the villagers conducting the rite. Sometimes not more than a quarter of a kilo was used, but in big havans as much as hundreds of kilos of nutritious ghee was used at the Chelana village itself. In big cities even bigger amounts of ghee may go into smoke as appetizers for the gods, as Tan Dan put it.

Savarn Hindus of non-Brahmin castes used to light a _jot_ fire instead of a _havan,_ when they were on their own, as only a Brahmin was allowed to light a havan fire.

The difference between a _jot_ and a _havan_ was mainly that much less ingrediences were used in the jot fire.

The only savarn Hindu caste in the village, who did not bother about religious fires such as jot, were the potters of the Matigar Kumar caste, Tan Dan told. He thought they had enough of fires and smoke in their daily work as potters.

It was a part of their caste profession to burn their clay pots in a big heap of combustible material. At Chelana they used to build these heaps in the the open space in between their houses. They piled up dry thorny bush from wasteland areas around the village. _Guar_ stalk, leavings from cowsheds, twigs and branches from trees etc. were added. In the middle they put the clay pots they had formed. The way they burnt these big heaps in the middle of their house yards, with the smoke in big clouds penetrating the whole mohalla, choking and suffocating people, was most unpleasant. That is probably why, they were not very keen on sacrificial fires, Tan Dan thought.

_Dhup_ was also a small ritual fire that could do, when it was not possible to light a havan. The ingredients sacrificed into the fire were comparatively few. Only a little ghee was sprinkled into the dhup fire, even less than in a jot. There was not much smoke coming out of this fire.

Ritual fire and the untouchable castes

Neither _jot_ nor _dhup_ fires were much used in worship among Bhangis and Bhambis and Bavris. However, to some extent _dhup_ was used also among these groups. For example, at the time of the _noratra_ festivities, when they worshipped the Jagthamba godess. _Noratra_ is the nine days fast celebrated twice a year at Chelana and the rest of northwestern India.

Chelana communities cremating their dead

Fire is much used in worship, but its most important use among the Hindus is at the time of cremation.

At Chelana the savarn Hindus used two different cremation grounds. The Rajputs cremated their deceased relatives at the open space near the village pond close to the cenatophs of the Chelana Thakurs. The Muslim had their idgah nearby, and in recent decades also a small cooperative godown had been built close to the Rajput cremation ground, which had a higher feudal status than the cremation ground used by most villagers. It was situated at a creek near the southern outskirts of the village about 250 m south of the bend where the bus turns towards Jalagarh. The creek is close to the temple ruins of the now disappeared Chelani village that (probably) existed here before the present Chelana village was built one kilometre to the north. About one thousand years ago.

Getting cremated in a sitting position

The common practice was to lay the one who had died on a bamboo ladder used as a bier. The corpse was cremated in that position.

Among the Bhanvria gotra of the Jat caste there was a tradition of keeping the dead person in a palanquin at the time of cremation. He was kept in a sitting position with the help of ropes. To some extent also families of other castes in western Rajasthan keep the dead person sitting in a palanquin, but it is unusual. The family who cremates in that way is expected to arrange a big after death-meal.

In the 1960s Girdhari Bhanvria's mother died and Tan Dan joined the funeral procession to the cremation ground near the creek. Girdhari was a Jat farmer living at his dhani homestead in a field outside the village settlement. The Bhanwaria gotra of the Jats always carried their deceased relatives in a sitting position to the cremation ground. They were sometimes burnt in that position, too.

In the early 1970s there was a funeral procession of Seva Baba Jat of the Bhanvria gotra. His body was taken in procession to the cremation ground to the south of the village from his house in the Jat mohalla of the village settlement. The procession passed the Baniya mohalla. Dholi drummer kept drumming all the way from the home of the Jat family to the cremation ground.

Seva Baba's body was kept in a sitting position in his funeral palanquin. All who came to see him for the last time brought a pair of coconut. Therefore his palanquin became full of coconuts.

When the funeral procession had reached half way to the cremation ground, they made a halt. It was the last place, where they paid homage to Seva Ram. His four sons greeted their dead father with folded hands.

Castes burying their dead at Chelana

Some low ranked castes in western Rajasthan did not cremate their dead, and did not use much fire in worship, either. Their deviations from these basic customs may indicate a different cultural origin. They had graveyards.

At Chelana only three castes buried their dead: Bhambi, Bhangi and Nat. Also the Muslims buried their dead. These communities had their graveyards at different places outside the village settlement area.

In Tan Dan's childhood the Bhangis had their graveyard in the wasteland area to the east of the village pond. Around 1960 the Bhangis moved their graveyard from there to a place on the barren land to the north of the village. In the late 1950s the new Bhangi mohalla was built by the village panchayat with money from a Government welfare scheme. These houses were situated in the northern edge of the village, too. Both the living and the dead moved at about the same time.

The graveyard of the Muslims were up to the 1960s in a shrub jungle field close to the village settlement area. When the Chelana village hospital was built there in the 1960s, the Muslims shifted their grave yard further away.

The two medium ranked castes of Sirvi and Bisnoi also buried their dead. There were no families of these castes at Chelana, but in other villages in the same area of western Rajasthan.The Bishnoi had the custom of burying their dead elders in front of their house within the walls of their compound. (Cf. Hutton, 1946.)

However, the Mochi shoemakers cremate their dead. They also use the _jot_ type of fire in their rituals to a much larger extent than other untouchable Shudras. In these respects the Mochis resemble the savarn Hindus more than the bottom ranked castes of Bhambi and Bhangi.

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### Chapter 14 Ganga water rites

It was an old custom among Hindus to immerse a part of the body of those who had died into the Ganges river. Although that river was far from western Rajasthan, it was done by most Hindu villagers living there, Tan Dan told. Both by savarn Hindus who cremated their dead relatives and lowcaste Hindus who buried them.

The custom of considering river water sacred and to immerse the body of the deceased into it might have an even more ancient and universal origin than the Brahmin regulated Hinduism, as pointed out by Hutton, 1946, p.236. He suggested that the connection between the soul of the dead and the fertilization of the ground is reflected in its association with water.

Similar magico-religious thought and practice is widespread throughout Indonesia and southwest Asia and survives in strength in farther India, according to Hutton. Also among Indian tribals largely uninfluenced by Brahmin Hinduism there were similar beliefs.

