Twilight of the taru – the saga of Sangat Ram

For five and a half decades, a hair’s breadth separated life from death for Sangat Ram. He illustrates the margin by touching the nail of his thumb to that of his index finger and saying, “Even if it loses this much of balance, equal to the breadth of a hair, you drown.” Navigating the ferocious, icy waters of the Beas was not everybody’s game. Certainly not on a wobbly, inflated bullock skin, the only mode of crossing rivers here for centuries.

Sangat Ram, 89, is among the last living tarus (river ferrymen) in the Kullu Valley, Himachal Pradesh. His profession died long ago. It started losing relevance in the beginning of this century, when bridges and jhulas (hand-pulled ropeway trolleys) came up at various places. Before that, from local deities to kings, baraats to dead bodies, harvest to timber, he would ferry almost anything under the sky across the river on his ‘diriya.’

The diriya was an inflated bullock skin used as a craft to cross the Beas river. Legends around the diriya date back over two thousand years to when Alexander’s army revolted against proceeding further in India. Folklore speaks of locals plying diriyas even then. The Greeks, on the other hand, thought the ferocious river impossible to cross. The Beas was one of the most difficult obstacles Alexander faced. Some historians assert it marked the eastern-most limit of his invasions in India beyond which he could not move.

For centuries, diriyas piloted by these river ferrymen, perhaps including Sangat Ram’s ancestors, acted as the only bridge between the left and right banks of the Beas. The river originates from the high-altitude alpine lake, the Beas Kund, and covers 470 kilometers before merging with the Sutlej at Harike in the plains of Punjab.

In Kullu Valley, across a distance of around 20 kilometers, there were five tars – relatively calm stretches of the river – where the tarus operated. Those were Bhuin Tar (nowadays called Bhuntar), Hata Tar at Bajaura, Rah Tar, Jogni Tar and Jia Tar (on the Beas’ tributary Parvati). Sangat Ram worked the Hata Tar crossing, covering over 400 feet each trip on a river that can still be ferocious at times – on an inflated bullock skin. The waters at Hata Tar in his time were between 15 and 20 feet deep. But the river in this sloping area was more dangerous for its currents than its depth.

Earlier, people had to walk long distances to find bridges to cross over. “We had to travel 10 kilometres to reach the left bank, which would take two to three hours. But with the tarus, we could cross in three minutes,” Chhabeel Das Sharma, a 76-year-old resident of Bajaura and priest of the village temple, tells PARI.

It was a strange way to carry passengers. A taru would lie down across the diriya and the passenger would piggy ride on the taru’s back, sometimes lying down on him. The taru would row the diriya with the help of his legs and a fali (small oar). The ferryman would not only move his feet to propel the diriya, but also use them to balance this peculiar vessel. The key was to bring the entire weight to the centre of the diriya and the taru.

Each diriya was made from a single bullock skin and normally carried one passenger at a time.

If the passengers were more, or the cargo heavy, they would join two diriyas together and place a charpoy on them; the taru would then ride a third diriya to propel the entire contraption forward.

Diriyas were active beyond the Beas region. Travellers’ accounts of the past reveal that they were lifelines for people living around the rivers Sutlej, Jhelum and Sindh. At some of these places, the diriya was called a mussack. In his 1904 book ‘India Through the Stereoscope,’ James Ricalton wrote: “These drea-wallahs can drive the skins across the river during high floods when the best swimmer would be helpless in the powerful current.” Around a century ago, colonial explorer William A. Greene called the phenomenon “probably the world’s oldest and most curious river ferry.”

Sangat Ram inherited this profession from his father, who worked his entire life at Hata Tar. So did his father’s father. “We are of boatmen lineage,” he says. [He is of the Koli community, listed as a scheduled caste in Himachal Pradesh]. “Our family came from Sujanpur,” he tells PARI. After migrating from Sujanpur – located around 170 km downstream on the southern bank of the Beas in Hamirpur district – his ancestors settled at Masrogi village located on the left bank of the river, facing Bajaura town. At present, 13 families living in that village trace their lineage to tarus.

The first thing for a grownup child in any taru family, Sangat Ram says, was to master the burbling Beas in all weathers. “I started riding a diriya when I was 14 or 15. Before that, we were made to dive and swim in the Beas for months. To learn the art of balancing, four stones, each weighing around 3-6 kilograms, would be attached to every leg of the inflated skin and then the young boys were asked to ride them. I lost control just once. Otherwise, never did I fall myself nor did I let any passenger drown.” However, his mama (maternal uncle) Dole Ram, who taught him to ride the diriya, lost his life while crossing turbulent waters.

Work remained suspended between May and September when the river’s strong currents made it impossible for the diriya to float. It would resume between October and April, the period when the waters of the Beas used to be relatively calm. Prior to Independence, says Sangat Ram, a tarai (ride) across the river cost one anna (1/16th of a rupee), then two, and after 1947, 25 paise — a rate that lasted for decades. In the 1970s it became 50 paise, and by the 1990s, one rupee. “We would charge money only from unknown people who would come from far-off places,” he says. For the locals, a share of the harvest from the villagers after both rabi and kharif seasons, or anything that the farmers would produce, used to be the fare.

