Chapter 7 The Bhangi baskets
The Bhangi sweepers used baskets and iron pans for removing the dirt from the houses of their jajmans. The garbage basket was used for collecting the sweepings at the buvaro area outside the house of the jajman clients. Shit from the toilets was carried away in iron pans called kunda. The women used to carry the kundas on their heads. The kunda rested on a ring of cloth.
They came along either with the garbage basket or the kunda iron pan, not both at the same time, as they were used at different places and had to be kept separate. The basket used for garbage is called chajla and has only three vertical sides. The fourth side is open, as the garbage material is loaded and discharged into the basket tray from that side. Then the sweeper carried away the garbage sweepings with that basket.
The chajla basket was also used by the villagers in general for cleaning grain at their homes and by farmers at the threshing ground for winnowing the harvested crop. These baskets they bought from the sweepers.
Vimla and Baya and the other Bhangi women kept both pans and bread baskets on their heads, but the chajla basket for the sweepings they carried at their hips, as it was a wide basket and a support for the broom they used at the buvaro area. For the tarat toilet they kept another broom they kept in the kunda iron pan.
The roti bread from their jajmans, they carried home in a basket called chabdi in Rajasthani. When Tan Dan accompanied Baya one forenoon in December 1977 she carried home the bread from the jajman clients in a big and beautifully made basket decorated with coloured strips. Such a chabdi basket, closed on all four sides, is also called kharolia.
There are even bigger baskets of this type used for keeping fodder. They are called khari in Rajasthani. The khari fodder basket is always of the same size. It is used as a measurement unit throughout western Rajasthan. Fodder prices are calculated in Rupees per khari. Except fodder grain stalks, which are calculated in bundles. (Kharolia baskets, the chabdi, were not used for measurement.)
Who made the baskets and out of which material?
The strong Bhangi baskets mentioned above were done by certain Bhangi families, who had specialized on making baskets of sarkanda and some wood of the beri tree. The baskets were tied with sinews and hide strips made into cords. Also other parts of the dead cattle might have been used as strings, such as blood vessels.
The reed baskets were only made by Bhangis in western Rajasthan, but baskets of wheat straw , and straw of some other cereals and wild grasses and bushes, were made by individuals of many castes depending on skill and aptitude. Also Bhir Dan, Tan Dan's cousin, who was a pioneer in well irrigation, made baskets as well as other handicraft work such as carpets and charpai beds.
Madan Lal Gharu, also called Madhobhai and Madan Ram, was very good at making baskets. A skilled craftsman. Tan Dan followed his work in the 1960s. He tied the baskets with strong cords, probably sinews made into strings or perhaps blood vessels from cattle carcass. He kept bundles of such cords in his hand while working.
Basically the Bhangis made the baskets for their work as sweepers, but the baskets were sturdy and durable and in demand by other villagers, especially farmers, who used the baskets for winnowing grains and also for storage.
In some villages Bhangi basket makers sold their baskets at big cattle fairs, melas. That was done by basket-making Bhangis near Butati village. Tan Dan went their in the 1970s. To Paldi village on the way to Nagaur from Merta. There he met a basket-maker at work, who belonged to a Bhangi clan well known in the whole region for their skill in making baskets.
The skilled Bhangi craftsmen of Butati village
Basket-making and broom-making are traditional handicrafts of the Bhangis in western Rajasthan. The Bhangis of Butati village were skilled in making both. They knew how to make very strong baskets of the wild sarkanda reed. So strong that a horse could put both his front legs on such a basket without breaking it. Then half its weight was on the basket. Tan Dan saw such a demonstration himself, when he visited their village after having met them at a mela, a religious fair at Jalagarh held in 1981. There these baskets were sold.
Butati is a much smaller village than Chelana situated nine kos, i.e. 27 km north of Merta. At Butati village about six Bhangi families lived. The menfolk of these families had adopted the work of basket-making, and brooms, as their speciality, while their womenfolk continued with the usual Bhangi sweeping work for their jajmans.
The husband of the family Tan Dan visited at Butati in Februari 1981 tied the reeds of the basket tightly with material from dead cattle. It was a part of their jajman duties to remove the animals and take care of the carcass.
