According to one of the many legends associated with the festival of MahaShivratri or the Great Night of Lord Shiva, this is the night on which Shiva and the Goddess Parvati got married. Yet another legend says that this is the night on which Shiva performed his cosmic dance. Both together provide a peg on which to hang a tale about love, marriage and merrymaking among the Bhils as that is what I am more knowledgeable about than the stories about Shiva.
The Bhil adivasis are among the most romantic of people; they start
falling in love early in life. The Bhils' main claim to cultural fame is
their colourful Bhagoria festival, which takes place just a week before the Hindu festival
of Holi in spring and is just round the corner. The Bhil festival is celebrated by turns in the market
villages or towns on the market day of that particular village or town. The
festival has been filmed a number of times. Primarily a celebration of the kharif
harvests, it is also associated with the custom of teenaged boys and girls
eloping from the festival to lead a married life and it is followed by a spring and summer of marriages before the monsoons and sowing time. Thus there is much singing and dancing during this festival by youth decked in colourful attire.
Marriage for the Bhils remains a loose arrangement to bring up
progeny, and countless pre-marital affairs between boys and girls and extra
marital affairs between men and women add spice to the humdrum of family life. As
long as people don’t get caught in the act, everyone winks an eye at this side
current of free sex that laces Bhili marital life. But once such liaisons
become known, the Bhili society takes it upon itself to keep some semblance of
order. What they do provides them with great entertainment. Apart from this,
there are instances of forcible capture of girls and even married women by boys
or men for marriage; cases of rape are rare because there is so much
opportunity for free sex. Finally, there are the inevitable divorces. One of
the enduring aspects of Bhili society that has survived the ravages of modern
development is the role of the traditional community panchayat in resolving all
kinds of disputes involving man-woman relationships.
All the parties involved, two, if it is just a matter of resolving
the elopement of a couple and three, if it is a case of an extra marital affair
or the carrying off of a betrothed or married woman or the desertion of one man
by a woman for another or vice versa, get together to sort out the matter. They
usually sit at a distance from each other, communicating through messengers who
are called "vataars". This is a safety device to prevent direct
confrontation between the opposing parties, which could become murderous
considering that people often come armed with bows and arrows and guns to these
panchayats. But this means that the vataars have to bear the brunt of the
abuses and taunts when they go from one side to the other with proposals for a
solution, which are wild at the start with, before they reach more realistic
levels through bargaining. That is why there is a saying in Bhilali that the
behinds of buffaloes and vataars regularly get taken!
The Bhils also have a system of arranged marriages to keep the youth
under control and prevent the onset of unbridled sexual and marital anarchy. So
even though the custom of a girl running away with a boy to get married is
quite common and has social sanction, in such instances the boy's family has to
pay a premium over the prevailing rate of bride price. The bride prices are
negotiable and keep increasing with time. In case of extra and pre-marital
affairs, the boy or man has to pay a fine, which again is negotiable, depending
on the seriousness of the offence and the prestige of the offended family. So
the whole business of settling romantic disputes is a highly entertaining
affair, what with all the people hearing the colourful evidence, the hyperbolic
demands for money and the choice epithets that are traded back and forth. There
are times when the settling of these disputes requires quite a few sittings. A
kind of "politics of honour" is also involved in these matters, which
sometimes makes these disputes take on major political overtones between sets
of villages.
However, in one village in Alirajpur, whose whereabouts I will not disclose, extra-marital affairs
were the rule rather than the exception. Almost every week, the people of the
village could be seen sitting down to resolve these disputes, which invariably
ended in someone or the other being made to pay a nominal fine. Now the person
who had been cuckolded was not satisfied with just this paltry fine; so he
would look for an opportunity to have an affair with the offending person's
wife or unmarried sister. He would usually succeed, once again prompting the
need for a panchayat in which it would be his turn to be fined. It would carry
on like this in a form of sexual vendetta. Appetite whetted, these fellows would
try to have affairs with the wives or unmarried sisters of other men. In this
way the entire village would remain involved in a sleazy game of “cuckold my
neighbour.” Old age was no bar. There
was a man in his fifties who continuously had affairs with other women in the
village and was regularly fined, but his wife always remained true to him, not
even once falling prey to the numerous advances that must have been made to
her. When his Sati Savitri wife died, this man married a second time. His second
wife was young and an easy prey for the other men who had been on the lookout
to take their revenge. Despite all the old fellow did to prevent it, one
enterprising man soon cuckolded him. To ensure that the old fellow was well and
truly floored, this man nicked his own neck with a dharia, a kind of machete
and then lodged a false complaint in the police station along with a hefty
bribe that the old man had attempted to murder him and got him into jail. There was an air of celebration in the village as at last the old
man had been castled in style; no one went to bail the old fox out.
Despite the depredations of modern development which have adversely affected their livelihoods, the Bhils have retained their freewheeling romantic ways and their love for song and dance and it is heartlifting to watch them live life with gay abandon amidst their hardships.
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