"It is hardly necessary to call to mind the value set by Hindus upon the immersion of their dead in the Ganges, but there are a number of parallel beliefs in more or less primitive tribes, which do not seem to owe their existence to Hindu influence, but rather to have their origin with the ingredients of that religious system. Thus the Meithei practice of disposing of the frontal bone of the deceased in the Ganges appears, at first sight, to be the result of their Hinduization, and no doubt their choice of the Ganges is such a result, but their neighbours the Kacharis, when yet un-Hinduized, used to consign their frontal bones to the Kopili river after the harvest, while the Rengma Naga make a pool for water at the grave of any notable man that the rain, and rice, may be plentiful - The Santal again have the practice, at any rate under certain circumstances, of consigning a piece of bone from the head and another from the breast of the dead to the waters of the Damodar river." (Ibid.)

Those who bury their dead have no ash to immerse into the Ganges river

In western Rajasthan the Hindu rite of merging a symbolic part of the body of the dead into Ganga has been followed also by caste groups with little savarn Hindu influence such as Bhangi and Bhambis. As they do not cremate their dead, they do not have any ash to immerse into the river Ganga when going to Hardvar for the liberation of the soul of the dead relatives. Instead they take some nails or other small part of the dead body such as a loose tooth, and put these in the small cloth bag they bring to Hardvar. The content of the bag represents the whole body. Such pieces from the dead are called _pind_ , i.e. the body in Rajasthani. These details Tan Dan has been told by several persons of both Bhangi and Bhambi communities at Chelana and elsewhere. They seem to copy the savarn Hindus with regard to the cloth bag, but the rite of submerging parts of the dead body into sacred water is evidently an old custom also among tribals and similar groups without much contact with Brahmin culture.

Is the Ganges water too sacred for the untouchables?

However, in western Rajasthan, keeping untouchables out of reach of Ganges water has been one of many ways of the Brahmins to discriminate against them, Tan Dan told. According to the Brahmin tradition, no untouchable Shudra was allowed to bring Ganga water to their homes. The Brahmins even forbid them to touch any Ganga water at all. On the other hand, it was a compulsory custom for a savarn Hindu and a touchable shudra to go to Hardvar at least once in his life to bring water from the river Ganges to his home.

How Mother Ganga came down to the earth

_'Ganga Mai'_ , i.e. mother Ganga, is an affectionate epithet of this river. It was the most sacred of all rivers, as it flowed from heaven, according to popular belief. Heaven was situated at the top of the huge snowclad mountains of the Himalayas. There the gods lived on a mountain peak called Sumeru Parvat. As all could see that the Ganges river flowed down from these unreachable mysterious mountains, it was natural for those in the plains to believe, that the river came straigtht from heaven.

The stories about how the Godess Ganga became a river are popular all over north India. Also at Chelana, where most villagers have heard the following version:

Brahma once requested Godess Ganga to go down to the Earth and shower her love on her devotees. Being assigned such a task she felt very great, equal to Lord Shiva himself, and therefore did not show him as much respect as she used to. Before leaving heaven for earth, she went around chatting and dancing, showing herself off to the other Gods, while saying goodbye. Lord Shiva was sitting by himself in meditation. Ganga could not distract his attention in spite of displaying all her beauty. To get him to react she teased him by telling, "That old hermit is always busy in his own thoughts." Shiva did not like to hear this, and thought he would teach her a lesson. He stretched out his hand, grabbed her, and swept her into his long curling bundle of hair, in which she disappeared and got lost to such an extent that she could not find her way out. Mahadev closed his eyes again, and continued his meditation. It was really a long one, because he used to meditate for twelve years at a stretch.

Ganga struggled to come out of Shiva's hair, but on her own she could not. At last Shiva (Mahadev) showed his mercy and let her go. She poured out of his hair in the shape of water, flow down the Himalayan mountain slopes and reached the plain at Hardvar.

Villagers in other parts of the subcontinent knew somewhat different versions of this legend, but they all had heard that Ganga is a river coming from heaven, springing out of Shiva's hair as a fountain. That is why the river is so sacred river. It is a widely spread belief, according to Tan Dan. Also among Hindus with university education, very few thought that Ganga is just an ordinary river made up of rain water and melted snow, originating from watersheds in the mountains.

To many villagers at Chelana doubt in religious matters was impossible. How could the Maharaj (the Brahmin) be wrong? To question the teaching of the Brahmins is pap (sin), and does not become a good Hindu, Tan Dan was told by pious people.

They argued like this: "It is my sacred duty to believe him. If he misleads me by saying something which is not correct, it is not my concern. Rather, it is for the Maharaj to take care of his own dharma."

There were religious-minded people who did not believe in the mythological explanations, though. Those who belonged to the Hindu sects believing in _nirankarvad_ , i.e. that God is universal and shapeless. To them all talk about the holiness of river Ganga was fake and humbug. One of these sects was the Kabir pant in northern India. They were followers of the poet saint Kabir, who lived in the 15th century. A.D.. Most followers of such dissidents belonged to low castes, and their saintly leaders, too.

Those of untouchable shudra castes might have mixed feelings for Mother Ganga, as savarn Hindus did not want them to worship that godess. They did not want the untouchables to worship Shiva, either, although he is a god, who, in ancient times, was worshipped in India already before the Indo-Aryan tribes migrated into the subcontinent more than three thousand years ago. Judging from archaeological findings from the Harappan civilization.

The Hindu custom of bringing some ash to Hardvar for merging with Ganga

Hardvar means 'the gate of the gods'. It is a busy pilgrim town on the Ganges river near the Himalayan foothills. Villagers of western Rajasthan bring to Hardvar ash and small pieces of bones of their deceased relatives. Ash and small pieces of bones from the cremation pyre at their home village is brought to Hardvar in a small cloth bag hanging in a string around the neck of the the pilgrim mourner. The ash of both men and women are brought to Hardvar. It is done by the son or some other male relative. Such ash is called _asthi phul_. That is, 'flowers of the bones'. The ash in the cloth bag represents the whole body of the person who has died, and at Hardvar these remnants are immersed into the sacred river. Brought by millions of relatives.

The pandas at Hardvar in the 1970s, as experienced by Tan Dan

At Hardvar the pilgrim mourners will look for the panda of their own caste and _gotra_ in order to get his help with the ritual ceremonies. The pandas belong to the section of Brahmins, who take care of the last remnants of the dead body. There were thousands of pandas at Hardvar, each of them in charge of a certain gotra. If the gotra is big, the panda may have assistants attending the relatives of the deceased.

