*
The same year, 1977, Tan Dan was present when Pelad's daughter, another Bhangi girl, got a jajman roti thrown to her by the wife of a bhambi household. She was the wife of Ladu Ram, a smallscale farmer. Ladu's wife threw the roti to the Bhangi girl, as she did not want to be touched by her. Those of the Bhambi caste treat the Bhangi sweepers as untouchables to them, although both Bhambis and Bhangis are untouchables to most other villagers. By discriminating against Bhangis such as this girl, the Bhambis tried to get prestige in the eyes of other villagers. For them it was important to show that they were not the lowest caste.
Some sweeper women Tan Dan met in the 1960s and 1970s
Tan Dan had many memories of the Bhangi women he met at the Chelana village lanes in the 1960s. Women going around with baskets, iron kundis and brooms.
A few years later, in the early 1970s, Tan Dan got to know a teenager sweeper girl with two small sisters who used to come along with her on the sweeping rounds in the forenoon, as there was nobody at home to take care of them at that time of the day. They carried the empty iron pan for excreta, and she kept on her head the big basket for bread from the jajman clients. She was a thorough worker and swept beautiful patterns with her broom. She worked hard out of habit.
In 1980 Tan Dan met Madan Ram's daugther-in-law married to Tamba Ram, who worked as an agricultural labourer. Their daughter of about eight years carried a fairly small basket for bread, and her mother the broom and the iron kunda tray. Tamba Ram's sister was also married, but she still lived at Chelana waiting for her husband to bring her to her sasural village. As she was in her early teens, her muklava was near. Meanwhile she enjoyed the company of her friends in the Chelana Bhangi mohalla. She used to be together with Baya and Vimla, who also were married girls waiting for their husbands and the muklava feast. Thirteen or fourteen years of age.
Now and then they met out in the village while at work in the forenoon, and had chats in the lanes of the mohallas, where there jajman clients lived. Charans, Mali farmers, and the Rav genealogists for the Brahmins.
While chatting they kept there iron kundis on their heads, evidently so used to the kundi and the broom in it that balancing was no problem, even if they did something else. Vimla and Baya were accompanied by one sister each, but they were so small that their company was more a kind of child care than help in the work. Only four years. Vimla's sister wanted to show Tan Dan that she could carry bread baskets, too. First she put the ring of cloth on her head as support and on it the basket. The two small girls were keen on carrying out whatever task given to them, as they enjoyed the company of their big sisters and were happy for a little praise now and then. They learnt the work from imitating the grown-ups, thinking it was a funny game rather than a drudgery.
Tan Dan met in a village lane Harman Ram's eldest daugther. She was in her teens and lived in the second house from east in the Bhangi mohalla row. She had been sweeping at some of her family's jajman houses. It was a part of her job to remove the shit from the toilet, and that she did with the iron tray she keept on her head, the customary way for village women to carry things.
She looked well fed, Tan Dan thought. The Chelana Bhangis had plenty of meat in the house all the year round, although from dead animals.
Bhambis, on the other hand, were visibly underfed. The reason for this difference could be that the Bhangis get plenty of carcass meat, whereas the Bhambis did not eat that ample source of protein food any longer. As Tan Dan remembers from his early childhood, the Bhambis were not as thin looking before 1952, the year they left leather work.
Evidently, the Bhangi families had no shortage of bread either, considering that a sweeper family got one roti every day from every house they served, which meant many dozens of roti bread daily. Baya's family, for example, had some 70 client households. Probably the jajman roti were sufficient in number for all Bhangis at Chelana to get at least two or three stale rotis thrice a day.
How the Chelana sweepers shared the work
Thirteen Bhangi families lived at Chelana in 1980. They had in total about eight hundred jajman families all over the village. A few generations back the thirteen families had been one. As the families belong to the same clan, they themselves divided the households in the village into jajman groups. With the growth of the Bhangi clan, they changed their jajman relations now and then, but their jajman families did not bother much, if the work went on all right. Compared to other jajman relations in the village it was not so close, as the Bhangis were kept at a distance, being considered very untouchable.
Sweeping the entrance area of the house yard
The main work of the Bhangi woman was to sweep the house compound around its entrance and at the walled open space in front of the house called angan, in Marvari chauk. The area to be swept was called buvaro. Most house yards were walled, except at some houses of poor families. There the Bhangi swept a little around the entrance of the cottage.
