Raja Nal and the Goddess: The North Indian Epic Dhola in Performance

Preface

Preface More than thirty years ago, on a hot, humid monsoon day when the men of the village known as Karimpur1 in Mainpuri District in western Uttar Pradesh could not work in the fields, they gathered in the village dharamśālā (pilgrims’ way station usually attached to a temple) to hear Ram Swarup Dhimar (Kahar, Water Carrier by caste),2 a resident of Karimpur, sing D̊holā. I later learned that this was a long oral epic segmented into eighteen or more identifiable episodes, each usually performed in one night. Because the men knew of my interest in various kinds of oral performance, I was invited to attend (and was the only woman present, camera and tape recorder in hand). Little did I know then that I was beginning a quest that would last more than thirty years to understand what I heard that rainy day. I saw a man, probably in his late thirties, clad in his everyday dhotı̄ (a piece of lightweight cloth that men wrap around their waist to create pants) and shirt, playing a cikār̊ā, a simple stringed instrument, accompanied by a drummer on a d̊holak (see cover). The singer was clearly an expert, telling a story to a fascinated audience as he mixed song with prose sections. As I have since learned, Ram Swarup shares a lower-caste identity with the majority of Dhola singers. Some months later, I saw this same performer with his “company” performing Dhola as a folk opera on a neighbor’s verandah. Here he was dressed as Raja Nal, the epic hero, while others became women or his male helpmates. I had little sense of what I saw and heard, the poetry then being beyond my Hindi skills, though I was able to follow much of the prose narrative portions. But the story was complex and confusing, its history unknown. I could find no reference to what I was hearing in the scholarly literature, though I soon found that I could buy chapbooks (cheap pamphlets, usually of twenty-four or fewer pages and selling, literally, for cents) of Dhola in any local book stall (and still can, though now one is more likely to be able to buy a commercial tape cassette of an episode of Dhola). As I went on to explore other village oral traditions, and social change in north India more generally, I kept returning to Dhola as time and circumstances permitted. On return trips to Karimpur in 1974 and 1984, and then regularly throughout the 1990s, I began attending any Dhola performance I could find, eventually hiring Ram Swarup Dhimar and other singers to perform for my tape recorder and, beginning in 1989, video recorder, sometimes on the verandah of the house where I resided, sometimes in the dharamsala, sometimes in xii Preface another village or at someone else’s house. Later I worked with Komal Kothari in Jodhpur with a singer, Matolsingh, and tracked other singers through the Braj region. A foray into the archives of the British Office Library in London led me to nineteenth-century publications of versions of Dhola, also in chapbook form, as well as to a greater understanding of the relationship between its performance region and its history. Since Dhola is never performed as a continuous story, I have recordings of only twelve episodes. I do have one of the commonly performed episodes sung seven times by four different troupes, plus numerous episodes on commercial tape cassettes from another dozen singers, including one set of twenty-one cassettes that contains most of the epic. I also have numerous chapbooks, including complete sets of the epic by the two most prominent writers of the latter part of the twentieth century. The performers and other local storytellers can narrate a summary of the whole epic, although even these renditions run many hours, and their audiences seldom demand the infrequently performed episodes.3 Dhola is driven by audience demand, not by ritual, although there is an odd reference to singers who worshiped Raja Nal. That Dhola is not tied to ritual is important, because the singer is not constrained by a fixed text that must be accurately performed for ritual purposes. This book is broken into two sections. After a brief introduction, part 1 includes a vastly condensed retelling of the epic itself, followed by a brief literary and cultural history of the epic and the region where it is performed. Chapter 3 illuminates epic performance through...