Introduction

Summary

What will you do with a mare? You should just live off your land. But now that you have the mare, it looks like you will raid and plunder.

The Thar Desert in South Asia is at present divided by an international boundary between India and Pakistan. However, the Thar has historically existed as a frontier connecting regions like Punjab, Multan, Sindh, Gujarat and Rajasthan with each other. The Thar desert can be defined as a region through the mobility of its inhabitants, who were warriors, pastoralists, traders, ascetics and bards, often in overlapping capacities, exchanging mobile wealth and equally mobile narratives. The historical understanding of the Thar Desert, like that of other such spaces, is couched in familiar frames of barrenness and waste. Yet, a closer look at the Thar Desert reveals a rich history of movements of a large number of itinerant groups, of settlements and depopulations, as well as of a cultural milieu where memories of movements have been immortalized in the rich folkloric traditions of the region.

A wide corpus of historical research on the Thar focuses on ‘Rajputana’ as the physical and intellectual area of study. The former refers to definitive political spaces divided by fixed boundaries and ruled by Rajput clans. The latter alludes to Rajputs as the pre-dominant reference to its socio-historical identity as well as, to a misplaced emphasis on land, agrarianism and territoriality as the basis of social and political relations in the region. Both identifications are misplaced and highly problematic. The arid desert of the Thar has historically existed as a frontier region that could be defined better through the mobility of its peripatetic residents than through the political boundaries that divided it. The recurrent patterns of circulation of people, resources and lore united the Thar as a region encompassing several political states with shared histories of mobility. From the sixteenth century onwards, the overarching endogamous category of ‘Rajput’ increasingly focused on land and territoriality as means for extending control. Bardic traditions patronized by Rajputs reiterated protection of land and forts, particularly against Muslim invaders, as being central to ‘Rajput ethos’. Poetic and prose compositions like Raso, Vachanika, Khyat, Vat etc focused on bravery as well as generosity as attributes of Rajputs. In the writing of later histories of Rajasthan, these were read and interpreted as accounts of heroic Rajput struggles against expanding Muslim polities.