The Oral Epic Tradition of Rajasthan: Pabuji Ki Phad and the Professional Storytellers Who Carry It

Story, Object, and Performance as One

In most storytelling traditions, the story and the performance are separable: the same story can be performed by different people in different places with different objects. The Pabuji Ki Phad tradition is different. The phad — a large horizontal scroll of painted cloth, typically five to fifteen metres in length, depicting scenes from the life, battles, and supernatural deeds of Pabuji — is not an illustration of the story. It is the story's material form. The performance does not exist without the scroll, and the scroll does not come alive without the performance.

The Bhopa (the male performer) and his wife the Bhopi move along the length of the scroll during the performance, illuminating specific sections with a small lamp as they sing the narrative segment corresponding to that section. The audience watches the lit section — the story's current moment — against the larger context of the scroll's whole narrative, visible but unlit. This simultaneous presence of the whole narrative and the illuminated current moment is a storytelling technology: it gives the audience both the immediate drama of the current scene and the broader context that gives it meaning.

The Bhopa performs in trance-like states at specific moments of the narrative — particularly at moments involving direct contact with Pabuji's divine presence — which positions the performance as not merely narration but as an ongoing relationship between the performer and the deity whose story is being told. This is not theatrical performance in the secular sense. It is a form of worship in which the story is the primary ritual act.

Pabuji: The Deity and the Narrative

Pabuji is a historical figure — a Rajput chieftain from Kolumand village in Jodhpur district, believed by his community to have lived in the fourteenth century — who was deified after his death and became the object of a cult that spread across the desert communities of Rajasthan, particularly among the Rabari and Bhil pastoral communities whose cattle Pabuji is said to have protected.

The oral epic narrative of Pabuji — the text performed in the phad tradition — is a complex, multi-episode narrative covering his birth, his supernatural origin, his adventures and battles, his marriage, his relationship with camels (he is associated with the introduction of camels to Rajasthan in the epic tradition), and his death in battle while defending the cattle of his sister-in-law Deval. The narrative contains elements of historical memory, pastoral ecology, supernatural intervention, and ethical teaching about the obligations of the hero to his community.

Scholars including John D. Smith of Cambridge, whose book The Epic of Pabuji (1991, Cambridge University Press) is the most comprehensive academic study of the tradition in English, have analysed the Pabuji oral epic as a sophisticated literary text with its own formulaic structures, compositional principles, and aesthetic conventions. The text is not a fixed script — it is a compositional framework within which each performance is a new creation, with the Bhopa drawing on memorised narrative blocks and real-time composition to produce a performance that is both traditional and new.

The Phad Painters and the Living Visual Tradition

The phad scrolls are painted by a specific community of scroll painters from the Joshi caste in Bhilwara district of Rajasthan, whose families have maintained the tradition of phad painting for generations. The most prominent contemporary phad painter family is associated with Shree Lal Joshi and his descendants, whose work has received significant national and international recognition.

The relationship between the phad painters and the Bhopa performers is structurally important: a new phad must be ritually consecrated before it can be used in performance, and the scroll's life ends — it is ritually immersed in water — when it is no longer suitable for performance use. This life cycle of the scroll — creation, consecration, performance use, ritual disposal — positions it not as an art object with permanent material existence but as a ritual instrument with a specific functional life.

The tension between this ritual understanding of the phad and the contemporary art market's treatment of phad paintings as collectible objects — displayed on walls, sold to collectors, exhibited in museums — is one of the most interesting and most unresolved tensions in the tradition's contemporary existence. Phad paintings made for the art market exist without the ritual context that gives the tradition its specific character. They are beautiful and they carry the visual vocabulary of the tradition. Whether they are the tradition, or representations of it, is a question that practitioners answer differently.

Spin A Yarn India's engagement with Rajasthan's storytelling traditions includes the Pabuji Ki Phad as one of India's most remarkable examples of a tradition in which story, object, performance, and community are genuinely inseparable. Visit https://www.anhayafoundation.com/spin-a-yarn.

Sources

Smith, J. D. (1991). The epic of Pabuji: A study, transcription and translation. Cambridge University Press. [The most authoritative English-language academic study of the Pabuji oral epic and phad tradition.]

Bard, R. (2008). Phad painting. In Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema (2nd ed.). Oxford University Press.

Note: The characterisation of Shree Lal Joshi and his family as the most prominent contemporary phad painters is based on the author's knowledge of the field; teachers should verify current practitioners through the Rajasthan government's cultural documentation resources and the Crafts Council of India before formal citation.