Moving in Sand and Time: Chronotopes and cultures of pastoralism in Indian Thar

The historical geographical existence of pastoralism is ensconced in long periods of the Indian Thar, a region with a fabulously rich prehistory and history where a range of cultures have coexisted and interacted with one another. As shown by scholars of South Asian prehistory, the simultaneous occurrence of gathering and foraging economies with food producing subsistence economies that included both farming and pastoral nomadism has been the guiding grid for understanding human natural interface in the development of Neolithic, Chalcolithic and the urban Harrapan sites from 6000 to 2000 BC. Pastoralism and nomadism, the mainstay of the culture and the moral economy of contemporary western Rajasthan, originated in the Mesolithic age that began in 9000 B.C. with the archaeological site at Bagor providing the earliest evidence of domestication of animals around the 5000 B.C.

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After Harappan Civilizations’ possible conflicts and interactions with nomadism the next high point in the history of the Thar is represented by the origin and consolidation of Rajput polity. The origin of Rajputs is inexorably bound with the upsurge in nomadic conquests and expansion from the 6th century A.D. The Chinese chronicler Huen Thsang (Xuanzang) was the first to make this observation when writing about the Gurjara Pratihara kingdom of western India in the 7th century A.D. British colonial administrators and geographers such as James Tod and A. Cunningham have elaborated on the same point. More detailed research by?? contemporary historians have sought to explain this phase of nomadic conquests in terms of an imposition of clan aristocracies on old settled villages.

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The Rajputs soon became the ruling ideologues of supra local and supra regional State form which articulated its power in terms of Brahmanical injunctions, mythical genealogies and initiatives taken in the construction of wells and reservoirs.? The stabilization of Rajput polity was guaranteed by an upsurge of the main aspects of nomadism i.e., long distance transhumance and the movement of long caravans along nomadic trails.? Capital accumulation in Marwar (western Rajasthan) also starts from this period when we hear Arab geographers talk about the widespread circulation of Indo Sassanian silver coinage in this region in the 10th century A.D.

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The remarkably detailed census by Mohnot Nainsi, the 17th century chronicler of the Jodhpur state enables to infer that the pastoral economy was a flourishing autonomous sector of considerable importance size. The colonial state symbolizing the new civilization had to come to terms with this predominantly pastoral and nomadic Thar in the nineteenth century. The British involvement in the early decades of the nineteenth century explored the possibilities of using the Thar as a ‘corridor zone’ for connecting the ports of Gujarat and Bombay with the regions on and across the Indus. The still flourishing periodic fairs, markets in Kabul and Afghanistan were marked out as having lucrative prospects for selling English goods especially woolens. The colonial regime concentrated on ways to monopolize the ‘passage through the desert’. Livelihood strategies related to or dependent upon livestock products like the prolific production of woolens in the countryside crumbled under the growing weight of exports of raw wool and the process of deindustrialization.

?The greater penetration of the market in late colonial times through newer modes of carriage also provided the material context for the growing economic importance of livestock and products related to them. The British records all through the nineteenth century single out animal wealth and livestock products like wool and ghee (clarified butter) as the major resources of the arid Rajputana. Livestock fairs, which were one of the main sources of income of native states, still proliferated in all major micro regions of Thar. This expansion of commerce was made possible by the colonial structures of dominance and control. These were deployed right through the nineteenth century, which was described by the British in disquieting terms, to coerce and regulate the mobility of several nomadic communities who were perpetually on the move. Even the scientific conquest of hydraulic engineering and its marvelous scientific feats of canalization of land, settlement of lands into chaks for agriculture was a strategy to close in the frontier on pastoral and nomadic communities.

?And so, it continues, the busy world of the farmer strives to intensify resource inputs and outputs in irrigated farming as being the only possible prescription for irrigated farming. Most of them retain the inner core of being a pastoralist who deftly adapt to the emerging landscape of economic opportunities in the livestock markets. ?Practices associated with mixed farming, rain fed farming and natural farming are gaining attention as emergent practices at the frontier boundaries of ecological sustainability.? With each passing day the mirage of irrigated command areas in the still overwhelming presence of rain fed tracts (sand) is an apt pointer to the intimate connectedness of space, its periodicity and every day clamour. Space the natural arena, bounded and unbounded, is the life world context that embeds different times of cultures of pastoralism, the intimate connections of historical time and momentary agency.?? ??

Space is not the static, absolute field imagined in Euclidean geometry, but rather what Henri Lefebvre calls a "social morphology," an active producer and product of social relations. Another of his brilliant insight pertaining to the inseparability of space (sand) and time points out that “social space which at first biomorphic and anthropological tends to transcend this immediacy”. And even though rapid modernization creates homogenized flattened built environments that transform landscape into built scape, in production of space “…what came earlier continues to underpin what follows”. Social space produced by built environments is typically oriented towards future but is imbued with a subtle continuity with preexisting spaces, social and natural, expressed as deep structures of social and cultural memory and ego substrates of habitus.

