Baazigars & The Brits

Whatever little Hindi I knew as a child came from the Bollywood movies of the 90s. When SRK’s ‘Baazigar’ came out in ’93, the ten-year-old me learnt a new word which I then thought meant ‘Magician’. It was only when 32 years later, that I discovered that the word was far more layered than I had imagined.

Baazigars (magicians, tumblers and acrobats) were among several itinerant groups in the undivided Punjab and North India who performed their illusions by invitation, at festivals, fairs or weddings. Consumers paid for their work in cash or kind. In undivided northern India, Naats (‘tumblers’ of a different clan and creed) entertained in much the same way. Performers of this type existed in many parts of India at the start of the century, but were concentrated in North India, particularly the Punjab. Partition scattered them like chaff in a storm. Even though their attachment to ‘Hinduism’ or ‘Islam’ had always been tenuous, the conditions of the time, and their itinerant lifestyles, encouraged a process of ‘unmixing’ and border-crossing. Baazigars, a clan of many intermarrying groups with its own dialect, moved from West to East Punjab and North India, where they continued, somehow, to subsist. The British had categorised Baazigars and other similar groups into the catch-all category of ‘vagrants’, rather than as ‘Criminal Tribes’, after 1872. But after independence and partition, when many Baazigars migrated to India, they found themselves labelled as ‘ex-Criminal Tribes’, and were rehabilitated in villages. Oh, the wonders of the Indian state, its myopia and inverted logic! However fatuous and inappropriate, the ‘criminal’ tag stuck, despite the Baazigars’ campaigns to fight it, and to be designated instead as a Scheduled Caste.

Before partition, each group of Baazigars ‘bagged’ about thirty or forty villages as their turf, where they (and no other troupe) performed at marriages, festivals and fairs. These villages were their patrons, but of a particular kind: when a Baazigar daughter married into another clan, she could sometimes take performing rights in a village as a form of dowry. It took many villages, then, to sustain a single troupe. There was as little fat on their bodies as there were coins in their coin bags. They were also a common sight at fairs, in turn

With partition, Baazigars were torn from the networks of villages that had patronised them. Itinerants resettled as if they were criminal tribes; the state tried to reform them into becoming ‘good and productive citizens’. Many began to live by manual labour, while occasionally performing baazi for a small sum. Today baazi makes up only the tiniest fraction of the occupations they practise. The vast majority have shifted to whatever unskilled labour was available,

This is from Joya Chatterji’s amazing Shadows at Noon. Eventually, it was the nascent Bollywood that ended up employing many of these Baazigars as ‘stuntmen’ with some like the Great Gama achieving global fame.

Even more intriguing is the fact that the British attitudes towards vagrants were not shaped by their interactions with the subjects of their colonies. This persisted right since the 17^th century during the Elizabethan Age. In Stephen Greenblatt’s, ‘Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare’, he explains why even a Shakespeare finding his way in life with no set aim would have found the going hard:

A person uprooted from his family and community in Elizabethan England was generally a person in trouble. This was a society deeply suspicious of vagrancy. (Shakespeare would later make much in his works of the tribulations of the uprooted and unprotected.) The age of questing knights and wandering minstrels was over—if indeed it ever existed except as a fantasy. Itinerant friars and pilgrims had certainly existed, and within living memory, but the religious orders had been dissolved by the state and the pilgrimage sites had been shut down and smashed by zealous reformers. There were wanderers on the roads, but they were exceedingly vulnerable. Unaccompanied, unprotected women could be attacked and raped almost with impunity. Unaccompanied men were less desperately at risk, but they too needed all the protection they could get. Trades that required travel were heavily regulated—every peddler and tinker was required to have a license from two justices of the shire in which he resided, and anyone not so licensed could be officially or unofficially victimized. An able-bodied beggar or idle vagrant could by statute be seized and brought before the local justice of the peace for interrogation and punishment. Being able to sing and dance, juggle or recite speeches was no excuse: among those who were to be classed as vagrants, the Vagabond Act of 1604, continuing earlier statutes, includes players of interludes, fencers, bearwards, minstrels, begging scholars and sailors, palmists, fortune-tellers, and others. If the vagrant could not show that he had land of his own or a master whom he was serving, he was tied to a post and publicly whipped. Then he was either returned to his place of birth—to resume the work he was born to do—or put to labor or placed in the stocks until someone took him into service.

If this was the state of England in the 1600s, what chance did the Baazigars of the subcontinent have?