Tradition prescribes, that the relatives of the dead should carry out the rituals in a certain order under the guidance of the panda of their gotra down at the _ghat_. It is the stone-paved bank of the river with steps down to the water. First of all they had to find the panda of their own particular gotra in the crowd of pandas. Each panda had his own corner down at the ghat. He sits according to an ancient system along caste lines grouped in varnas. It is therefore possible for other pandas to show the way to the panda searched for. The crowd of pandas at Hardvar, and the way they sit in relation to each other, represents a significant part of the whole Indian caste system, Tan Dan thought.

The drama of asthi phul immersion

The panda must confirm that the person has come to the right panda, and therefore he asks the visitor about the name of his father and other relatives who have been to Hardvar earlier. Then the panda disappears to look up the names in the book, where the names of all his previous clients have been recorded.

The book is kept by a senior panda in his temple higher up from the river. Singing, praying, and guarding the book of the gotra, in which entries always must be made of the particulars of the dead and his party. The name of the dead person, his caste, gotra, and the place where he has lived, are recorded, but no dates. Some books were very big and bulky.

If the panda finds the names in the book and feels sure he deals with an entitled person, he sends him to the _nai_ (barber) to get the ritual shaving of all hairs of his head except the eyebrows. The client returns from the barber completely baldheaded and is then instructed to take his ritual bath in the river Ganga. The bath is a long ceremony starting with giving some money to the panda. With his permission you may then dip your right foot into the water. The panda asks for some more money. You obey to show your gratitude for his help. Now you are allowed to put down your left foot also into the water, and ordered to give some more money. The amounts are clearly stated by the Brahmin panda, and differs from client to client depending on how much the panda thinks his client can pay. The brahmin panda tells his visitor, that the Ganga water is very holy, as it comes from heaven. "We pandas have been authorised by the gods to take care of you and the welfare of the world. Only with our permission you are allowed to dip yourself in the Ganga, and wash away your sin. Only by our service you will be able to help your dead relative and yourself to reach salvation (moksha). Without the dip you are not allowed to do the sacred rites. To dip yourself without our permission would be like theft."

Then the client should dip himself completely. While doing that, the client lifts his arms above his head and holds the small bag of asthi phul ashes in his hands. It should not get wet while he keeps his head under the water surface.

The client has now taken his dip and is clean from sin. He is therefore pure enough to submerge the ashes of his relative on the instructions of the panda. The Panda tells, "Your relative does not die several times, and this is your last opportunity to serve him. You are donating for the welfare of your beloved relative, and whatever you give, give it with all your heart."

The panda starts shouting _slokas_ looking here and there in a carefree manner, with his ears wide open. After a while he stops and asks his client, if he has made up his mind. The client muster courage and tells a sum. The panda shows his surprise and disappointment, and asks his client to try again.

It is a critical moment for the client, as the ritual has to be carried out at any cost, in order to save the soul of the dead relative. According to the Hindu belief at least a portion of the bones and ashes of the dead body has to be submerged into the water of Ganga, and not until that is done, it is possible for the soul of the deceased to take abode in a new body and get reincarnated. Dharm Raj will not permit Vidhata to use a soul from a perished body for which all the death rituals has not been completed.

Dharm Raj is the god in Heaven, who estimates the dharma of every soul. The dharma score of the soul is based on the performance of the soul in all lives completed up to that time. On the basis of that score Dharm Raj decides in what kind of body the soul shall take abode. Then it is the duty of the godess Vidhata to insert the soul in a suitable body down on Earth.

When the ashes of the deceased relative is immersed into the water, his body merges with God, as river Ganga is a godess in the shape of water and the ashes represents his body. As it comes from heaven, it never stops flowing, pious people told Tan Dan.

When the Ganges water reaches Hardvar, it is refreshingly cool in the hot summer, but can be bitterly cold in winter, which evidently has to do with melted snow, regardless of the legend about Shiva's hair. Shivering of cold in knee-deep water, the panda's client soon realizes he has to make up his mind about the donation quickly. If not, he may catch pneumonia. He hands the panda a sufficient amount of money to make him satisfied, and the final rituals start. These rites will save the soul of the client's relative. The panda sings a _mantra,_ which the client is told to repeat word by word. Meanwhile the panda gives the client a white thread to keep across the palms of his hands. Then the ashes and pieces of bones in the little cloth bag around the client's neck is poured into the joined palms of the client.

On the order of the panda the client separates his palms, the white thread breaks, and the small heap of ashes of the client's relative pours into the water. At that moment the soul of his relative reaches the court of Dharm Raj, who then decides whether the relative's soul shall wait in hell or in heaven until Dharm Raj is ready with his calculations of the total score of the relative's _karma_ , on the basis of which the god Vidhata will provide his soul with a suitable body for his next life.

Those who live far away from Hardvar, such as the farmers of Chelana, are often not able to go with the asthi phul until a long time after the death of a relative. Especially if they are poor, as such a journey can be expensive.

After several years, when somebody at last is able to go, he might bring the ash of all relatives who have died in between.

When the ashes of a deceased person still is kept in a small clay pot at the house of the family, ready for being brought to Hardvar, the soul of the dead can become a problem. The soul is thought to roam around aimlessly without rest and peace. If there is too long a delay in bringing the _asthi phul_ to Hardvar, there is a risk that the soul of the desceased person may become a ghost ( _bhut_ ). That is the common belief.

Pandas visiting Chelana

In the 1970s Tan Dan met two brothers from Hardvar. They were Brahmin priests, pandas who kept death records. These pandas come every ten years to their jajman clients and collect clothes for their women and money for themselves. At Hardvar they have one very big book, in which they enter additions from notebooks at the end of each day. They record visits from their jajman families of the Charan caste. All gotras of Maru Charans, except the Khiria gotra, went to these two Panda brothers at Hardvar.

While the two Pandas were on their tour to jajmans in Rajasthan, other male members of their families attended Charans, who meanwhile might come to Hardvar with ashes of relatives for the submersion rite, and for getting recorded in their big book full of names.

It is possible to figure out lineage from the pandas death record books, at least to some extent, but it can not tell other information except lineage. The valid record is considered to be that of the Bahi Bhat genealogists belonging to the Baldia group of castes hailing from northwestern parts of the Indian subcontinent. The pedigree records kept by people of the Bahi Bhat caste have even been referred to in court cases.

Pilgrimage for taking water from the Ganga river

The death rite duties are often combined with Ganga water pilgrimage. Hindus from western Rajasthan may also go to Hardvar only as pilgrims, having a bath in the river and then bring home water, the sacred Ganges water.

