Speculating about the outcome of these general elections is quite the national obsession these days. Newspapers, television and the blogosphere are full of snippets about secret meetings, power alliances and more. The other day, whilst reading about a mysterious ‘masked guest’ visiting 10 Janpath, I chanced upon a photograph sticking out of my computer drawer. It had been taken in Sadri, a small town in Rajasthan’s Pali district. There I was, squinting at the camera with Daili Devi, an animal-healer. Suddenly, memories of my conversation with her flooded back. “Living as we do so far from Delhi,” she’d said to me just over a month ago, “who wins and who loses the elections has absolutely no meaning for us…”
We sat in her courtyard, sipping saucers of fragrant tea as she told me about her life. Daili Devi was a Raika, a nomadic animal-herder. She’d seen her tribesmen go as far as Madhya Pradesh in search of pasture for their animals, because successive governments in her state had declared all the pasture and forest land nearby out of bounds. “Now even to find some greens for my three cows and couple of goats, I have to walk miles…imagine how far my tribesmen, some of whom have hundreds of buffaloes and camels, have to go to feed their livestock!” she said. When the government declared the nearby forests of Kumbhalgarh reserved, it had ignored the fact that they’d traditionally been the Raika’s pasturelands for centuries. “The misconception is that our animals denude the forests. But we know that when a herd of grazing ruminants always leaves behind valuable manure for the land…but we live so faraway from the city, that nobody listens to us or is even aware of our problems!” she said.
Her daughter Pavani walked in, school uniform, pigtails and all. She spoke to an old cow in the courtyard, and the cow lowed gently in response. “Do you know our cow’s story?” she asked me. I didn’t, so she told me. “Years ago,” began Pavani, “my mother found her, abandoned by her owner. Her leg was badly fractured and infected, her chances of survival were nil. Or so her owner thought…” Daili Devi reminisced: “I applied a poultice with potter’s clay and some herbs. Using bamboo canes as splints, I tied them around her leg with my own hair...” Since human hair is elastic, it’s good for tying a bandage that’s tight yet comfortable, she explained.
A fractured bone healing under a bandage of bamboo, clay and human hair? Modern veterinary medicine would scoff at such healing methods. But the cow recovered completely, and is now a content grandmother. Daili Devi she said owed her skills to her father, a gifted healer of his age. “He believed that healing skills came from an emotional linkage with animals, not from books,” she said. Pavani nodded, for she knew how an animal in pain would only let her mother near, nobody else.
Yet, there is little money in animal-healing, as Raika healers traditionally do not accept any payment. “Pavani also has my gift of healing,” she said, “but I have told her she must aim for another career. Animal-healing is a gift, but she’ll need to earn money…” The government had done little to facilitate the Raika or folk healers like her. “At this rate, if not us, at least our next generation will leave Sadri for the city, and give up our all old ways,” she sighed.
I sighed too, as I took my leave. For it struck me how little politics and democratic elections mattered to people like them, struggling to eke a living in the desert.