Fantastic folkways

rural rounds

We were in the flamingo-haunted, saline wilderness of Gujarat on a mission. The UNDP (United Nations Development Programme) had chosen Hodka as a rural tourism project for village development and had asked us to assess it.

Their resort fascinated us: beautiful, pragmatic and truly rural. Circular and thatched bhunga huts rose at one end of a large, saucer-shaped compound floored with mud-plaster. Inside the huts there were beds on earthen platforms with thick, and very comfortable mattresses; cushioned seating against the walls of the bhunga; a writing table and chair; and a wardrobe-and-luggage alcove.

The intricate mud-and-mirror work of Gujarat gave an understated elegance to our hut. The shower and loo were in another hut across a small courtyard: water would have made the plastered floors of the bedroom tacky. Privacy was ensured by a fence of branches heavily plastered with mud. It was all snug and delightfully, genuinely rustic.

The public area of the resort was at the other end of the basin. A metal frame supported an open-sided shamiana-marquee and a ceiling bright with squares of locally-woven fabrics. A buffet platform held sigri-braziers at meal times.

We loved everything about this resort: the setting, the strictly vegetarian local food (even though we’re carnivorous), the service, the evening folk-entertainment, the stillness and peace that enfolded us in serenity. And the excursions that introduced us to the other harmonies of the Banni lands of the Rann.

This seemingly hostile land is richly embroidered with folkways. We visited a village where the descendants of ancient migrants still retain the traditions and customs of the legendary North-West Frontier. They breed horses, ride bareback, wear beaded bride and bridegroom masks, are taught by a cheerful young maulana, and their moorchank-twanging headman would have merged effortlessly into the population of Kandahar. Though we’re not sure that the moorchank, also called a jews’ harp, is a popular instrument in tribal Afghanistan.

But then again, an unforgiving environment often brings out the best in the people who inhabit it.

Common creativity

Embroidery and appliqué are common folk arts in the Rann: seemingly as essential an accomplishment of virtually every housewife as knitting had been in early 20th century Europe. But in our quest to find the most skilled appliqué artistes we discovered that our evocative tourist village had spawned a clone. Baya-bai, who we photographed while working on a colourful skirt, was also the proud part-owner of five bhungas, designed for tourists. She reasoned, “When tourists live where you are staying, their guides take them to other villages to buy their handicrafts. When they live with us, they buy our handicrafts.”

The kaleidoscope of handicrafts is enormous: wood carving, pottery, lac-ware and stuffed toys of dancers, camels and turbaned riders on horses. Lohar Salemamad Husen forges bells. His craft grew out of fashioning bells for herders so that they could identify their foraging animals. He showed us wind-bells and festoons of love-bells shaped like hearts and even a mini xylophone called a sa-re-ga-ma. He creates his bells of iron, hammers them till they produce the right sound, then plates them in copper. “I can produce any tone you want,” he asserted confidently. Perhaps it is time that designers promoted the old-fashioned and individual rope-and-striker door bell to replace impersonal electronic chimes.

The sounds of the Rann were a gentle orchestration as we drove through the scrub wilderness: the clonk-tonk of buffalo bells from the half-wild black herds; the twitter-whistle of partridges insistent in the sere grass; the honking of an enormous squadron of cranes winging in the soft light of evening; the distant, lonely yowl of a jackal setting off a cacophonous chorus of howls like demented spirits beckoning from the underworld. “They are singing for their supper,” remarked a gaunt man with deep-set eyes in the parking lot of the Dattatreya temple. The shrine is perched atop a knoll in the Black Hills of Kachchh wreathed in the eerie legend of a divine being who fed himself to the jackals when all other food ran out.

The evening aarti ceremony was over and we joined a mass of devotees, assembled on a spur, gazing down at a platform built at the edge of the thorny cactus thickets. A priest approached, carrying a large bowl of consecrated food. He struck the bowl, emptied its contents on the platform and called out.

And suddenly, the cactus thickets shifted and moved as a horde of dun-coloured jackals materialised out of the khaki shadows of the scrub, leapt on the platform and, snarling and yapping, began to feast on the prasad. It was an amazing sight and one that had been repeated every morning and evening ever since this sacred hillock emerged out of the salt-flats of the Rann, thrust up by the earthquake of 1918. Or so a priest of the temple informed us solemnly. “This was” he added, “on the caravan route from our land to the other side of the Rann, now in Pakistan.”

Picture this

We couldn’t quite establish the contours of the route in our minds but then, possibly, our topographical knowledge wasn’t quite up to his. We walked to the parapet at the far edge of the escarpment that fell away from the shrine. At our feet, the vast expanse of the saline flats of the Rann shimmered like crushed glass, stretching to the curve of the earth’s shoulder.

The sun was an angry ball at the edge of the world, sinking slowly, implacably. For a brief moment the salt flats picked up its reflection and then, after a swift and almost imperceptible flash of green, the sun was swallowed by the dusk. The sky stretched velvet-black over it all, spangled with the mirror chips of stars.

And as we drove down from the knoll, a cool night wind, scented of incense, brought the far yowl of a jackal choir master. Then, on cue, a full-throated melody burst out, celebrating the drama of the setting, sunset on the far frontier of the Rann.

Fact file

Fly or take a train to Bhuj. Hodka is 65 km from here. (Ahmedabad is 400 km from Bhuj, linked by train/bus.)

For more information, contact [e-mail], or visit www.hodka.in and
www.exploreruralindia.org.