The Brahmins at Chelana and elsewhere tell people that it is very good for the future of their souls to go to Hardvar, where they should take a dip in the sacred river. They should also bring some sacred Ganges water back home.

Every man who had a chance should make such a pilgrimage, and it was good for women too. If husband and wife go together and take a joint dip wrapped in the same dhoti, both being naked, the couple will become husband and wife again in the next life. Such is the belief among most Hindus, both rural and urban, Tan Dan told.

It did not appeal to all, and some wives at Chelana refused to follow any advice in this direction given by the Brahmin family priest. Tan Dan's wife Chanda, for example.

The effect of your pilgrimage is said to be greatest, if you walk on foot both ways. It is a humble way of approaching the divine place. Going on foot might take weeks or even months for those who live far away. However, the north Indian highways nowadays are heavily trafficated tarmac roads, and pedestrians have a hard time. In the modern age (1991) most pilgrims go by bus.

When reaching Hardvar, the pilgrim search for his own panda, who would help in carrying out the rites. After having taken the dip and given donations to the panda in charge of his gotra, the rituals for taking water from the river can start. As a service to the pilgrims, there are pots for sale. The water pots are kept in baskets made of bamboo and decorated in bright colours. In the old days the pots were made of bronze, but nowadays of aluminium, which is lighter.

When the pilgrims have bought their pots, the panda takes them down to the riverside, to the ghats, and starts filling the pots of the pigrims one by one. It has to be done according to a certain ageold ritual, and it must be done by a panda, who charges money for the service. No pilgrim can make a shortcut and fill the pot himself in order to save money. When the pot has been filled and the mantras sung, the panda seals the water pot. He covers the pot with a lid and ties it with a thread by making a special knot, which is said to be sacred and Vedic, that is, prescribed by the Brahmins. The pot of Ganga water can only be opened again by the Brahmin priests of the pilgrims's home village.

Ganga water pilgrims walk home on foot to their village

In February 1977 Tan Dan met a group of such Ganga water carriers on the road from Delhi to Jaipur. They walked along with swift rythmic steps, and their movements were coordinated with the swings of their baskets full of Ganga water.

They all came from the village Baneti in Jaipur District, Rajasthan. They had started from their village on 4 February 1977 and it took them ten days to reach Hardvar. Tan Dan met them on their way back to their village. There they would feed one thousand Brahmins, they told. They estimated, it would cost them at least seven to eight thousand Rupees, out of which two to three thousand Rupees would be donations.

They were eleven farmers belonging to different castes. Five of them were Rajputs including the leader of the group, and an ex-armyman. There were two Brahmins, one Sonar Goldsmith, one Darji Tailor. One of them belonged to a pastoral caste, Ahir. The eleventh pilgrim of the group was the most unusual one. His name was Puranmal and he belonged to the Khatik caste, which traditionally had been a caste of leather traders and Hindu butchers. The Khatik caste had a very low rank in the caste hierarchy of his village. Still the other villagers let him come along. As he was an untouchable Shudra in the eyes of the Brahmins, he had faced difficulties at Hardvar in getting attendance, but he managed at last by giving one hundred and one Rupees to a panda, who compromised with his principles against an extra income. The normal fee was either five, eleven or twentyone Rupees.

These amounts belong to the lucky numbers, according to Hindu tradition. 1, 5, 11, 21, 51, and 101 are all lucky numbers. Therefore, donations and gifts were mostly given in such amounts.

How the arrival of Ganga water used to be celebrated in Rajasthani villages

When they reached home the Ganga water carriers would be welcomed by a big crowd outside the village. Relatives and others would gather to celebrate the event.

On such occasions village musicians play and the crowd sing all the time. People shout "Ganga Mai ki jai ho". (Victory to Mother Ganga.) The celebration is called _panthvari puja_. They celebrate that river Ganga is flowing into the village with the help of the pilgrims and their pots.

From the field where the pilgrims were received, the Ganga water carriers walk in a procession on the road leading into the village. The villagers worship the road, as they think it has become an extension of the river Ganga itself this day. The pilgrims walk with the pots filled with Ganga water on their heads. Husband and wife, the wife behind her husband, both being tied together through the odhni of the wife and a towel-like cloth, which the husband has bought at Hardvar.

The wives of the water carriers, and other female relatives, have dressed themselves in their brightest and most beautifully decorated clothes. Only married couples participate in the procession of Ganga waterroad worshippers. Other persons are just spectators.

Therefore, any unmarried man, who have joined the party of water carriers to Hardvar, must hand over his two water pots to a married relative. He and his wife will bring the water into the village along with the rest of the procession.

Also Puranmal Khatik, the water carrier on the Delhi-Jaipur road, would be compelled to hand over his pots to a savarn Hindu friend, as no untouchable would be allowed to participate in the procession going into the village.

According to custom, the procession must take place in the morning. If the pilgrims happen to arrive later in the day, they must wait until next morning outside the village at a small shrine erected for this occasion. It is a temporary temple of godess Ganga Mai, and she is worshipped there at this _panthvari_ celebration.

The feast for opening the water pots

The water pots are then carried to the temples of the village, where they will be kept until the water pot opening ceremony. It is called _Ganga jal bhartavna_ in Rajasthani. The family of each pilgrim will carry out that ceremony on its own on some later occasion. It is an expensive function, so the family has to wait until it has saved enough money for it. All close and distant relatives are invited to this feast. All the Brahmins of the village are also invited to eat at the feast to the best of their ability, also Brahmin women and children. The cost of food and donations (dan) to the Brahmins can be back-breaking at such feasts, at least for an ordinary villager with limited means.

In the 1970s the cost of the _Ganga jal bhartavna_ function in western Rajasthan was in the range of 2,000-50,000 Rupees, judging from the functions Tan Dan had attended.

The food was cooked in the night prior to the feast. It is a lot of work and everybody is busy. The women keep singing until dawn.

Then the Brahmin priest opens the pots under solemn elaborate rites. He sprinkles Ganges water around the whole house and on the food. In this way all of it receives ritual purification.