Whenever the river grew fierce, diriyas were the only mode of conveyance people could use. During the devastating floods of 1947, when Bhuntar bridge collapsed, some members of Sangat Ram’s extended family shifted to Bhuntar on orders of Raja Bhagwant Singh of Kullu. “It took three years to rebuild the bridge. For those years, we were the only bridge between both banks of the river,” he says.

For Sangat Ram’s nephew Gautam Ram, 53, the centuries-old family profession was the obvious occupation. But just as he embarked on it in the 1980s, it had begun losing relevance. A cable trolley came up here in that decade. Then came the bridge at Bajaura in 2002. So, for Gautam, the diriya either remained an item of personal use, transporting goods and timber, or for fishing. He quit this line of work to become a clerk in the education department. However, his memories of the 1995 floods remain fresh. “My grandfather Sundru Ram and an uncle, Gashnu Ram, received a commendation certificate from the deputy commissioner of Kullu during those floods. They had rescued people and doctors from Bhuntar dispensary and fished out dead bodies using diriya, from waters where nobody else dared to go.”

Diriyas were a common mode of transportation for local deities, too. A popular Kullu Valley myth holds that Sangat Ram’s ancestors swam through the rivers and brought the goddess Satyavati from the plains in ancient times. “Our Raja [the local king of Kullu] used to go to Hurla village on the left bank and would cross the river sitting on our backs. At any and every hour, we would be ready,” says Gautam.

The diriya, from which every taru family earned its livelihood, held a cherished place in the household, where it would be kept away from direct sunlight when not in use.

Making and preserving a diriya involved folk wisdom and science invented and advanced by Dalit communities. Sangat Ram says that initially it used to be very difficult to get diriyas as they were available only in the plains. Before they began to be made locally, a diriya would cost Rs. 120. “But slowly our forefathers trained a local person from our village to skin the dead bullock and carve out a diriya.” Now they came at a tiny fraction of the cost.

It took seven to ten days to make a diriya. In the 1950s, a Dalit craftsman would be paid one seer of ghee, roughly 933 grams, several kilos of grain, and five rupees for his labour. Once delivered to the tarus, they purified the hide with deodar oil (from Himalayan cedarwood) and rubbed in the powdered bark of the karal fig tree (Ficus tsjakela), to seal the pores, blacken the skin, and prevent decay. A small piece of skin of goat or karth (Himalayan tahr or wild mountain goat) was stitched to the rear leg for inflating the diriya. “It took two to four minutes to fill it with air,” says Gautam Ram. “With care, one skin lasted 15 to 20 years—only the stitches needed mending now and then.”

The dead bullock would usually come from the local Muslim community, who lived in significant numbers in the Kullu valley before 1947. Muslims of the area attached great value to the diriya. “They would tell us not to forget to inform them when a new diriya was to be set into the waters,” says Sangat Ram. “They would bring along a piece of cloth as long as the diriya itself, to lay on it. Five sets of clothes were given to the taru by the community, apart from food, ghee, sugar and grains. The first passenger was always the owner of the bullock, who would be carried back and forth, across the river, as a ritual. It was considered auspicious. The owner would be ferried on the diriya for free, all his life.”

This interplay between diverse social groups and religions in the past did not, however, erode the walls of caste divisions. Most of the tarus are Dalits from the Koli caste. For centuries, the deities and kings didn’t mind crossing the river while riding on the backs of these Dalits. Yet, even today, the Dalits are forbidden from entering the temples built by those kings and inhabited by the same deities who had crossed the turbulent waters on their backs.

Sangat Ram did his last taru trips in 2002. For the past two and a half decades, he has existed on a monthly Himachal Pradesh government old age pension of Rs. 1,700. He also gets a little help from his son Khoob Ram who works as a ‘peon’ in a bank.

Those generations born after the 1980s still look down on the tarus as just another low caste community. They have no memories of ‘huge, dark, floating bullocks’, the only floating things they’ve seen on the river are plastic inflatable rafts. Standing on the right bank of the Beas, Sangat Ram’s small eyes seem to be searching through his thick glasses for Hata Tar, whose waters he ruled for 55 years. The same waters now blend in a mosaic of blue, yellow, and orange rafts echoing with the joyous cries of tourists. He looks at them curiously and softly murmurs to himself: “It is not at all dangerous to ride these. The diriya is cylindrical, absolutely cylindrical. One wrong move, and you are gone.” He suddenly starts talking about the diriyas in the present tense. Hata Tar has come alive. Sangat Ram is a taru once again.

This story is published under the PARI Senior Fellowship 2025.

Author’s Note: My sincere thanks to Yatin Pandit, an independent researcher based in Kullu.