Untouchable Friends

Untouchable friends

Tan Dan about Bhangi sweepers in feudal Rajasthan

By Son Lal

Copyright 2013 by Son Lal

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This is a work of fiction. The names and characters come from the author's imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. Similarly, the locations and incidents in this book, which might resemble real locations and events, are being used fictitiously and are not to be considered as real.

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Untouchable friends

Tan Dan about Bhangi sweepers in feudal Rajasthan

The neglected life of an ageold caste in a desert region with strong feudal attitudes and ritual barriers. As narrated to his friend Son Lal around 1980.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 Tan Dan

Chapter 2 The Bhangi caste at Chelana

Chapter 3 Baya and the other sweepers at Chelana

Chapter 4 Toilets cleaned by sweepers

Chapter 5 The sweeper families at Chelana

Chapter 6 Bhangis and village politics

Chapter 7 The Bhangi baskets

Chapter 8 Badri, the Bhangi boy at Jodhpur

Chapter 9 Various aspects of the Bhangi caste

Chapter 10 Discrimination in between untouchable castes

Chapter 11 Bhangi religious thoughts

Chapter 12 The Lal Guru worship

Chapter 13 Cremation and burial

Chapter 14 Ganga water rites

Chapter 15 The prestigious death meal

Chapter 16 The Chandals

Chapter 17 Tan Dan about outcasting Hindus

Supplements

Indian words used in this book are explained here.

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Chapter 1 Tan Dan

In Rajasthan, a dry part of northwestern India, women and young girls of the Bhangi caste have worked as sweepers for generations. Also in Tan Dan's home village. Tan Dan has followed Bhangi life with keen interest since his childhood, and in this book he gives his version of a life very little known to many Indians, although sweepers are seen everywhere. For him they are friends, not untouchables. Many narrations are based on his experience in the 1970s.

Who is Tan Dan?

Tan Dan Detha was born in a farmer family of the Charan caste in 1943. His native village is Chelana in Jodhpur District of Rajasthan in northwestern India. Tan Dan has lived in the midst of his strongly traditional environment all his life. He is a critical observer rather than a follower of that tradition.

Who is Son Lal?

Son Lal is my pen name. I was born in a Scandinavian country of northern Europe in the early 1940s. I have lived in India off and on for fifty years, since I first arrived to the Gateway of India at Bombay by ship in 1963. In the 1970s I met Tan Dan. We soon found we shared many views on the world, and had the same curiosity of village life. I saw a chance to learn how he experienced his rural environment. He did his best to explain, and I am grateful to him for having shared his knowledge and thoughts with me.

How this narration was done

Tan Dan told in English and I typed, while we sat together in long sessions. His many photos became a starting point for our discussions. We formulated the sentences together. Sentence after sentence, day after day. Most of it we wrote around 1980, but some additions were made in later decades. Afterwards I have edited the material and supplemented some sections with information from elsewhere. Still, it is Tan Dan's voice that is heard on these pages. It is a personal narration by a village farmer, and has no connection to any university.

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Chapter 2 The Bhangi caste at Chelana

The touchable Hindu castes that dominated Chelana in the feudal time were Rajput, Baniya and Brahmin. Also the Charan caste was strong. In the 1970s there were about twentyfive touchable castes in the village and twenty untouchable ones from the pont of view of the highcaste people. The total number of untouchables in the Chelana area was about one fifth of the total population.Bhambi was the biggest untouchable caste at Chelana with about forty families. The Bhangi caste of about ten families was a small part of the village population. Many untouchable castes were even smaller with only one or a few families.

Bhangis at Chelana and elsewhere in Rajasthan were also called Harijans by other villagers and in recent years many Bhangis have started to call themselves Valmiki. There are Bhangi families who have stopped doing any kind of sweeper work, having entered a middle class professional life. They are few compared to those Bhangis, who still rely on sweeper work for their livelihood, but they are bound to become more in the future.

