Bhopas in Churu: putting down roots

“Haryana, Punjab hoon lege Jaisalmer tak saro desh mharo pagaa hu napedo hain [From Haryana and Punjab to Jaisalmer, we mapped the country with our feet],” says Bhadar Bhopa. The 65-year-old is seated under a tree near his house in north-western Rajasthan. “There is no place which we did not see,” he adds.

A member of the nomadic Bhopa community who live in Gujarat and Rajasthan, Bhadar has spent most of his life moving around the country, playing the ravanhattha – a string instrument made of bamboo and coconut shells. “We went from one place to another, stayed, performed, and moved,” he tells PARI.

Finally, 11 years ago, Bhadar and his five sons put their roots down in Churu district. “I became tired of that [nomadic life], so I settled in one village,” says the now resident of Dheerwas Bara. He chose the village as he had travelled through it many times and people here were familiar. My grandfather recalls seeing the Bhopa family as musicians travelling through our village.

The family associates itself with the Nayak community (listed as Scheduled Caste), although in Rajasthan Bhopas are considered Other Backward Class (OBC). The Nayaks are also hesitant to accept them as part of the community.

Initially, buying land in Dheerwas Bara was very expensive, so they settled just outside the village for the first two years. “Later we approached the Sarpanch [village council chief], and he gave us access to this land,” says Bhadar Bhopa’s son Bhanwar Lal. “It is almost one bigha and three biswa [about 0.75 acres].”

Walk south from the main bus stand of Dheerwas Bara village, along the kachha road to the fields, and you will cross two shamshan bhoomis (cremation grounds). The first one is used by the Swami community (classified as an Other Backward Class) and the other, some distance away, is for people from Scheduled Castes. The road separates the cremation grounds from the Dalit mohalla (neighbourhood) situated on the other side. And beyond this is the haddwar – where dead cattle are disposed of.

On a part of this haddwar, in makeshift homes, lives Bhadar Bhopa’s extended family of around 50 people. They lead a settled life, very different from the one they led before.

In the beginning it wasn’t easy for them to find agricultural work.

“The villagers thought that ‘Bhopas are lazy workers, and can’t do much’,” recalls Bhanwar Lal. “But when a Brahmin farmer’s mother died during peak harvest season, their farm work was delayed due to the final ceremonies. In a hurry to get the harvest done as soon as possible, he hired us [Bhopas] for crop cutting...and from then on people started hiring us.”

It has been years since that first harvest season, but Bhopas say the locals are still hesitant to accept them as part of the village agrarian structure. Even now they have to constantly negotiate for fair hours and wages – unlike wages for other communities which are fixed.

Members of the Bhopa family also travel up to 150 kilometres to Sikar during onion harvest time. Children join their parents, dropping out of school. And when there’s no agricultural work to be had, young men dig for satta (red hogweed), a plant used in Ayurveda. “We earn well from it, on average 500 rupees per day,” says Vinod, son of Bhanwar Lal. Others work on construction sites or in timber cutting shops known as aara.

I grew up in Dheerwas Bara and went to the local government school with the now 22-year-old Bhoop Bhopa. There were many Dalit children in the school and we were lucky to have a Dalit teacher, Hajari Meghwal, who was very encouraging.

Bhoop’s home did not have electricity, and as a first-generation school goer, there was no one at home to help with schoolwork. He had the added pressure of minding the family cattle from time to time. I remember he was absent for days, and came back and said he had taken their animals to the famous cattle mela in Gogamedi, almost 40 kilometres away.

Not much later, he dropped out in Class 4 and went on to do wage work – like most others in the family. Back then he was the only literate person in the family of musicians – the literacy rate among the Nayak caste, which the family identifies as, was just over 57 per cent in 2011.

Today, only Bhadar Bhopa and Bhanwar Lal can play the ravanhattha, but the latter has no interest in returning to folk performances. Instead, he farms about 10 bighas of land (6.25 acres) as a sharecropper in the nearby Bharang village. He tells PARI: “this work is full of respect.”

Even Bhadar’s elder son, Bhagirath, in his fifties, is not keen to turn the clock back. He points to the low incomes and hard conditions of the past and says the musical legacy wasn’t of much help to the family. “Now we are living a good life,” says Bhagirath, who works in a hotel in Meerut and is happy with his job. “We get money whenever we need and have all the facilities.”

Despite their avowed certainty in their new livelihood, life in Dheerwas Bara is hard. Oil lamps come on at night in the absence of electricity – the nearest connection, just 500 metres away, has not reached them. “To charge our mobile phones we have to go and ask some households in the mohalla,” says 35-year-old Mahendra, Bhadar Bhopa’s younger son.

Government schemes like the Rajasthan government’s monthly old age pension for Bhadar Bhopa and his wife Kamala, are harder to access in light of digitalisation and changing KYC regulations. When their bank merged with another, the couple were unable to make any transactions for a while.

“I do not know what the government needs from all of us. Everyday they need some document or process,” says Bhagirath, back from Meerut to make sure the family can prove their electoral existence for Rajasthan’s special intensive revision (SIR) of voting lists. Being here also means he is losing his daily wages from the hotel.

However, the documents they collect to show themselves as residents of the village, also surprisingly show them living in the middle of the village, with all the services and facilities they need. The dashboard of the Swachh Bharat Mission – (Grameen), shows the village not only free from open defecation but also equipped for proper waste management. It is certainly news to Bhadar Bhopa and his family who never received any funds to build toilets and are forced to defecate in the open.

“We do not get anything from the government,” says Mahendra, pointing at a dust filled ditch – the point where the family received a water connection under the Har Ghar Jal Yojana. The water reached them only months later due to the high demand on the water line but now, the line is dry again. Speaking to the previous village sarpanch did not result in anything.

That, unfortunately, is not new to the family. As Mahendra says, “Everyone makes promises in chunav [elections] but after that no one listens to us.”