*

Puranmal, the Khatik water carrier, told Tan Dan that the feast for opening the water bottles could not be carried out in his house alone, as Brahmins and other savarn Hindus of his village could not attend a feast celebrated in the house of an untouchable. He had to carry out two feasts, one at his home for his relatives, and another at the house of a Brahmin. He would have to pay for that feast also, although he was not allowed to participate, or even to enter the house. He had to look at that feast from a distance. Tan Dan asked, why he did not carry out the feast on his own, without feeding the Brahmins. Puranmalji replied that he did not want to do that. Without offering food and donations to the Brahmins, he would not reap the fruits of all the good deeds (karma, puni) he had accrued through his pilgrim journey to Hardvar. He thought it would be foolish to risk anything by making such a mistake, especially as he was likely to be born as a savarn Hindu in next life, if everything went on well. He could enjoy all the privileges at that time.

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### Chapter 15 The prestigious death meal

These Ganga water rites are often combined with a big after-death feast. Sometimes all caste fellows within the whole _khera_ are invited to a big death meal called _barva_. The Chelana villagers call the death rituals celebrated on the twelfth day after death Barva simply because _barva_ means twelfth. ( _Barahva_ in Hindi.)

The Rajasthan government made such big feasts illegal and Ganges water celebrations was combined with the death meal partly to circumvent the law, as people try to continue with big feasts in order to save their honour and religious well-being. Hence, in western Rajasthan death meals, _mrityo bhoj_ , are often called the _Ganga jal bhoj_ , which means Ganges water meal.

The _Ganga jal bhoj_ may or may not be a part of the _Barva_ ceremonies, depending on the ability of the family to go to Hardvar and merge the ash within twelve days. The bus service for Hardvar pilgrims has improved to an amazing extent in recent years. Buses from Jodhpur going to Hardvar via Jaipur and Delhi passed Chelana once a day at the end of the 20th century. Therefore, it is nowadays easy to do the pilgrimage within twelve days, i.e. before the day of the Barva function, although western Rajasthan is far from Hardvar.

A Dakot family going on a pilgrimage to Hardvar

A group of brothers and cousins of the Dakot caste at Chelana went to Hardvar in 1979 for getting Ganges water, and submerging the _asthi phul_ pieces of burnt boons of deceased relatives. Tan Dan was present, when they left the village. They went in a procession from their _mohalla_ to an enclosed shrine in the wasteland shrub jungle just outside the village settlement.

At the head of the procession walked Pukhraj Dakot. He kept his _asthi phul_ in a piece of cloth tied to a cord suspending from his neck. His wife's _odhni_ was tied to his _angocha_ , a long thin towel kept on his shoulder. His wife had a _matka,_ clay pot, on her head with twigs of green neem.

From the shrine the ladies went home again, and the men started their pilgrimage to Hardvar. They went by bus.

Three days later the Dakot men returned from Hardvar with their Ganges water. One of the pilgrims was an agricultural scientist graduated from Udaipur University. He and his wife took part in the _panthvari puja_ celebration. He walked in the procession with his Ganges water pot on his head, and she followed him, both tied together with her odhni and a long cloth. They and the other couples walked from the shrine in the shrub jungle to their Dakot mohalla, thus making the river Ganges to flow into the village.

The relative who had died was Bagta Ram Dakot, a farmer with a big joint family. On the twelth day after the death of Bagta Ram his family celebrated the _Ganga jal shishi puja_ , i.e. worshipping of the bottle of Ganges water, which his son and other relative had brought from Hardvar. They carried out the _Ganga jal puja_ also for several other relatives, who had died in the last few years. Not until now any relative had gone to Hardvar, to get the _asthi phul_ ash submerged into the Ganges river at Hardvar, through the panda priest ceremony. Meanwhile their ash had been kept in store at Chelana.

Therefore, at the _Barva_ function, there was a long row of whitewashed _matka_ pots with grain. There was one or perhaps two pots for each relative who had died. Such pots are called _kalash._

In the front there was a brass pot for all the members participating in the ceremony. Such a pot is called _shubh kalash_. It was kept for the welfare and good luck of the persons of the families still living.

At the head of the gathering, beside the kalash pots, sat the six men who had gone to Hardvar. Two of them were real brothers, the others were their first cousins and second cousins. Four of them were farmers, one was a labourer operating mechanized wells of largescale farmers. He also lived on his own small farm. The sixth brother was Moti Lal, the Government employee working with research and extension in agriculture. He participated together with his ordinary farmer relatives, more or less illiterate all of them. He fully shared their traditional life and customs on the personal level, although he was a modern scientist in his work.

The Dakots only had a feast at lunch time on the twelfth day after death. The whole ceremony was done from morning to afternoon in the same day. Then all dispersed. Although it was a large gathering with many families, no marriage was performed on this occasion.

In contrast, some castes carried out their feasts for three days inviting all the caste brethren of their area. Jat, Sirvi, Mali, Bhambi and Rebari had this tradition. Such long and big feasts can be very ruinous as hundreds or even thousands of people are fed many meals during these days. That is why the Rajasthan Government tried to stop excessive celebrations by law as a welfare measure.

The Government tried to save villagers from getting ruined on big traditional feast, whereas caste panchayats sometimes ordered a family to carry out such feast as a punishment. To inflict economic hardships on the family. That is what happened to Mango Ram's family, when they wanted to get readmitted to the Bhambi caste after the death of his independent minded father Dipa Ram.

Death rites of a Charan family at Chelana

When Shankar Dan, a Charan of the Mehru gotra, died in the 1970s, his son Pithu Dan went to Hardvar to get the symbolic part of his fathers body, the _asthi phul_ , immersed in the Ganges river. Then Shankar Dan's soul could go to heaven. Pithu Dan returned to Chelana with Ganges water, which would be used for the death rites at his home. Before the Ganges water could enter his home, it was necessary to get the house purified by replastering the floor and cleaning all pots. Old pots were broken, and new ones brought from their _jajman_ potter.

Meanwhile, the pot with Ganga water was kept at a temple near the Charan mohalla. It was one of the two temples built by Charans. There was one temple for the godess Karni, but the one where the water pots were kept was a Krishna temple. Lord Krishna of the Vaishnav Hindus was worshipped there. The temple was built by the Mehru Charans. Also those of the Detha gotra used it, but no other villagers. Worshipping Krishna was a new phenomena among Maru Charans, at least the Krishna of the Vaishnav tradition, which was popular in the Hindu core regions around Ganges and Yumana. It was hardly done by the Charans before the 20th century, Tan Dan thought, at least not by the Dethas.

