Shantilal Bhopa is medium-built, wiry, dark-skinned with a thin handlebar moustache. In his long red robe and tightly wound red-yellow turban, he is the cynosure of attention, which seems to unnerve him a bit. Raju Devi, his sister, a demure, rugged desert woman, and Rakesh, a young dholak-player, who does most of the talking, are part of the group. They are in Kochi for a condensed performance of Pabuji Ki Phad.
“All my ancestors were bhopas of Pabuji,” says Shantilal in Hindi that is more Mewari. Prakash Joshi, one of the exponents of Phad painting, acts as his interpreter. “We are of the Nayak caste,” says Shantilal. The belief is that the Nayaks were Pabuji’s horse tenders, adds Joshi. “And ever since Pabuji ascended to heaven they have been singing his praises by reading the Phad. This caste alone is permitted to learn and perform this epic.”
Singer priests, bhopas and bhopis, worship Pabuji, their god, a guardian of livestock, and the tradition of worship involves a liturgical telling of the epic by the bhopas.
By the 1990s, most of the bhopas had given up performing and had taken up work such as pedalling cycle-rickshaws and sweeping temples, and today there are less than 25 active bhopas in Rajasthan. The Rabari nomads, who rear camels, cattle and goats —and who were once their staple audience — have lost their connection to the art form as their lifestyles and landuse patterns have changed.
Epic tales
William Dalrymple in Nine Lives writes that there were perhaps as many as 20 full-fledged Rajasthan epic poems that the bhopas performed, of which two were extremely popular. The most famous one told the tale of the ‘deeds, feuds, life, death and avenging of Pabuji’ and the other that of Devnarayan.
Since the Rabaris, a wandering tribe, could not visit a temple in a fixed place, the idea was to have the temple visit them. So, the bhopas would travel to where the nomads set up camp for a few days and perform. They carried the Phad, or par, a long narrative painting on a scroll of cloth on which are painted miniature scenes of legends. The performances took place only in front of the Phad and usually lasted five nights — eight hours — from dusk to dawn. This rarely happens these days, except perhaps in remote villages in Rajasthan, like Pabusar. Today, there are two performance styles: the ritualistic and the one meant for tourists. The former is generally confined to the local temples in the villages, while the latter is a blend of tradition and modern day demands.
So, we have bhopas perform in restaurants across Rajasthan, festivals across the country and abroad, often singing Hindi film songs in the course of their performance.
A bhopa needs to master three diverse skills — reading the Phad, dancing, and playing the ravanhatta, a string instrument. “Rarely is the whole Phad sung these days. Usually it is presented in episodes. But the bhopas have certain rules, for instance some episodes can be sung only at a particular time,” Joshi says.
Shantilal and his team walk through the crowd to the stage, which is lit brightly. The Phad forms the backdrop, and Rakesh squats in one corner of the stage with his dholak. Shantilal and Raju Devi take their positions. The performance begins.
“Normally, there is an elaborate process that precedes the performance. The Phad functions as the portable temple and so certain rituals are observed: the ground is swept clean, incense is burnt. The bhopa performs arati before the central figure of Pabuji. This is when the devotees make offerings. The bhopa then blows the conch, a signal that the liturgy is ready to begin,” Joshi explains.
There are two performance modes for the Pabuji Ki Phad epic — gav (song) and arthav (recitative).
The major part of the singing is by the bhopi, accompanied by the bhopa on his ravanhatta. This is the longest part of the performance. The bhopi designs the narrative through her singing.
From an introductory phrase sung by the bhopa, the bhopi takes over. The bhopa and bhopi have distinct and gender-specific roles. They never sing together. The bhopa is the instrumentalist who provides the melodic accompaniment, and the dholak, the rhythmic backup. The bhopi sings the episodes with full coloratura and emotion. The songs are in Mewari with perhaps a local twang.
How it goes
Arthav is a high-pitched or chanted recitative performed by the bhopa alone. Standing in front of the Phad, he declaims the events as they unfold, but this time, in prose, while pointing to images and characters on the scroll with the tip of his bow. This is punctuated by flourishes on the ravanhatta.
“When it is performed in the villages at the night the bhopi hold up an oil lamp, which is the only lighting on stage. Often the lamp is held towards certain figures on the Phad as the bhopa points to the illustration with his bow and he sings the explanatory verse,” says Joshi.
The bhopa and bhopi go on. Each passage sung by the bhopi is handed back to the bhopa as the story unfolds. The tempo increases gradually. The bhopa whirls and dances, jiggling his hips, stamping his feet, the bells fixed on his legs jingling. Scene to scene they go backward and forward, from one end of the Phad to the other, the singing accompanied by the strains of the ravanhatta and the pulsating thumps of the dholak.
As Dalrymple writes, some bhopas still cling to the tradition but in “a bastardised form singing snatches of the epic for tourists in the Rajasthan palace hotels, or providing ‘exotic’ entertainment in the restaurants of Delhi and Bombay.” But there’s no denying, the tradition of epic performance is rapidly dying.