It is tragic that artists in the drought-ridden Thar do not have the opportunities to use their cultural skills to create livelihood opportunities and that their skills as artists figure nowhere in employment-creation government schemes for the region, says Rahul Ghai.

Drought, National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, and the Challenge Before Subaltern musicians in the Thar

The bearers of the lilting Rajasthani folk music traditions, whose performances always promise ecstatic feelings of joy and take the listener to mystical heights, are facing a terrible drought this year.

This drought is the third worst in twenty-eight years out of which twenty-six were drought years anyway. The food, fodder and water crisis is of an enormous magnitude, with a seventy-five to almost hundred percent crop failure being reported from most villages of the desert districts of Thar. Prices of essential commodities like wheat, bajra, edible oil, kerosene have more than doubled and fodder is no longer easily available even at double its price. And water, the supreme elixir, is extremely scarce. All this heralds a long winter of destitution and misery.

Waris Ali, a Sufi singer from Rawala, a remote settlement in the Indira Gandhi Nahar Project (IGNP) Stage II canal command area in Bikaner, talking to me about the peculiar water woes of the IGNP canal area, insists that this looming scarcity is not only due to the failure of rains. “Even earlier months have been like drought to us, for us it is a permanent drought,” he says. And adds, “Forget irrigating our fields, we do not have water even for drinking”. Abdul Jabbar, a versatile musician from Pugal, pensively points out that, “For the last twenty-five years the state has been pushing the grand IGNP canal as a panacea of all ills, to assuage the people of the misery of drought, but since the last few years almost every year we have a drought-like situation here.”

The other day, during a visit to Gafur Khan’s dhani in Jafli Kalan, Barmer, we were all pleasantly surprised to see a full-fledged brick structure, a music centre named after the khartaal legend Sadiq Khan. “It is a pucca building, but no music happens here, this is becoming a relic,” bemoaned Hakam Khan, a kamaicha player from Hadwa, a nearby village. Fakira Khan, recounting the outcomes of a recent conference of folk musicians of the Thar organised by the Society to Uplift Rural Economy and Marudhar Lok Kala Kendra and supported by the India Foundation for the Arts (IFA), points out that out of more than two thousand families of Langas and Maanganiyars from Barmer and Jaisalmer only twenty to thirty families get to perform abroad or outside the region. The majority of them have witnessed a steady erosion of their traditional patronage, livelihood opportunities and their bonds with their art practice. Many of them have become casual wage earners working at the lower levels of the tourism and modern entertainment industries, which have been badly hit by the economic recession. Nage Khan, an old Manganiyar musician, says fatalistically, “Forget the tradition, it will die with us, most of us do not get even basic entitlements for a dignified life.” 

The ease with which most of these musicians can sing compositions of the great Sufi mystics like Bulleh Shah and Shah Latif, and the nirgun bhanjans of Gorakhnath, Kabir and Meera, along with the rich repertoire of folk songs, speaks of the robust and versatile texture of these living cultural traditions and the ability of these musicians to straddle different worlds of entertainment effortlessly. This ironical paradox of subaltern musicians, who are vast repositories of raw creativity, known for their ecstatic renditions, enticing overtures and robust dissemination of secular culture, languishing away in destitution stares you in the face. It exposes the deep-seated apathy of our policy planners and the gross failure to develop these resilient cultural traditions into lasting livelihood solutions.

As the spectre of an extended period of heightened scarcity haunts the region, these soul-stirring musicians have no option but to try and access drought relief work that involves digging earth and uprooting bushes, and does not build upon their existing skills. This has been the stock emergency drought relief response, and is repeated every year with its own share of farces and tragedies. The aesthetics of ecstatic tonalities and dexterous handwork of these bearers of living cultural traditions get drowned in the shrill clamor of these rugged drought relief works. These harbingers of ecstasy get metamorphosed into the wretched of the desert.

However, this time around the State has declared that it will combat drought through a potent mix of drought relief works and the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA). The discourse of planners about NREGA emphasises that it is an opportunity for creating sustainable rural livelihoods through rejuvenation of productive capabilities of rural people. This enlightened discourse on employment presents the question of rural employment as essentially one of lack of skills, lack of opportunities for upgrading skills, to be precise. This aspect of upgrading skills is not given much importance in the public discourse on NREGA as it reaches the villages where the preoccupation is mostly with generating employment for un-skilled or semi-skilled labour with a focus on either infrastructure development or natural resources management.

While not discounting the importance of the above-mentioned two sectors, attention ought to be paid to recognising and developing the capabilities that lie in the robust folk cultural traditions of people. There are hardly any government policies or schemes that deal with developing collective initiative around promoting livelihood options among the artist groups. It is quite paradoxical that artists whose cultural skills contribute meaningfully to the growth of a variety of entertainment enterprises do not have adequate opportunities to develop their own collective enterprises around culture. It is high time that we rid ourselves of the bias and theoretical baggage that relegates culture to some intangible super-structural variable, mute and fuzzy, and leads to the view that creative expression is only to be consumed for its transient pleasures and is of marginal consequence to generating livelihoods.

That engagements with folk musicians around their arts practice do open up issues of their wellbeing and entitlements is amply clear from the experience of recent IFA-funded initiatives involving folk musicians in western Rajasthan and their cultural traditions. What is more important is that such engagement leads to a community-based approach to the question of documentation, where teaching-learning and riyaaz at community sites takes a precedence over archiving of the rich and live repertoire. The dynamic processes these engagements have triggered off at the community level can well go on to become important processes towards consolidation of creative destinies, individual or collective.      

There is a need for the state as well as to civil society to engage these makers of ecstatic music. This could be done with NREGA contributing to developing skills for rejuvenation of folk cultural traditions. These cultural practices need to be recognised as viable livelihood strategies that can be developed under NREGA. Activities could range from providing opportunities for teaching-learning at the community sites, to training in making of rare folk instruments such as the kamaicha, nad, been, etc. This initiative at the village level needs to be coupled with creating opportunities for performances within their region and in the cities, air-time on radio, the launching of community radio networks, and so on,

In this context it would be worthwhile for NREGA planners to visit the Jodhpur Consensus, a concerted call to action by UNESCO, endorsed by the Ministry of Culture, Government of India in 2005. A central theme of the Jodhpur Consensus for rejuvenating and developing creative communities is the recognition that because culture industries incorporate not only cultural but social and economic factors, support to these industries is a practical strategy to contribute to socio-economic development and poverty alleviation. Encouraging people in rural regions to develop traditional forms of livelihoods based on cultural resources should be considered an investment in development.

Perhaps it is only in this way that the promise of right to dignified work, reduction of vulnerabilities and the safeguarding of our prestigious intangible cultural heritage would be truly fulfilled.

Ghai is an development processes facilitator and researcher working in western Rajasthan. In 2003 he began collaborating with the Mir community in an attempt to explore if the community’s musical traditions could offer sustainable livelihood opportunities. This project was funded by an IFA grant to Mir singer, Mukhtiyar Ali as well as a grant to the Marudhar Lok Kala Kendra. Ghai can be contacted at rahulconsult@gmail.com.