The rest of the house compound, bharo, the Bhangis did not sweep. They never swept the house and its angan (house court), as these places were too private for untouchables to enter.
The daily bread to the sweepers
The sweepers used to take two rounds to their clients. In the first round they worked as sweepers. Then they came back to the same houses in order to collect the buvaro ri roti, a bread left over from the last meal.
Before returning they used to clean themselves a little, wherever they could find some water. Sometimes the Bhangi woman was accompanied by a small girl who kept the bread basket. Then it was enough to make one round.
The sweeper shouted outside the house: "Roti do, sa!", which means, "Please give bread, Sir." Sa has about the same meaning in Rajasthani as Sir in English, i.e. that of showing respect and politeness to seniors.
The payment for the buvaro sweepings was always one roti per jajman household, and had been so for a very long time, Tan Dan told.
That practice continued regardless of increasing prices and changing economic circumstances in the society at large. Unfortunately the food habits among the jajman families tend to change in an unfavourable direction. When wheat became common as a result of increased irrigation facilities and more high yielding varieties, then many villagers started to eat wheat bread instead of that of pearl millet. People in the cities used to eat unleavened wheat bread of a smaller size than the big, heavy bread of pearl millet. Such bread was called sogram, whereas the small, light wheat bread was called phulka, i.e. that which blows up, inflates. It was also called chapati in north India.
Baniyas and the Thakur village lord family had long eaten phulkas at Chelana, a habit envied by the village commoners. In the 1960s and later other villagers got a chance to imitate them, due to the production increase of new high-yielding wheat varieties getting plenty of irrigation water and chemical fertilizers.
Persons of many castes made it a habit to eat wheat chapatis, partly because it was tasty and partly because it was modern and urban. Therefore, the pile of jajman roti brought home by the Bhangi women every day in their kharolia baskets became thinner and lighter, especially after the rabi harvest at the start of the hot season.
In 1981 big thick traditional bajra rotis were still baked by Jats, Malis, Kumars (potters), Sirvis, and other castes of the working class, but Charans such as Tan Dan's relatives had more and more joined the camp of the wheat eaters. These were the Rajputs, Baniyas, Brahmins, Sonars and a lot of other small castes who claimed to be high. Among these were also the Sads, the temple priests at Chelana. Persons of these castes with school education and urban contacts mostly preferred small chapatis to the big rotis. They did not want to be looked upon as ganvar, village rustics, Tan Dan thought.
Also Chanda, Tan Dan's wife, who had been used to big rotis from her childhood at her native villages Kanpura and Rojas, preferred the small wheat chapatis to the big sogram bread. Sometimes she had arguments with Tan Dan, who insisted that she should make big rotis, at least to him. That he also go
t. But visitors used to get the thin elegant wheat chapatis, as most visitors were Chanda's in-law relatives, and they considered it backward and old-fashioned to eat big sogram baked of grey pearl millet flour (bajra).
The price of one roti per jajman household was the same for rich and poor customers, which may seem unfair. For one thing, there was more work to do for the sweepers at the houses of rich people. The buvaro area to be swept was usually bigger. Secondly, the light wheat phulka of better-off people was less valuable than the thick and wholesome roti the sweepers got from the working class families. Moreover, one roti was a small outlay for a well-off family, but more difficult to part with for really poor villagers.
The annual grain received in barter for removing shit from toilets
The main job of the Bhangi sweepers was to sweep the buvaro part of the jajman house yards. The daily bread called buvari ri roti they got for that task. At some houses the sweepers also removed shit from toilet enclosures, and for that work they got an extra payment called bharod. It used to be paid in kind once a year in the autumn. Sometimes money was given.
Bharod means a full year's payment. In-kind payments given several times a year were called bhirat.
Up to the 1950s there was just one harvest a year at Chelana, the kharif harvest of bajra cereal and some hardy pulses, which were fed by the monsoon rains and harvested in October. Hence, it became a common practice to pay the sweepers their bharod grain in that season. The practice continued also after the production pattern in Chelana agriculture radically changed in the 1950s, as farmers started to exploit underground water by mechanized irrigation.
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