The Charans did not take Krishna as their own god, as long as they lived in their own nomadic culture of the Baldia type. Rather, they considered Krishna as a kind of pastoral nomad from the Gujarat region, who in his youth migrated with his cattle to the Braj region around Mathura, the river plains of Yumana and Ganga. For the Maru Charans, Hinglaj Mata of the Makran coast and her many incarnations within the Charan caste were the main deities. The Maru Charans and the Charans of Gujarat must have been familiar with Dvarka, though, the ageold pilgrim centre of Krishna worship in this region. The legend tells that Krishna ruled a small kingdom from Dvarka. The town is situated on the shore of the Arabian sea in western Gujarat.

Before leaving Chelana for Hardvar the villagers went in procession headed by a drummer. They walked from the home of the dead to a point in the northern-most part of the _abadi_ area at the Lohar mohalla. It was the ritual place for taking farewell of the pilgrims going to Hardvar with the asthi. (In Marvari asthi, in Hindi phul.) The villagers used to walk from there all the way to Hardvar.

In the early 20th century Chelana villagers travelling far could take the train from Umed or go on horse back, but it was more pious to walk on foot. In those days they had to collect many persons asthi, as they were poor and had to save money before they could afford such a rite.

Nowadays, when the villagers have more cash and there is a frequent bus service, the Chelana villagers go instantly at each death, Tan Dan told. (In 1999)

A few days later Pithu Dan's family performed the Barva ceremony twelve days after Shankar Dan had died. Ganges water was sprinkled on the food. The pot with the sacred water was kept in a basket in the middle of the gathering. They carried out the havan rite. Most of those present were Charans, especially Mehru Charans.

The Mehru Charan ladies were in _parda_. _Bahus_ were all in _parda_ , but not young girls who were daughters of the Chelana village. They were more natural in behaviour and could smile now and then.

How a Rathore family at Chelana celebrated their after death function

In 1981 an old Rathore lady died at Chelana. She was the sister-in-law of Praduman Singh, Ravi Dan's friend. Her husband was a retired judge. Tan Dan attended the after death ceremonies, which included both the Barva ritual and the Ganga Jal Bhoj meal.

It was a highly respected Rathore family, so the function was carried out by three priests. One of them came from a town, something most unusual for functions of this kind at Chelana. He was the chief priest of the ceremony and sat in the middle without a shirt. He was a Brahmin pandit with the reputation of being unusally skilled in this field. Next to him sat in white turban Mohan Sevag, the family priest of the Rathore family. He was also a Brahmin pandit, but contrary to the pandit in the middle he was a simple village Brahmin. He had inherited his position, as his family and the Rathore family had a jajman relationship which had lasted for generations. He was basically a farmer, who owned a part of the old Jagirdari land of the Brahmins, and he was more skilled in agriculture than in priestcraft, Tan Dan thought. All the same, he did participate in the ceremony, as it was his duty, and the only way to get the _jajman dan_ , i.e. the religious donation to the family priest.

Giving _dan_ to Brahmins was considered good for the client also, as he got _puni_ by such an act. A reward in future life for a good deed.

At the religious functions of his other jajman families, Mohan Sevag used to be the officiating priest, not just an assistant, as he was at this function. Then he carried out all the ceremonies to the best of his ability. He managed somehow, although not quite as well as the city pandit sitting in the middle did at this function.

The third priest, sitting in white turban to the right of the others , was a Sad by caste. He was the temple priest of the Rathore mohalla, and managed the two old temples outside the Thikana gate, whereas the third temple at that place, the temple with a golden knob on the top, was in charge of a Brahmin, who resided there. At his temple the god Sat Narayanji was worshipped. The two temples next to it were for Krishna, who was called Thakurji by the Chelana villagers. The Sad priest had brought a small bell, _ghanti_ , and a few other metal items from his Thakurji (Krishna) temple at the Rathore mohalla. Their display and use was considered an important part of the death ceremony and he kept the items on a tray covered with red cloth.

The youngest son of the deceased lady, and his wife wearing a red odhni, sat also on the ground around the place were several ceremonial objects were displayed. They carried out the Ganga jal worship. His sister gave him a few items required for the worship such as grain and some water.

The Ganges water was kept in a _bharni_ , i.e. the aluminium vessel that sparkled in the sunshine under an orange cloth. Villagers in western Rajasthan regard the orange-coloured cloth as a symbolic skirt of the godess Ganga, who was present at the ceremony in the shape of water brought from the sacred river. That is why they had dressed the _bharni_ bottle with an odhni cloth, i.e. the head cover and veil used by Rajasthani village women. They call it _Ganga Mai ro cheer_.

Tan Dan had heard this explanation of the custom of covering the Ganges water bottle with an orange cloth from many villagers in western Rajasthan.

Green tender wheat plants were kept in a brown clay pot between two big white pots. The wheat seed had been sown on the third day after death. It is the day when relatives go to Hardvar. After daily watering and care, the seedlings had sprouted quite well up to the 12th day after death, the day of the Barva ceremony. The cultivation of these wheat seedlings was a part of the ritual. Such wheat is called _javaara_ in Marvari.

A big clay pot covered with white cloth was put on each side of the pot with wheat seedlings. The _kalash_ pots. Some grain are put in _kalash_ pots. At death ceremonies there is usually two _kalash_ pots, when the death of a single person is celebrated, but more when the ceremony is for several persons. At marriage there are four kalash pots. On the other side of the havan fire, the family had put the _shubh kalash_ pot. From that pot green leaves appeared. The shubh kalash pot was a gift from the family potter to the mourning family. A greeting of good wishes and omen. The potter family regularly provided this Rathore family with clay pots on a _jajman_ basis.

The _havan_ fire of the Barva worshipping ceremony had burnt out when the family carried out the Ganga water function. It was the sacred fire the Brahmin priests used for their worshipping rites.

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### Chapter 16 The Chandals

At Chelana, some untouchable Shudras, such as the Bhambis and Bhangis, buried their dead in the 1970s. Most Hindus, though, burnt their dead at special cremation grounds. Since ancient times a group of people called Chandal has attended at Hindu cremation grounds, especially in the cities and other big settlements with big cremation grounds. Hence, most Chandals live in towns and kasbas rather than in villages. It is a minority caste with a small population. Still it is a well known caste, as it is at the extreme bottom of the whole caste hierarchy and its members are considered very much polluting to savarn Hindus.

It is the traditional vocation of the caste to work on cremation grounds. They call themselves Acharyas and use the name Acharya caste rather than Chandal. Acharya means religious teacher and is a title of learned Brahmins. Pandit is another Brahmin title sometimes used for the Chandals at the cremation grounds.

Several reasons have been conjectured, why the Chandals has such a low status in the Hindu society.

