Cartographic Anxiety on the Thar Desert: The Border Security Force and Jaisalmer’s Tanot Mata Mandir

Abstract

The spatiality of the Tanot Mata Temple, in Jaisalmer district of Rajasthan, places it at the crossroads of religion and nationalism. Firstly, its location near the international border makes it a marker of territorial integrity as well as the bearer of a ‘cartographic anxiety’ which aspires to keep the periphery intact and unharmed. Secondly, its spatiality is defined in terms of majoritarian religious beliefs which have been shaped in postcolonial India over a period of cultural and ideological interactions between the dominant and the marginal, mainstream and vernacular. Despite its past, which attests to fluid regional connections and itinerant migratory circuits, the temple’s sacredness operates today within a repository of visual registers which celebrates a specific kind of patriotism that is both exclusive and retaliatory. This paper will discuss a range of literary and visual material that establishes the temple’s legend on precincts founded on an imagined relationship of the citizen with the land.

Keywords:

• Bharat Mata
• frontier
• India-Pakistan border
• Longewala
• sacred geography
• Tanot Mata
• Thar desert
• war tourism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Acknowledgements

I am immensely grateful to Professor Stephen Legg, foremost, for conceptualising the workshop, ‘Communal Geographies’, held in April 2022, in which this work was initially presented, and, thereafter, his subsequent inputs towards revising the paper for this special issue. I am deeply indebted to Professor Charu Gupta as well for her detailed comments on earlier drafts of the paper. I am thankful to Shri Shailendra Singh for sourcing some valuable local literature on his family deity and on the region in which his ancestors once ruled. I also thank the three anonymous readers whose careful insights improved the paper substantially. I also express gratitude towards my young friend, Ridhima Sharma, for keying in rich facets in developing the paper from its nascent stage.

Notes

1. See Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991); John Urry, Consuming Places (London: Routledge, 1995).

2. This phrase is originally used by Kajri Jain, Gods in the Bazaar: The Economies of Indian Calendar Art (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007): 278.

3. In 1998, India conducted two nuclear tests near Pokhran not far from the region under discussion; Pakistan responded with similar tests in Baluchistan.

4. Practical measures involve additional enforcement of Border Security Force (BSF) jawans (soldiers), planting of landmines, floodlighting, and electric fencing in order to restrict movement across the India-Pakistan border.

5. See Navtej Purewal, ‘The Indo-Pak Border: Displacements, Aggressions and Transgressions’, Contemporary South Asia 12, no. 4 (2003): 539–56.

6. Sankaran Krishna, ‘Cartographic Anxiety: Mapping the Body Politic in India’, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 19, no. 4 (1994): 507–21; 513.

7. Krishnendra Meena, ‘Borders and Bordering Practices: A Case Study of Jaisalmer District on India-Pakistan Border’, Journal of Borderlands Studies 35, no. 2 (2020): 183–94; 187.

8. The phrase is originally used by Sankaran Krishna in his essay, ‘Cartographic Anxiety’ (see fn. 6). This argument is found in the same essay on page 512.

9. The Bhatis, or Bhattis, were in fact powerful heterogeneous groups of pastoralist Rajputs and Gurjars, whose dominion stretched across the entire arid belt from Rajasthan to Punjab and Haryana in India and Pakistan. In most places, they consolidated their power by imposing ransoms and by carrying out raids and plunder on caravans traversing the medieval trade routes and surrounding villages. They were also livestock suppliers and providers of military labour. Under colonial rule, they were notorious for their insubordination. Bhatis in different regions took up diverse faiths, including Islam and Sikhism: see Denzil Ibbetson, A Glossary of the Tribes and Castes of the Punjab and North West Frontier Province, Vol. 1 (based on the census report of 1883), compiled by H.A. Rose (Lahore: Superintendent, Government Printing, Punjab, 1919); James Skinner. Tazkirat al-umara, ff. 254r–261r, British Library, Oriental Manuscripts. AD MS 27254. For an understanding of the complexities and critiques of colonial ethnographic categories of castes and tribes such as the Bhatis, see Girija Joshi, ‘The Politics of Lineage: Caste, Kinship and Land Control in an Agrarian Frontier’, Samaj: South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal 21, no. 21 (2019), "https://doi.org/10.4000/samaj.5638.

10. Interestingly, the pilgrimage to the Hinglaj shrine is envisaged by believers as a counter or on equal terms with the Haj pilgrimage. In fact, the term Hinglaji is a direct counterpart of Haji.

11. Avad Mata is recognised by other names in different places across Rajasthan, such as Bhadriyarai, Temrarai, Swangiya, Ghantiyalrai, Degrai, Pannodharrai and Kaledungarrai, depending on the place and myth attached with the form.

12. The Charans were mobile pastoralist communities. Some of them later played bardic-scribal roles in Rajput courts and were instrumental in shaping the Rajput identity through literary and figurative representations of the might of their patrons.