For tying he used strings of leather and for finer string he used the 'nerves' of dead cattle. (Nas, it could be veins or sinews, but hardly nerves in the real sense.) A young relative showed Tan Dan how a chajla winnowing basket was made of two layers of sarkanda reed, going in right angle to each others for additional strength.
The Butati Bhangis mainly sold their baskets and brooms at the melas within the radius of perhaps fifty miles, going themselves to the melas with these items by hiring a camel cart or a tractor trolley. At the mela they sit among their brooms and baskets all day long. Their sale effort is a small marginal activity of the melas, many of which are cattle fairs.
Some of the melas are religious fairs meant for commemorating some saintly person or deed, or some god. For example the nausati mela at Jalagarh, which celebrates the memory of the heroic sati of nine queens of Raja Bali, once the ruler of a local kingdom. They burnt themselves to death on his funeral pyre, according to the legend, and that is the sati deed admired by the villagers as something brave and heroic. The nine satis are worshipped as deities.
At Merta Road there is once a year a big religious mela to celebrate the memory of Parshvanath at a Jain temple built in 8th century A.D. At the open ground outside that big fortified temple, a mela is going on for five six days, attracting lakhs of people.
Thus the Butati Bhangis sold their basket and brooms at some of the twenty to thirty melas held every year within their reach. At Merta, Nagaur, Riyan, Dadod, Jalagarh, Asop etc.
Most of the year they were busy either making these items in their home village or selling them at the melas. They sold a small part in the village itself on order.
The Bhangis of Butati have had this habit for a long time. They were known for making very strong baskets. People used to say that their baskets were so strong that even a horse could step on the basket with his front legs without breaking it. It is due to this reputation all over Nagaur district and adjoining parts of Pali and Jodhpur districts that they could sell so much at melas. In 1981 they got from five to twenty Rupees per basket depending on size and quality.
They made very good brooms, too. Their brooms were made of stalks of the sarkanda reed cut slantwise in such a way that the sweeping surface becomes big while sweeping.
This broom is more efficient and practical than the usual village broom made by people of other castes. The ordinary village broom is mostly just a small bundle of the thin top of the reeds, thus sweeping with only a small surface. It often sheds parts of the earheads.
Kalyan, the tractor driver who was a basket maker in the lean season
This mela going habit for selling handicraft was concentrated to only a few villages within the region. In these villages there were unusually enterprising and industrious craftsmen. The Chelana Bhangis were not among them, but some men of that village made good baskets too, such as Madhobhai and Kalyan.
Udaji's son Kalyan used to be employed by Naru Dan's family as a tractor driver. Not all the time, though. He also made baskets. Kalyan and the other Bhangis made baskets of about five to six different sizes of two basicaly different types. The kharolia basket, closed on all sides, in which items are kept, and the chajla basket, which is open on one side and is used for winnowing and grain cleaning. That is how the villagers used them. The sweepers used them in their work.
A moderately
trained basket-maker such as Kalyan Bhangi can make about three baskets in two days, getting perhaps seven to eight Rupees per basket. After deducting costs for raw material and transport he might have about seven eight Rupees per day on this basket-making work in 1981. He did this work in the hot season, in the month of April, when there was not much agricultural work to do on Naru Dan's farm.
In the lean season he thus became a basket maker, earning a supplementary income by selling baskets to other castes, mostly kharolia baskets. Big baskets used for handling fodder and hay, even bigger than the one Baya used to carry on her head when collecting bread from her jajman clients.
When Tan Dan met Kalyan in his angan at the Bhangi mohalla in 1981, he was about to make three kharolia baskets, two small and one big. Normally such basket-making work is done in batches of three.
He used sarkanda reed bought at Merta and hauled to Chelana by tractor trolley or by some other means, depending on opportunity.
The families of the Ganvaria Banjara caste had their houses south of the Bhangi mohalla, on the other side of a high wall used as a partition. The Ganvaria Banjara menfolk made several items of sarkanda reed, but not baskets. Selling products made of sarkanda such as chick curtains was their major occupation. Kalyan could have bought some reed out their stock, if they would have charged reasonable prices. Instead they put the price very high, evidently with the intention to have nothing to do with the untouchable Bhangis.