Book Excerpt: Of Gujarat, Kachchh and pastoral nomads of the western desert

In an essay in the magazine Seminar, Charul Bharwada and Vinay Mahajan write: ‘Be it the national highway or inner roads, forests or fields, villages or cities, the sight of a well-built, tall man holding a long wooden stick, a water pot hanging from his shoulders and a small cotton bag tucked in his dhoti moving with a herd of sheep, goat, camels or cattle is not unusual in Gujarat. He is one of the few million pastoralists of Gujarat known as “Maldhari”, moving with his livestock for grasses and water.’ Many worship Ramdev Pir, a seer with a wide following among Hindus and Muslims.

The Maldharis have been the focus of Sushma Iyengar. She studied development communications at Cornell University in the United States in the mid-1980s and came to Kachchh, which was experiencing severe drought. She worked with local communities on women’s rights and self-governance. She also curated an engrossing exhibition called ‘Living Lightly: Journeys with Pastoralists’.

She taught at the Centre for Heritage Management at Ahmedabad University. When we met in Ahmedabad in 2018, she told me about efforts to ensure that the state’s development assistance does not bypass those without a fixed address, such as the Maldharis. They also lack the paperwork needed to prove who they are. The pastoralists rear sheep, goats, cows, buffaloes, and camels and they are integral to Gujarat’s milk economy.

Some Maldharis have families across the border in Pakistan, which makes their lives more complicated in the new India which views all links with Pakistan with suspicion. Some Maldharis are used to travelling across the border often and the border forces tended to ignore those journeys unless bureaucrats from state capitals intervened. There is an arc from Barmer and Jaisalmer in Rajasthan, to parts of Sindh in Pakistan, looping back in Kachchh—people who live within this area share poetry, music, and crafts. Their ways of earning livelihood, such as pastoralism and animal breeding, are similar. Communities like the Memons, Lohanas, and Khatris have borrowed from each other, embraced each other’s faiths, and share many cultural norms across religions. The pastoral communities have settled here for centuries, and they have always disregarded the border. The interrelationships across the border are stronger than their ties with other citizens of their own nations. This is difficult enough for the state capitals—Karachi in Pakistan and Gandhinagar in Gujarat—to understand; for Islamabad and New Delhi, it is almost incomprehensible.

My uncle, Kulinchandra Yajnik, was a young civil servant in Kachchh between 1958 and 1960. He was aware of the hard life the Maldharis lived, and how their presence near the border made security-conscious bureaucrats from Delhi suspicious of them. ‘Officials who don’t know the area think their profession is spying, whereas in reality, they are poor people trying to make a living,’ he told me, shaking his head. They meant no harm.

The borders, he said, came later.

In 1965, to be precise. That year India and Pakistan fought an inconclusive war. The border was formalized, and national identities were given to the people who used to disregard the border. In the desert it is difficult to tell the two countries apart, where the only territorial markers are a few pillars and some patches with barbed wire. People often cross the border inadvertently; if they are unlucky, they get caught, and sometimes spend years in jail, as the Pakistani filmmaker Mehreen Jabbar showed in the poignant 2008 film, Ramchand Pakistani.

Over several cups of tea, Iyengar told me: ‘Kachchh always had a close relationship with Sindh. When I was in Kachchh in 1988, I remember bus drivers asking, “Gujarat javu chhe (Do you want to go to Gujarat)?” to potential customers at bus stands. The people of Kachchh did not see their region as a part of Gujarat. Even Gujarat saw Kachchh as a liability. Its droughts drained the state treasury, and every five years there would be three droughts, urban residents in Gujarat would complain. The relationship with Gujarat has always been complicated, and culturally and socially (Kachchh) has been distinct. That is now shifting. In the last decade, we have seen the first signs of Kachchhis expressing themselves as Gujaratis.’

Iyengar explained that the turning point in Kachchh’s relationship with Gujarat was the earthquake of 2001. Coping with calamities and disaster, and being resilient, has always been part of Kachchh’s culture. But that earthquake reshaped Kachchh. It became the fulcrum with many things happening around it, including the arrival of outsiders who wanted to be saviours and sought victims. Among the non-government organizations which came to provide relief, some offered help based on the victims’ religion. Investment in infrastructure increased and big business came, including the port in Mundra, that the Adani group ran. Kachchh was no longer seen as isolated. With the state promoting a desert festival and with the Hindi film superstar Amitabh Bachchan appearing as the state tourism board’s mascot, perceptions changed, and tourists from across India began to visit. The economy has boomed since, in particular horticulture (in some parts, mangoes are grown now and exported). The sense of isolation and separateness has diminished.

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Legend has it that the pastoralists had to keep moving because of a curse. According to Ibrahim’s account, once upon a time the pastoralists had seen a mouth-wateringly juicy lamb, and they slaughtered it to eat it. The lamb belonged to a woman who was horrified when she could not find the lamb. When she saw the men, she asked them if they had seen her lamb. No, they said. Out of frustration, the woman called out the lamb’s name, and the lamb began bleating from the men’s stomachs, at which point she realized that they had eaten her lamb. And so she cursed them—you will always wander from place to place and never have homes, and you will have to beg from others.

Excerpted with permission from The Gujaratis: A Portrait of a Community@2024Aleph