How to Remember without Becoming Stone?
An Ethnographic Inquiry into Rajput Memory in Nagarparkar
by Areesha Khuwaja (Pakkhee)
Fieldnote Entry: The Welcome
We arrived at their community center just before sunset, six women, four men and were greeted by a gathering of 25 to 30 men and boys, most of them elders. They welcomed us not with words, but with flower garlands and music. As soon as we entered, a harmonium swelled into song: Mithra Mehman, the folk melody of hospitality in this region. Their voices rose in unison, their turbans bright with reds, blues, saffron — the space between us and them seemed to dissolve.
It felt like a portal opening.
We took our places in a circle, some of us on charpoys, others on the floor, the music still lingering in the air. But even that enchantment, that invitation through song, wasn’t enough. Not for them. To truly enter their world, we had to do more than witness. They wanted one of us to step inside, to join the ceremony, to become part of the story, not just observers of it.
Illustration: Depicting the Rajput masculine memory-making ritual in Nagarparkar, rekindling the memory of Rai Diyach. By Pakkhee.
Context: Carriers of the Past
We explained who we were, where we had come from, and why. That we were building the first archive of the Karoonjhar Mountains and the stories rooted in Nagarparkar. They listened intently.
And when we told them our intention, they lit up, because their archive was already alive, stitched into their songs and memories.
They did not live in the Nagarparkar of now, but in the one preserved in their voices.
Among the Rajputs sat Ameero, a Meghwar man - from a caste historically linked to agriculture, weaving, and cattle herding. But here, he was the memory-keeper. He spoke with fluency and reverence, occupying the role of the bard, the oral historian. He carried their myths, battles, and pride - but it was not his own past being sung.
They were structured, attentive. The turbans told us more than names could: those patterned in vivid colors signaled men who still held responsibilities - sons and daughters to marry off. The plain turbans belonged to those who had fulfilled their duties. There was order here, encoded in cloth and song.
Interpretation: Rituals of Memory and Masculinity
That evening was more than a welcome, it was a ritual of self-preservation. The Rajput elders, in singing their history to us, were also singing it back to themselves. This wasn’t just hospitality. It was an enactment of identity.
Their memory lived not in books or museums, but in performance - voiced, embodied, shared. The arrangement was intentional. Their hierarchy, silent but firm. And even the way they invited us into the ceremony was loaded with meaning.
Music alone wasn’t enough. To really be inside their story-world, one of us had to accept their ritual of opium, a ceremonial gesture of trust, inclusion, and altered states. Our mentor and interpreter accepted.
The ritual was deliberate: opium mixed into liquid, poured from one man’s hand into another’s cupped palm, then drunk. All the while, the harmonium played. Poetry wove in, word by word, like incense. It was beautiful and eerie. A collective trance. Their eyes, half-lidded and lost in reverie, looked as if they had one foot in this world, and one in another.
Ameero’s storytelling flowed into song. And so, Sur Rai Diyach was summoned.
Folkloric Analysis: Sur Rai Diyach and the Power of the Word
Rai Diyach, they told us, was one of the last real rulers. The kind of man whose word mattered. Indeed, in Sindhi folklore, he stands as the ultimate emblem of a promise kept, of honor in action. He gave his head, literally, to a bard named Bijal who challenged his promise.
There used to be rulers like that, they said. But not anymore. Now we live in Kalyug.
The opium made them reflective. The music, devotional. But this story was not just myth, it was grief. The kind that forms when memory is the only proof that something sacred once existed. But as they sang of kings who kept their word, I couldn’t help but think of today’s rulers, of how they spin myths not to honor, but to distract.
Living Memory: Kasu Bha Sodho and the Refusal to Forget
Not all memory lives in performance. Some memory, like Kasu Bha Sodho’s, lives in refusal.
Kasu Bha, a farmer from the Sodha Rajput caste, made a different kind of choice in the post-Partition years. When his family decided to migrate to India, like so many Hindu and Jain families did from Nagarparkar, Sodho stayed.
“If you want to take me to India,” he said, “then take Karoonjhar along with me.”
It wasn’t a metaphor. It was his truth. To leave was not just to migrate, it was to sever the self from the land. His belonging was not portable. He couldn’t pack up memory, wrap it in cloth, and carry it across a border.
While others crossed into imagined futures, he remained - rooted, stubborn, grieving, but whole.
His story is rarely sung like Sur Rai Diyach, but it too holds a kind of honor. Not the honor of kings or bards, but of one man’s commitment to presence. He teaches us that resistance doesn’t always look like grandeur. Sometimes, it looks like staying still when the whole world is fleeing.
Theoretical Reflection: Memory Is Not Enough
The Rajput elders sang of Rai Diyach, a king whose word was his bond, a testament to an honor they believe lost to Kalyug. Yet, if Kalyug has arrived, we must ask: Who benefits when we believe it's inevitable, when we sing of lost kings but overlook those in uniform wielding power today? What do we truly lose when Rai Diyach’s integrity is revered in story, but present rulers are held to no such word?
We live in a time where governments posture as protectors while presiding over the slow erasure of land, water, and language. The military markets itself as a shield, dignified, rational, heroic, especially in the theatre of India-Pakistan conflict, where narratives of nationalism blur the violence of extraction. But behind that façade lies a machinery that feeds on what it claims to guard.
In February 2024, Sindhi villagers protested the construction of a canal that would alter the flow of the Indus and devastate their homes and fields. The state called it terrorism. The police opened fire. Two were killed. Dozens injured. The local government did not act independently. They followed orders. And those orders served not the people, but the ruling elite who benefit from land grabs, water redirection, and political silence.
Even within that intimate Rajput circle, power's shadow stretched. While the men sang of valor, their women remained confined, denied education beyond the fifth grade, bound to roles they never consented to. What kind of kingdom is preserved when half of it is silenced? And what kind of resistance is remembered when it erases its own contradictions? During the British colonial period, two prominent Sodha Rajput houses allied with the British and were granted privilege - a reminder that not all remembrance is innocent. And while many believe the Jains left after Partition, oral histories tell a quieter story: of pressures and displacements that began long before borders were drawn.
To truly honor Rai Diyach today is to internalize his legacy: to confront our own word, to acknowledge whom we are responsible to, and most crucially, whom we continue to exclude.
Let folklore sharpen, not sedate us. Let memory be a bridge, not a trap. Let resistance mean both remembering and re-seeing. Let active evolution be the truest act of reverence.
Let evolution be the truest act of reverence.
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