A reason often put forward among common people in western Rajasthan is that Chandals at cremation grounds are supposed to plunder the corpses of those who get cremated. However, it is an old custom that Chandals working at cremation grounds can take away belongings from the decorated corpses before cremation. At least nowadays it is done with the permission of the deceased person's relatives, and as a part of the death ritual.

The Chandals may search dead corpses for any belonging, especially valuables such as gold and silver rings, which happen to be left on the body. It is done in the cremation ground immediately before the cremation. According to Tan Dan, a few ornaments are sometimes left intentionally, as it is a belief among Hindus, that objects taken away by the Chandals from the dead body will be given to the dead also in his next life. It is even a custom among savarn Hindus to put a miniature golden ladder next to the corpse in such a way that the Chandal can take it away. It is done, as people think that the one who has died goes straight up to heaven, if a Chandal takes such an expensive small golden ladder from his dead body.

The custom of leaving small golden ladders in this way exists in many parts of India, Tan Dan told.

The strong ritual pollution

A shadow of a Chandal on the body of a savarn Hindu was considered polluting, that is, it gave a feeling of dirtiness, although that feeling was induced by religious thinking and not by any physical dirt.

Hearing or seeing a Chandal from a distance was not polluting. It was the touch and the shadow, which was considered polluting to most Hindus. Hearing or seeing a Chandal was rather considered ill luck and a bad omen than pollution, Tan Dan thought.

If a Chandal had to pass a road or a lane on which there were people or children, then the Chandal had to shout something like, "Here a man of the Chandal caste is coming". Very seldom grown up people got polluted by Chandals. It mostly happened to children, who did not have the sense to run away, when the Chandal passed by.

In Rajasthan, avoiding ritual pollution from Chandals in a very strict way went on among Hindus up to the 1960s, Tan Dan told. In more recent decades the concern has been less, but is still there.

The problem of sticking to untouchability rules in modern life for savarn Hindus

Generally speaking, the rule of untouchability was less rigidly carried out after the 1960s, because people did not manage to adhere to this rule in many modern situations. For example, when travelling in buses and visiting hospitals. But they tried to carry out the prescribed antipollution formalities, after coming home.

Untouchability rules have softened not so much due to increased enlightment among the common people, as to changed living conditions with many novelties, which has made strict observance of untouchability rules impossible.

Chandals as described in the literature

Learned savarn Hindus tell that Chandals are the offspring of Shudra men and Brahmin women. Already in ancient India the socio-religious law texts such as Manu Smriti proclaimed, that the offspring of those who marriage across the borders of the four varnas would get a degraded status. The most degraded of all such excluded groups was that of the Chandals. (From Shudra men and Brahmin women.) It had a lower rank than the offspring to Brahmin men and Shudra women. Offspring of the latter kind would not be downgraded to the Chandal level, the Brahmin texts prescribed, but were allowed to live as Shudras like their mothers. These rules of discrimination were probably created several centuries before the rigid caste system was created in the middle of the first century B.C. at the time of Gupta rule or the centuries that followed. The Chandal of the early Sanskrit text evidently did not refer to a special caste, but rather to a type of excluded and boycotted people. Discriminated in the same spirit as some groups later on were treated as untouchables.

Could love across the caste barriers be a reason for outcasting and the formation of untouchable castes?

Are all the Chandals of today the offspring of couples who had been excluded from their original castes because they belonged to different castes, in this case Brahmin and Shudra castes? Very unlikely, Tan Dan thought.

Chandals and intercaste marriages

The Chandals constitute a special caste and a well defined community, which is very old, but has nothing to do with intercaste marriages, according to Tan Dan.

Because that is not the way new castes are formed. Neither now nor in feudal Rajasthani history as far back as their is some solid knowledge.

Still, the old thoughts about the Chandals as a mixture of Brahmins and untouchables still lives on in the mind of people in villages such as Chelana. So children of intercaste marriages of various kinds are sometimes called Chandals, as an abuse. Also other children, who do not conform to accepted behaviour, especially when people get angry.

There were no Chandal family at Chelana.

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### Chapter 17 Tan Dan about outcasting Hindus

Stray couples, excluded from their castes because they have got children, in spite of belonging to different castes, will never start any new castes or communities of their own, at least not in the 20th century. There are a few outcasted individuals and families in many villages of India, but they live like isolated cases with whom nobody keep social contacts. Such persons are considered outcasted by the other villagers and their caste fellows, until they repent officially and pay the fines to their caste panchayat. In some cases they never repent and die outcasted. But such persons are not considered casteless either, in the sense that they are without caste or have lost their caste.

The children born from such parents will not be outcasted for ever. They have the right to be reaccepted into their caste, as soon as they make the atonement to their caste panchayat. Neither they nor their parents have become casteless, in the sense that they have lost their caste identity. People do recognize them as members of their original caste, although they do not keep contact with the outcasted family for the time being.

Every person born as a Hindu has a caste, and will always have a caste in the eyes of other Hindus, whether he is outcasted or not.

_No Hindu in western Rajasthan can change his caste, even if he is outcasted_ Hindus will consider a Hindu a member of the caste in which he has been born, even if he has converted to another religion. In the eyes of other Hindus he will always be a Hindu.

To belong to a Hindu caste is not a matter of religious belief. The person may be an atheist or go to church and read the Bible or follow any other non-Hindu religious act of worshipping, as long as the person concerned follow the caste rules and perform all the customary rites, according to the dictate of the caste panchayat, and as long as the person does not do anything, which the caste panchayat does not allow, such as eating beef. In case he eats beef, he will be outcasted, but he will not loose his caste.

The casteless sweepers, a mistaken belief

Sweepers are not casteless, neither in Rajasthan nor in other parts of India that I have visited. Nevertheless, the myth about the casteless sweepers in India is common in Europe, it seems. There are even indologists who tell that sweepers have no caste. The idea of castelessness might stem from Sanskrit scholars in Europe in the 19th century, more in contact with Sanskrit books written by Brahmins, than with the sweepers. The problem of the sweepers is not that they lack a caste (jati, in Marvari _kom_ ), but that they face segregation by other Hindus. That social isolation is still very strong.