In Bakhtin's concept of Chronotope, takes its meaning from reference to another term, time-space. Connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships, the inseparability of space and time. In recent times it has been quite in order to extend these Chronotropic frames to real human life in form of “intrinsic connectedness.”? Time pointers to spatial and temporal embedding of human action in order to offer a better understanding of how humans act in their biotopes. Chronotopes, by which different aspects of human experience, such as the eternal alternation of the seasons (cyclicity) as opposed to the description of truly historical events (historicity), take narrative shape.

The ‘chronotope’? (intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships) relations of? cultures of pastoralism with built environment of the Indian Thar has in its bosom layers of meanings. The contemporary ‘presence’ of generational transmission of tradition and their renderings is phenomenal as anybody and perhaps everybody, can rattle off with ease twenty to twenty- five generations of their respective family histories. Such is the symbolic largeness, the magnificence of the duration and epochs of time, in histories, myths, anecdotes and soul stirring compositions recounted today. ?

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Would be apt to begin with an age old saying, culled out of Oral Tradition dating from more than thirty generations.

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“Feet in Pugal (Bikaner), head in Umarkot (Sind), limbs in Barmer, keeps wandering in?Jodhpur?and resides in Jaisalmer”.

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This couplet describing the omnipresent expanse of drought in the Thar more closely represents the base reality of Thar?and seems more apt as a metaphor. The sense of history which guided us one which was attentive to the longer time scales, the?longee duree, that prodigious mass as F. Braudel described it, that bears within it an unconscious heritage. In other words, what interests us here is history of human and livestock communities of the Thar and the physical territory in which they were inscribed, the deciphering of the relations, multiple, intertwined and elusive, between man and biosphere in Thar.

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The conversations with people afforded ample opportunities for reflections on the?longee duree?of the Thar. It is in these perspectives offered by pastoral communities that contain the corpus devoted to rohi, natural environment. What is tera incognita for the sedentary perspective is in fact, prized by pastoral communities as natural endowments. These communities have been continually adaptive to the region, its vulnerabilities and harshness punctuated by brief spells of bountiful splendors of nature. The chronotopes of cultures of pastoralism belong to longee durée of the Thar, structured by conflict as well as complementarity between nomadism and civilization.

On Going studies on Pastoralism as a Complex Social Ecological System

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The socio ecological context of Ramgarh region is inscribed by different natural resource regimes ecological ‘niches’ (in the ecological sense of the term) like grasslands, ponds, agricultural fields, khadin, orans, micro catchments, inter-dunal flats, shifting dunes, land in and around permanently settled old villages. The state intervenes in the lives of the communities living in these distinct components of the arid zone, offering specific conditions of survival for the living species through its rules, prescripts, policies and actions for access to, use, regeneration and control of the natural resources, mainly land and water (make the sentence clear). The IGNP canal (originally the Rajasthan Canal Project) has been a?? major public investment by the post-colonial developmental state.

The socio ecological pastoral system of Ramgarh region was embedded in a complex of practices that are a set of broad ranging skills and acquired intelligence in responding to a natural environment characterized by high variation. Many pastoralists from among Solanki’s and Muslims have shown ability to constitute and sustain innovative combinations based on an astute observation and engagement with the natural phenomenon in its changing cycles of seasonality of scarcity and abundance and integration with markets of wool, milk and mutton. These have been practices that range from pragmatic response to evolving social ecological realities as well as to the changing landscape of economic opportunities.??

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We premise that pastoralist communities in the study region comprise collections of social units - the clans together with their animal herds - that have been engaged in a continued process of interaction with the local ecosystem for over a significant period of time.? Each pastoralist clan is constituted by a number of pastoralist households, and the clans comprise the fundamental social units of the community, that also interact among each other through the collective act of grazing their animals and harvesting of ecosystem services and the ecological resources of the region. Both these types of interactions, between the social units and between the social-ecological units, are characteristically polyadic in nature.

We consider the Solanki pastoralism SES to be an instantiation of a complex adaptive system. Thus, the pastoral system under study qualifies as a SES having the structure in accordance with the definition given earlier. The relations constituting the above SES are dynamic in nature and provide the entanglement of the social and the ecological systems, while the set of constants C accommodates? non-negotiables that? may be inherently dynamic in nature.?? The elements of the environment that are outside the scope of immediate functional interdependence of the social and ecological entities comprising the socio-ecological system, constitute the set , while the boundary of the system is defined by the disjoint union of the sets V and as discussed earlier. Thus, the boundary and the environment of the said system is scoped relative to its functioning. The pastoral socio-ecological system under study being an open system comprises a porous boundary and continually exchanges matter and energy with.?

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Further research questions should therefore take into account the complexity of the social-ecological system. These will have to be understood in the context of the shifting social ecological pastoral reality that comprises of the traditional and created water bodies as well as the backdrop of the Indira Gandhi Nahar Pariyojana. (IGNP).

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