Motive, memory and perception of the Horse Gift
As anthropologists we are concerned with how processes occur and why they take the course they do. We are of course interested in what occurs but are now more and more uncertain about speaking with finality about events as if they were facts, primarily because we recognize the plurality of interpretative strategies that could and are brought to bear upon any social event. even when it has clearly demarcated sequences, defined physical space, a cast of characters that is not compromised by defiant or deviant behavior and wherein a predictable and visible exchange takes place from one party to another. My purpose in this paper is to share with you , how I a relative insider used my status and proximity to engineer an event and my position as an anthropologist to then seek a more distanced and anthropological perspective of it. In doing so I hope to show how motive, memory and perception of the Horse Gift was based on the pursuit of historical evidence, required orchestrating centrality and visibility to establish presence, and then manufacture the consciousness about the event as 'social fact'. That this consciousness came from a collaborative agency of many players who shared a similar sentiment even as their individual roles and aspirations were not identical.
Description of the event and its place in the overall ritual sequence.
I refer to the Asva Dan or horse gift ceremony that took place in Jodhpur India on the 31st of December 1997, which itself was but a single ceremonial ritual of some twenty minutes duration, on a day of ceremonies and rituals, processions and public addresses that began at 7am and ended at 8pm. These events were celebrating the 50th birthday of Gajsinhji II the Maharaja of Jodhpur, 38th ruler of the Rathor Rajput dynasty. I was invited to participate in two capacities. In the first as a kinsman, I am his first cousin by virtue of being his mother's brother's son and in the second capacity as a visual anthropologist. In the first capacity I was expected to join in the celebrations as befitted my rank and status and to conduct myself in keeping with traditional norms. My brief as a visual anthropologist was to document and interpret the event for contemporary audiences and posterity in video. Thus I had an obligation to two constituencies at least. The assembly of celebrants and the constituency of anthropologists. I was to be insider and outsider simultaneously. To execute this task I was accompanied by a team of colleagues, fellow anthropologists from Temple University. This team had the better part of six months to prepare for the event by studying available literature and video records in Philadelphia.
The 'Asva Dan' or Gift of a Horse took place at a open courtyard which served as the approach to the Women's congregational area in the medieval fort of Jodhpur. It was positioned there because it allowed the women to view the proceedings as well as the gathering of men, some several hundred in number who walked with the maharaja, with his maternal kinsmen besides him, accompanied by his son and Rathor clansman to the spot after the ceremony of allegiance or mardana Darbar was concluded in a vast tent set up 300 yards away. The ceremony was a splendid if relatively simple, in that the colorful robes and swords flashed in the sun and the Jhalas were distinguished from the locals in the distinct style of the turban. A brass band played as the men approached the courtyard. Once there the band died away and two bearded men a poet and a bard/genealogist began reciting the historical relationship that existed between the Rathors and the Jhalas and the present relationship between the Houses of Jodhpur and Dhrangadhra. This recitation at which all stood and listened took place before a carpisoned white and black paint Marwari mare, which was the gift. The tall mare was restless during the entire ceremony and it took all the skill of the groom to keep her in check . After the bardic recitations were well underway, 3 Brahmin priests chanting in Sanskrit, assisted in the worship of the mare by the Yuvraj of Dhrangadhara, my elder brother, who as the senior representative of our house and clan was the gift giver. This worship was intended to cleanse the mare and make her auspicious and fruitful and therefore a fitting gift. The worship consisted of anointing the mare as one would a deity or a dignitary with pastes and rice, garlanding her with flowers and feeding her sweet molasses. That done the Yuvraj led the somewhat reluctant mare by the reins a few steps, to the Maharaja who accepted the reins and in doing so accepted the gift. He then in turn attempted to offer molasses to the mare in welcome. Thereafter he embraced the Yuvraj and in order of seniority me and my younger brother the other leaders of our lineage. After we embraced him the three of us embraced his son and heir. While all this was happening, the bard continued to recite praise couplets, some of which were invented for the occasion. The embracing essentially ended the event which was followed by a photo - opportunity of the maharaja with his maternal kin, and while this was happening the mare was paraded before the larger audience and then led away to join the resident stallion in the stables. The assembly of men and other visitors disbanded.
Motive and Maneuver.
