Wanderlust in the Genes

A new academic work from OUP, ‘Nomadism in South Asia’, edited by socio-anthropologist Aparna Rao and her professor Michael J. Cas...

A new academic work from OUP, ‘Nomadism in South Asia’, edited by socio-anthropologist Aparna Rao and her professor Michael J. Casimir, University of Cologne, tells the lay reader an interesting tale. It challenges the apparent western perception that South Asia is a static society, immune and resistant to change! The book presents 16 essays that aim to disprove the prevailing western view of South Asia as a society stuck in the mud. It does this by focusing on three kinds of rural nomadic societies and their dynamics within their own communities and with the societies they interact with, including ecological, economic and political factors: animal husbanders (including hunters and gatherers), peripatetic traders and entertainers.

While this is a very valuable piece of documentation on Bakkarwals, Raikas and others, with the usual vilification of Asian mainstream society, it is startling that the West should see us as a static society. We had a whole subcontinent to move in, plus seafaring to East Asia and China. True, there are core areas that we keep ‘sacrosanct’ but when it comes to adopting or adapting material and technological conveniences, we know we are as receptive as we can afford to be. In some places we even push the change, like Silicon Valley. And we do choose to include the new when we see value in it. One small but significant example is classical Carnatic music. Its oldest scales like Raga Kurunji are held to go back more than two millennia, as is the mizhavu drum, still employed in Kutiyattom, the 2,500-year-old tradition of Sanskrit theatre, ‘discovered’ last year as an Intangible World Heritage by Unesco. The leading exponents of Carnatic music are usually orthodox South Indians who are strict vegetarians, dress conservatively and uphold the inviolable South Indian social code of ‘adakkam’ (severest restraint). But when this supposedly closed tradition encountered the western violin, clarinet and mandolin, it liked their sound and developed them into concert instruments.

Such a community would perhaps be categorised as ‘sedentist’ by western norms. But they have an ancestral history of nomadism as descendants of the Vedic people who crossed the Narmada and reportedly Sanskritised the Indian peninsula in three waves of settlement. In Sanskrit and Hindi, the very word for battle, ‘sangram’, recalls the nomadic herders of the Vedic culture, the ‘coming together’ or clashes that ensued when they fought over pasturelands. Our medieval and modern histories of invasion also kept entire urban communities on the run.

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Movement is thus encoded in racial memory, even in supposedly sedentist communities. In the 20th century, when life became untenable in Tamil Nadu for many, thanks to the DMK movement, the community migrated en masse again: to Delhi and Mumbai, but mostly to North America. Similarly, there are trading communities that since centuries, have pulled up stakes and gone wherever there is business. The Marwaris and the Patels are abiding examples, so well-documented as nomads within sedentist societies, that they are a category of their own. On the move permanently in modern India are the sarkari ‘tribes’ of civil servants and armed forces personnel, whose children frequently intermarry, irrespective of birth-caste. The Godrej almaris of this category of urban nomads are their ‘carts’. So in the eyes of Indians themselves, our society is one immense configuration of nomads, both urban and rural, constantly crisscrossing the land, be it the pan-Indian mass of medical students bound for hostel or the Gadia Lohar in his fantastic cart who appears around Diwali to sell iron implements like khurpis and to whet kitchen blades. Even the sedentists must move on pilgrimages and keep the sacred circuits activated at all times, except chaturmasya. While the rural nomad has a cycle, the urban nomad keeps going.

It is a society constantly moving and programmed to move or deal with movement, exposure, change and novelty, with rules for appropriate behaviour for each social layer. For goras to declare that we are in stasis is therefore most peculiar. Their ignorance is shocking. Rao and Casimir now need to do a book on South Asia’s rootless urban gypsies!

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