Signs of Life

Folk tales help Rajasthan’s desert communities prepare for famine

- SHARANYA DEEPAK

On a dusty morning in Palasani, a village near Jodhpur, 46-year-old Kaburi Mirasi recounted stories her mother told her about the Chhappaniya Akal— the Famine of ’56. The famine occurred in 1899–90, or 2056 in the Bikrami calendar. Kaburi narrated how members of her community of Mirasi Muslims, a historically marginalised caste in Rajasthan, would beg their landlords for spare grain or how water from boiling green pulses was preserved as a source of nourishment. The famine spread through north-western India and, in Rajasthan, brought illness and hunger like never before. “People left their homes forever,” Kaburi told me. “Millions moved away to villages far away in the hope of some work and a meal.”

In Rajasthan, famines are classified into four types: a dearth of water, a dearth of grain, a dearth of fodder and, the most gruesome, trikal, or a lack of all three. A nineteenth-century report about famines in western India noted that “distress came from a ‘famine of wages’ not a ‘famine of grain’” and that the “common peasant” remained impoverished because of their lack of agency over crop and land. So, even as rainfall and floods triggered periods of scarcity, famines were not simply matters of natural intervention. When scarcity arrived, kings did not create irrigation channels, while moneylenders from dominant-caste trading communities further ensnared farmers in debt traps. Little has changed since, causing the community to never forget its traditions of fighting food scarcity.