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### Supplement

The delicate task of giving names to the Bhangi caste

Harijan was an affectionate name of untouchable castes, meaning the 'the people of God'. It was used by Mohandas Gandhi and social reformers of the Congress already in the first half of the 20th century. In the Chelana area of western Rajasthan the name Harijan was only used for Bhangis in the 1970s. There, Harijan became another name of the Bhangi caste. In the Pattikalyana village of the Samalkha area of eastern Haryana the word Harijan was instead used as a name for the three Chamar subcastes of that village. Also in the 1970s. At Pattikalyana the Bhangis were called Balmiki. That name referred to the famous ancient Hindu sage with whom they associated themselves. Valmiki is the name of the Bhangi caste that is most accepted within the caste itself. To have a name with mythic associations is common in India. Is it necessary in the modern world of the 21st century to have such religious connotations? Is it in the field of religion that low ranked castes see their future? Why not adopt a secular approach and realize that caste itself is a big myth. There is just one caste, jati, for all human beings living on this globe. The jati of Homo sapiens, the human species to whom we all belong, because there are no biological barriers to get offspring within that big group of six seven billion individuals. We are human beings, Homo sapiens, and one of the animals species. Other animals such as monkeys and cattle, have their own species, _jati_. In a biological sense. Bhangis and Brahmins, though, are not different species ( _jati_ ). Hindu caste barriers for marriage are all artificial, and will fade away, when there is a will for it. It would in the long run be more beneficial for people of the Bhangi caste to increase their knowledge in the field of natural science than in narrow-minded religion, with leaders that try to tie people to outdated beliefs. Myths that scientific findings based on logic and practical experiments have discarded long ago.

Attempts to find better toilets

Mohandas Gandhi (Mahatma Gandhi) and after him the Gandhian organizations took a great interest in finding means of providing the villagers with sanitary latrines, but the impact was small. In the Samalkha area of eastern Haryana, the Gandhi Ashram at Pattikalyana village built a line of public toilets for the villagers in the late 1960s. By using these they would not have to squat in the bush at the outskirt of the village for latrine. That well meant welfare scheme did not work at all. The people continued their habit to sit in the bush at the edge of the village, and the toilets were hardly ever used, the villagers told. In 1976 the doors were gone. Some villagers had stolen the doors and used them as fuel wood.

In some areas public toilets actually used by common people quickly got soiled with faeces. No water for cleaning was a common problem. When water was available, the sewage might get blocked, which made the mess even worse. In spite of all difficulties, schemes for rural private latrines continued in the 1970s. Some voluntary village development organizations helped implementing simple, practical pit toilets for villagers. For example at Phulera and Khandel in the Jaipur district of Rajasthan in the early 1990s. Towards the end of the 20th century there were several well functioning public toilets run at intercity bus stations in north India. Also in Rajasthan. Operated by sweepers of the Bhangi caste.

Tan Dan had a good latrine at his angan with lined underground tanks for accumulating nightsoil. He built it in the 1980s. Before that he had a simple latrine shed of _sarkanda_ reed, two big stone slabs and a deep pit below for the nightsoil. When the latrine was full he closed it. When the compost had become mature soil he planted a papita tree on the top of the old latrine, and that tree-like plant yielded excellent fruit.

The great advantage with the pit latrines compared to the old _tarat_ latrines is the lack of nightsoil to be removed by Bhangi sweepers. The latrine is cleaned with brush and water, that is all. There is no repulsive work of removing shit and put it in piles somewhere. Water toilet does not mean flush toilet, but the use of water kept in pots and buckets.

Building lined pits for water toilets was expensive to the villagers. At Chelana most families still lived in houses without toilets. The morning walk for a shit in the wasteland became longer and longer due to new housing colonies come up, and population growth. More and more squatters.

Some minister said in a speech in 2013 that there were more temples than toilets in Indian villages. Such talk few persons wanted to hear in religious India. The statement was criticized in the massmedia. All the same, it is amazing how many new temples, big and small, are being built in the dynamic rural development areas of Rajasthan and Haryana.

_Explanation of some Indian words occurring in this book (Hindi and Marwari)_

angan. A walled-in yard in front of a house is called _angan_ in Hindi and _chawk_ in Marvari.

asthi phul. The ash from the dead body of the person cremated. Many villagers of western Rajasthan have the tradition of going to Hardvar for the asthi phul immersion. There are other places, too, but Hardvar seems to be the main centre for the masses of northern India, as for this rite.

bahu. Daughter-in-law. A young married woman is called _bahu_ by all in her husband's family.

gotra. A gotra is an exogamous kinship group of a caste. The endogamous caste consists of a number of gotras, and marriages only take place between persons of different gotras. A family is an exogamous unit in most societies, but in the ancient Egyptian kingdoms the Faraoh ruler married his own sister.

jajman. Clients faithful for generations are called jajmans. A common working relationship between families in feudal Rajasthan.

lakh. One hundred thousand.

mantra. Rhymes which bring luck and prosperity to the client.

mohalla. A residential area of a village where families of the same caste live.

norta. Nine days of mother godess worship. In westernRajasthan done twice a year for Karni, Jagthamba, Baya and similar folk godesses.

odhni. A head cover cloth for women by which she can cover her face to strangers and male senior in-law relatives.

parda. When a woman hide her face from other men, strangers or senior in-law relatives. When they live in seclusion out of sight of strangers.

patvari. Village land accountants. Their records were used for estimating land revenue, which was an important income of the government in the old days, but not after land reforms in the 1950s.

pinda. The Rajasthani villagers call the Brahmins at Hardvar pinda, which means body in their own language, but the Brahmins call themselves panda.

puni. Puni means a good deed (opposite to pap, sinful deeds). It is believed that those who get puni improve their chances for a good living in next life.

roti. Flat round bread cakes baked without yeast on an iron ban.

sarpanch. The chairman and head of the elected village council, the _gram panchayat_.

thikana. The walled fortress and residence of the village lord in the feudal days.

varna. Varnas are the ancient classes of Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Vaishya, and Shudra into which the thousands of caste groups of today somehow is being fitted. People often talk about these varnas as if they were castes, but they are rather categories of castes.

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Reference

Agarwal, 1979, Rajasthan District Gazetteers

Briggs, G.W. 1920. The religious life of India. The Chamar. Calcutta. 270 pp.

Hutton, J.H. 1963. Caste in India. Its nature, function, and origins. Oxford etc. pp.324.

Singh, M.H., 1990, The castes of Marwar. Census Report of 1891. Jodhpur.

Cover image

A sweeper girl living in the Rajasthan desert region.

Photo: Tan Dan Detha

***

That was all for the time being, but Tan Dan has more to tell.

If you have any comments on this book, please mail to me. Any suggestion for improvement is most welcome.

My e-mail adress is sonlal41@hotmail.com

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