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Book Name:The Singing Bow Song-poems of the Bhil Tribe. Translated & Illustrated by: Randhir Khare Publisher: Harper Collins India Year: April 2001 Pages: 262 Price: Rs. 295 ISBN: 81 7223 425 2

Singing In Tongues.

For thousands of years India's tribal people have lived on the banks of river they worship as their mother goddess, their shakti. They are an ancient people in an ancient land, the Bhils, Bhilalas and other tribes whose lives depend on a river that flows from central India to the Arabian Sea. In India, there are more than 50 million Bhils who follow their own religions and speak their own languages, uncounted, unnumbered and ignored by the Government.

"These are our village gods," say two young Bhil men speaking through a translator, as they brush dry leaves from three smooth stones. Their ceremonies are legendary things that may take place once every five years. In utter pitch darkness, a shaman becomes possessed by a god, which speaks through him.

No wonder that Hindus and Moslems alike have shunned the Bhils - though Colonel Tod discovered their romance in his Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan. To a certain tribe of Bhils in Rajasthan went the honour of anointing the rulers of Bappa Rawal's dynasty with a smear of blood from a sliced finger. However, on the whole, the Bhils have had to struggle to survive and whatever lives they have carved out for themselves have been carved out by hard work.

The Bhils live far away from any technology and they shun it like the plague. Farmers who use only implements they make themselves and the power generated by humans and animals. They weave their own houses, and their villages melt into the hills around them. Their homes are bare of furniture, but usually have a sleeping loft. In some houses, dried corns and beans hang from the ceiling, as do huge baskets stuffed with tobacco and chillies. Some groups wear very few clothes. Those most influenced by the outside world have picked up the cool Mafia clothes, shorts, shoes, greased hair and watches. But they make their own liquor from the mahua flowers that grow in one of the large shade trees, and are picked around 2 a.m. Each morning begins with the sound of spices being ground in the darkened huts.

Life for the Bhils is a constant round of birth, weaving, planting, marriage and fighting. They walk side by side with mythology and invent their own song poems to make sense of their lives. It is a brutal, erotic existence with moments of mysticism and tenderness.

Lamps lit lamps lit
I pray as they begin
Dancing in the courtyard
And in the evening air
Dance dance dance
I pray as they begin
Weaving strings of fireflies
Into swirls of light
(Dance of the Matas)

Randhir Khare's translations of these song poems are a commendable effort, since the language of the Bhils seems to have defied all conventional patterns. Singers take a known song and improvise stretching the music and word pattern to incredible limits. The songs have been translated straight into English without any other dialect or language intervening. The poems express the robust spirit of the Bhil tribe, a spirit that is rich with legend, folklore, the eternal experiences if birth, sexual adventure, marriage, death and life after death. The themes combine the brutal, the tender, erotic and sublime with lyricism.

He has tried to convey the rhythm of the originals by making the poems rhyme, marrying them to his own lyricism. Ribald marriage poems, mystical naming poems - they all carry something that for want of comprehending the originals must be the spirit of the originals.

This is a stanza from a poem on the name 'Kodari', which means 'inferior cereal':

There are some things about you, Kodari,
Some things that defy your name
Your mouth with lips fulls of honey
Your eyes dark, pool like, aflame.

Or, from Waiting to be Married

Someone's dancing in the courtyard
Who, who, who?
The prince I am about to marry?
No, no, no.

Khare has also provided the illustrations for his work. Traditional patterns taken from Bhil motifs with plants and arrows accenting them. Which is good. What is not so good is the attempt to convey the flavour through the use of modern words like 'tits' and 'buns'. As in:

The King was drunk with Hansoti todi
And he staggered round the city
Singing to beautiful women
Pinching their buns as he passed them by

There is no harm in going modern and groovy if you want to convey the mood and flavour of an erotic rebellious lifestyle. Catullus has been done groovily and survived - because there is an approximation between 20th century English slang and the Latin in-language of Catullus' time. However in the case of the Bhils it suddenly sounds forced - like a note gone wrong in a song. Perhaps because the slang and the language aren't extreme enough. Or because in the middle of the kings and the spirits the words seem contrived, as if the translator himself were being self conscious about them.

However, for an understanding of the nature of this mysterious group of people, this collection cannot be faulted.

About the author:

Born in Kanpur in 1951, of Irish, Spanish, English and Indian descent, Randhir Khare grew up in a politically and culturally turbulent Calcutta where his poetry began appearing in magazines and literary journals while he was still in his teens.

Over the years, his poetry has been presented at readings across the country in eastern Europe, and during lecture presentations of India, exhibition openings and arts festivals in Dublin and rural Ireland, adapted for national and international contemporary puppet theatre performances, used extensively in creative and educational workshops in Ireland and England, set to music, used by the Victoria and Albert Museum for their exhibition on Nehru and the Making of Modern India and has inspired the works of painters, illustrators, photographers, educationists and multi-media producers. He has published four volumes of poetry, three of short fiction, a travel book and a futuristic fable and has been given several awards.

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