The idea of the Asva Dan came to me in May 1997 in the US after
the opening of the Padshanama exhibition of 16th century Mughal
paintings at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C. which
was formally opened by the Maharaja as he was thought to be a
living descendant of that court and as his kin were represented
in the paintings. At this opening RR Mahendrasinhji, his aide,
pointed to a picture of a painted horse within one of paintings
and said that they had recently acquired a Marwari stallion that
looked exactly like the painted one and they had stabled it at
the fort. They did so as they felt that for a Rathor fort without
a stallion in residence was unbecoming. At the same occasion the
Temple team and I who were recording this event, were invited
to attend the birthday celebrations in India in December. I felt
that this occasion required a fitting gift that would spot light
the Jhala maternal lineage and its give it visibility in what
was more centrally an all Rathor and all Jodhpur affair. As the
lineage and clan that had gifted a Jhala bride to the head of
the Rathor Clan we Jhalas too were celebrating our nephew's 50th
year. I was also moved to do so to revive memories of the long
period of the Maharaja's infancy and minority when his affairs
were guided in good measure by his maternal uncle, my father the
Maharaja of Dhrangadhara. In addition, I wished to remind those
present of the historical ties between these two houses and to
harken to an event in the early 1600s, when an common ancestor
from the Jhala lineage, Raj Chandrasinhji of Halvad, gifted 140
horse to the bards of Jodhpur when he came to wed the Rathor Princess
Satyabhama. Finally the horse in my opinion was an appropriate
gift because it is even today, a symbol of Rajput indentity in
village and palace.
I inquired of the maharaja whether he would accept such a gift, and if he agreed I would in turn have to submit this proposal to the head of my family lineage and clan my father for his approval. The gift would be made in his name as clan head regardless of who actually presented it in person on the occasion. After this hurdle was successfully negotiated and both giver and receiver accepted the idea there was the problems associated with the logistics of acquiring and delivering an animal. Being based in the US and hence being unable to find an animal personally, I again sought the maharaja's help, requesting him to ask Raja Bhupat, a leading horse breeder's help. The question was what type of horse was fitting. In telephonic conversations and letters we discussed Raja Bhupat demands. He maintained that my initial idea of gifting a Kathiavadi Stallion from my region of India was good but not appropriate in that there was already a standing Marwari stallion and that an appropriate mare would help initiate a breeding stable and serve the objective of reviving the Marwari breed. His further injunction was that if he were to participate in the procuring of the animal he wanted a blank check. Only the best animal was fit for so public an occasion and he did not wished to shamed by the presence of an average animal. This being agreed upon he began a search and then disaster struck. He had a accident and broke both his thighs which effectively took him out of the picture but the requirements he set were now the criteria for selection. The task was now handed over to the Rawal of Nagar and elderly Rajput horse breeder. It is this man who found and brought the horse from a Gujarati village some 400 miles distant on the night before the ceremony. The mare had all the points of an excellent specimen and in addition had virtually the same paint markings of the resident stallion and those of the painted horse in the Mughal manuscript. Triple aspirations were fulfilled. First the mare did come from my home region of India, it was of the Marwari breed and it provided a direct link to history in its color. I was pleased.
Opinion
Unlike the preceding paragraph which reflects my direct and personal negotiations with various persons, the interviewed response to the event involved members of the team as well who on several occasions spoke to persons independent of me. How then was the Horse Gift internalized. To appreciate this I present its discourse that began with the idea of the gift and which ended in a memory of the event. I draw on the remarks made by the maharaja , the receiver of the gift, RR Mahendrasinhji one of the principal organizers of the event and the executive director of the fort museum where the event took place. Sri Dholi a Rajput farmer and traditionalist. Jaswant Singh - Rathor and national political figure, a powerful leader in the present political regime of the Bharatiya Janta Party. Raja Bhupat - leading horse breeder of the Marwari Horse. Rawal of Nagar the person central to the search for the animal and its transport to the site. These men form the voice from within to which must be added the report of local newspapers. In addition, the view of outsiders is articulated by the thoughts of Dr. Ken Robbins, a US psychologist practicing out of Washington D.C., who is also an important collector of objects and documents that are associated with Princely India, and by the observations of the Temple team.
