The Real Gypsies

Today I am in Delhi, figuring out how not to be deported from India when my visa expires in less than a month. On the bright side, I am reunited with my family whom I have not seen since I was nine. It has been a very happy reunion.

Two days ago, I was sitting in the fields a couple of kilometers behind HKS, watching about a dozen women from a nomadic Rajasthani group of Marwars steal water from someone's well. As the well was nearly dry, the water was seemingly inaccessible without a motor like those used by the farmers here to extract it, as it lay in a mere puddle 30 feet below. The women however, had devised a system of drawing out the deep water with a bucket. Three ropes were attached to one bucket, and three women stood at equidistant points around the well with their respective ropes. This positioning allowed them to manipulate the angle of the bucket, enabling them to scoop the water up from the puddle in the well and draw it upwards. It seemed to me like they had a lot of practice. They filled perhaps 40 gallons worth of metal pots this way, and then carried them on their heads back to their temporary camps past our farms.

Not knowing whose well was being raided, and not really caring, Sumita and I were simply trying to start up a conversation with these women. Not only was there a small language barrier (we speak Hindi, these nomadic peoples speak a dialect, Marwari), but the women were worried we were going to cause trouble for them with this particular well. They asked several times if this was our well, and if not, whose it was. We were finally able to convince them that we did not care about their stealing this water. Even after this, we conversed very little. Trying to lighten the tension a little, I picked up one of their empty metal pots and tried to carry it on my head. This coerced some laughter from the Marwari girls around my age, and sent the younger girls into hysterics. We were able to ask a few questions about their nomadic life--to us so strange and foreign-- and received surprisingly detailed answers: traveling around all the time is hard work, so no, they do not always like it despite the freedom everyone always assigns to it; they know a lot about the outside world from traveling so much, including that they can get a lot of money from tourists wanting to take their photos; they travel from Jaipur to Bhopal and back every year-- over one thousand kilometers in all; one was married at fifteen, and she hates her husband; some of them go to school, a few even leave the clan and go to college.

I had seen other groups of Marwars traveling before; there must be several large groups that take different routes at different times of the year. They travel in caravans as large as 400 people, and bring with them herds of sheep, goats, cattle, camels, and elephants. It is quite a sight, a caravan perhaps two kilometers long sharing the state highway with Hondas and Tata trucks as it weaves around Rajasthan. They look far stronger than the village people with whom I live. I suppose they eat better. The women are loaded down with jewelry since most of their accumulated wealth is carried with them.

When I studied in Spain a few years back, we learned about the Spanish gypsies who had come from India so long ago, and many of whom still live in southern Spain. I was amazed to see the same physical features-- I mean exactly the same-- in these nomads we were meeting in India as the gypsies I had seen in Spain. If anybody comes across some cool anthropological literature on the history of gypsy migration out of India, send it my way.

Anyways, really amazing experience. The Marwars stayed for two days in the Jhiri area, and then the third day were gone without a trace.