Only Bhangis have sweeping as a traditional caste profession in western Rajasthan. Some persons living far from the reality of the sweepers maintain that sweepers have no caste at all. Nevertheless, it is a caste with a well established gotra system, as will be shown later on in this book.

In these narrations I will use the name Bhangi, which is the ageold name of this caste. It is nothing wrong with that name. The fault is at those who treat Bhangis as untouchables, and have contempt for those who help others in the society by cleaning their streets and toilets and carrying out many other useful tasks.

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Chapter 3 Baya and the other sweepers at Chelana

Baya was eleven years in 1977 and already a fullfledged sweeper. She carried out her duties according to ageold village customs. The villagers treated her as an untouchable. Baya and her mother worked in a number of mohallas including that of the Charan, Mali, Rajput, Dakot, Brahmin and Muslim. Tan Dan's family was one of her clients. He followed Baya in her work one day in December 1977. We will start this book about Bhangi sweepers by showing what Baya did that day.

When Baya woke up at sunrise, she started to sweep her houses as soon as she was out of bed. That was her habit. Her mother prepared tea. The milk they got from their goat. After chatting a little with her neighbours, Baya went off to her duty, just half an hour after she had woken up.

The Bhangi families had nine houses in a row at that time, and Baya's house was in the middle. Baya lived there with her parents, brother, sister and a goat. December nights are chilly at Chelana. Men and animals alike shiver of cold and the sleep is uneasy and incomplete. Also for the family goat lying in the angan. When the sun rays started to warm up the body of the goat, she felt comfortable at last, and drowsed, undisturbed of Baya's energetic sweepings.

Baya collected the dust and dirt of the angan in a small heap in which there were also goat droppings. This fertile dust she put on a kunda, i.e. an iron pan, and carried it to the partition wall between the Bhangi and Gavaria Banjara mohallas. There the Bhangi families kept compost heaps, one for each family. When it had become fertile soil they sold it to Tan Dan and some other irrigation farmers with papaya fruits plants and vegetable nurseries on a small scale.

Baya's hens

In a corner of the mudwalled house compound, there was a big clay pot, matka, in which Baya's family kept their hens during the night. As the deshi hens kept by the Bhangis were so small, there was enough space for two or three of them. During the night Baya put a stone slab over the open top of the matka to prevent attacks from small wild predatory animals such as wild cats, dogs, and foxes. Also mungoos killed hens.

At Chelana only Muslims and Bhangis kept poultry birds. People of most other castes did not like eggs at all. They considered poultry husbandry a dirty habit and anti-religious. Brahmins and Baniyas told it was against the principles of ahimsa, non-violence, to eat eggs. Eggs were called murgi ke bacche, i.e. the hen's children. For the egg to be fertilized the hen must have had sex with a cock, which not always is at hand, though. Orthodox Hindus do not want to consider that aspect.

The poultry bird flocks of the Bhangis are often small, just a few hens. One or two matkas are often enough for a Bhangi household. Occasionally it happens that the flock increases in size, up to a dozen hens or so. Then the Bhangi family make a small poultry shed of stones and wood, but the big flocks seldom last long. Predatory birds like hawk and eagle (cheel) as well as crows reduce their numbers and so do diseases. After some time the matka pots may be used again as a handy shelter.

The small deshi murgi hens run around on their own anywhere. They can stand hardships and know how to feed themselves without any help. The eggs of these hardy birds are extremely small, though.

Still, such a small egg is more expensive than a big egg from a poultry farm near towns. Common people believe, there is more power in the small deshi eggs, than in the big ones sold at the bazar.

Baya as a sweeper

She left her house after having cleaned her own house, having had a morning chat with her neighbours and a breakfast with tea and stale bread. Some of the family's small hens followed her for a while, when she left. Then she walked away with her broom and her basket along the sandy village lanes full of limestone pebbles. In between stonewalls, some greenery of thorny bush, low thatch-roofed houses and big houses with roofs of long stone-slabs. She would sweep in front of the houses allotted to her family as jajman. Baya's family had in its jajman some seventy to eighty houses all over the