I am forced to condense the answers in my attempt to share the different attitudes and sentiments these persons spoke of. The maharaja spoke of how fitting the gift was from the point of view that it came from his mothers home and region and that it was viewed as such in Hindi and English news papers. He spoke of the history of the Marwari breed and illustrated his remarks with various military campaigns of the 17th and 18th centuries as well as with campaigns in China at the time of the Boxer rebellion and to the campaign in Palestine in the 1st world war where the Marwari horse outperformed other breeds in certain situations. He also spoke of the spirit of revivalism that was current in Rajasthan and how the Marwari horse was making a comeback and was seen and used on ceremonial occasion such as marriages where a good auspicious horse could procure high fees for its owner. In contrast, Jaswant Singh the BJP and influential politician sought to downplay the event suggesting in his remarks that I and the Temple team were in effect presenting a static recognition of ritual and tradition and in which the horse represented the nostalgic past, especially as in the present day very few Rajputs had horses or were in the military, even though their history were tied to that past. Shirr Dholi's response was most emphatically the opposite of Jaswantsingh's in that he said that the horse was the vehicle of Rajput Sanskriti ( culture and way of life) Itihas ( history) and dharma ( religious, social duty and obligation) and that it was with the help of the horse that Rajput identity was carved in the local imagination. The elderly Rawal of Nagar maintained that it was his duty to find a fit animal for his master and shrugged of the rigors of traveling the dusty back roads to locate and bring in the mare. RR Mahendrasinhji when interviewed spoke of the saga of the procurement of the mare and of his role in making certain that all was in place for the ritual event. He spoke of the negotiations about the choice of the location and the time and the difficulty of accommodating opposing sentiments. Ken Robbins the visiting American psychologist and art collector spoke of the event of the Asva Dan as the most energized and spontaneous of all the rituals and performances that he was witness to and compared the very naturalness of the event as to the more seemingly contrived ceremonies that took place that day.
Recognising Authorship
If I were to leave the discussion at this juncture, I will be providing you with a varied and complex set of information that comes from various individuals, who represent different constituencies, who as actors are more or less central and more or less visible to the event ritually played out and who collectively contributed to the establishing of certain facts even as they pursue various fictions and agendas. Clearly these thoughts when placed together despite their individual diversity represent an elite point of view, and a male point of view. There is no evidence of here of non Rajput sentiments, nor that of women, nor of the views from the street. Presenting these essentialized voices might be the sensible thing to do, because as I try and pull this diverse information together and put my interpretive emphasis on it, what I am doing is precisely that, making it my utterance. This act of summarizing and authoring alters the equivalence of the different points or view, all of which are salient to understanding the event. My interpretation of the event highlights the process of internalization and assimilation of a package that is a many pronged information stimulus. It is this process that perhaps is more important for us to appreciate, as most of the several hundred witnesses of the event could have attempted an evaluation of this kind in its aftermath, on their journey home, in conversations with friends who were alongside them or with others at work. The point is that other viewers had other informants than those I was able to gain access to, and they presumably formed their opinion based on those very particular conversations and lived experiences. To understand ritual and performance it seems it is central to understand the motive, the intellectual legacy, political and cultural constituency, social status of the reporter , whether he or she is witness to the event described or not, and to underscore that no matter how exhaustive the description and satisfying the analysis that this version is but one or several impinging upon our consideration. That said the privileging of a particular voice, in this case that of the anthropologist, suggests that it is not possible to have opinion that is insightful without its particular intellectual preference and that for any kind of inquiry, making a hierarchy of available authoring statements is as necessary as it is inevitable. This has to be constantly kept in mind even as we appreciate the process of how motive, memory and perception of the Horse Gift made for a particular pursuit of historical evidence by the actors on the ground, and how they orchestrated centrality and visibility for the event so that it had high symbolic and experiential value at the moment of its enactment.
In the end it would appear that it is not fact but perception that is important, for perception based on experience begets memory and memory in turn gives birth to agenda and agenda provides the basis for action. It is not the fact of Caesar's death that angers Rome but the perception of it as skillfully orchestrated by the loyal Mark Anthony that instigates action. Finally, it is entirely possible to present this all male enterprise as benefiting one woman, the mother of the Maharaja of Jodhpur, for it is her stature that is raised above all others, and to see all the self serving male activity as a scramble for intermediate goals that blinds the actors from recognizing the full consequences of their acts by engineering the gift of this horse. In this scenario, the silent non actor is the principal beneficiary of social agency.