13. Jurgen Schaflechner, Hinglaj Devi: Identity, Change, and Solidification at a Hindu Temple in Pakistan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017): see pages 85–87 for other versions of Avad Mata’s legend and especially her role amid friction with a Hun-Muslim king and siding with the Bhatis; also see Janet Kamphorst, In Praise of Death: History and Poetry in Medieval Marwar (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2008): 241–44, 254–56. Much of this study is based on Sigrid Westphal-Helbusch’s anthropological research on various Bhil and Charan sects published in German. For regional resources in Hindi on Avad Mata, see Narendra Singh Charan, Kul Devi Shri Tanot (Aawad) Mata Ka Itihas (Jodhpur: Rajasthani Granthagar, 2022); Satyadev Akhawat, Bhagwati Shri Aawad Maa (Jodhpur: Rajasthani Granthagar, 2020).

14. See Kothari’s description of what he calls ‘folk deities’ in Rustom Bharucha, Rajasthan, an Oral History: Conversations with Komal Kothari (India: Penguin Random House, 2003): 118–20.

15. See Kim Paul, ‘Negotiating Sacred Space: The Mandir and the Oran as Contested Sites’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 16, no. sup001 (1993): 49–60; 51; also see Jurgen Schaflechner, Hinglaj Devi: Identity, Change, and Solidification at a Hindu Temple in Pakistan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017): 85.

16. Bharucha, Rajasthan, 118–20. This observation is further clarified as one sees the eulogies addressed to local deities travelling far and wide along recognised routes with nomadic Charan bards.

17. Ann Grodzins Gold, ‘Jatra, Yatra and Pressing Down Pebbles: Pilgrimage within and beyond Rajasthan’, in The Idea of Rajasthan: Explorations in Regional Identity, ed. Karine Schomer (New Delhi: Manohar, 1994). Both the terms yatra and jatra mean travel, but the difference in intonation distinguishes between grand (trans-regional) and short (regional) travel.

18. It is considered self-manifest because of its unique rock formation of rotund rocks or pind within a cave located near a mud volcano symbolising the body of the mother goddess. There is a disagreement over which part of Sati fell there. While many believe it is the navel, for others, it is the skull.

19. This episode, for many scholars, coincides with the coming of the Devi Mahatmya to western India: see Schaflechner, Hinglaj Devi, 84, 40–44, for a detailed discussion of a temporal sequencing of Puranic or Tantrik texts like the Pithanirnaya in which the shrine gets primacy.

20. Hinglaj is also an important site in other Tantrik sacred geographies.

21. This is by no means a definite interpretation, and the integration of the centre into the structures of the Vedic devi worship could be a later assimilation.

22. In the sixteenth century Bengali work Chandimangal, Mukundaram lists Hinglaj as the seventh of nine peeths in the Daksha Yagna Bhanga Section, and as where Sati’s navel fell: see Dinesh Chandra Sircar, The Sakta Pithas (Patna: Motilal Banarsidass, 1948): 33.

23. The names of the dipas/dveepas are: Sangal dip, Swet dip, Jambu dip, Salmali dip, Kolan dip, Chhaon dip and the seventh, Sata dip: see Baluchistan District Gazetteer Series (Bombay: Bombay Education Society’s Press, 1907): 276–79.

24. At the north-west corner, on a detached rock, are said to be the footprints of Duldul, the horse of Ali, and near this rock is an enclosure with red flags dedicated to Khwaja Khizr, the patron saint of the Meds: ibid., 280.

25. For how Abadhuta’s post-Partition travel to Hinglaj from Bengal is indicative of an emergence of new trans-regional cosmopolitan consciousness, see Swarupa Gupta, Cultural Constellations: Place-Making and Ethnicity in Eastern India c. 1850–1927 (Leiden: Brill, 2017): 351–52.

26. In Rajasthan, Bijasan/Bayasan is a generic collective designation for the Saptamatrika to link the local and immediate kuldevis or clan goddesses with the timeless Puranik ones: see Lindsey Harlan, The Goddess’ Henchmen: Gender in Indian Hero Worship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003): 214, for a discussion on the numerous clan goddesses like Sukh Devi, Avad Mata, Ban Mata or Amba Devi and religious traditions in Rajasthan.

27. See Tanuja Kothiyal. Nomadic Narratives: A History of Mobility and Identity in the Great Indian Desert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), for discussions on how, contrary to mainland perceptions, the entire Thar desert was crisscrossed with the mobility of pastoralists, traders, artisans, bards, genealogists and ascetic hermits all through history, almost always necessitated by the search for fodder and water under conditions of drought.

28. Kamphorst, In Praise of Death, 260.

29. Kamphorst suggests that the centres of devi cults merged with major centres of cattle trade in the medieval times along ancient-medieval nomadic routes. Also, interestingly, many of these nomadic groups later transitioned into embracing diverse faiths such as Sufism and Islam but still remained aligned to their earlier origin myths, giving rise to patterns of complex syncretism in this belt. For example, Hinglaj is addressed as Naniya (arch-mother/grandmother) by her Muslim followers. The caretakers of Hinglaj’s cave are also Muslim Charans. Again, Avad Mata is also known by another name, Pannodharrai, which originated from the episode where Avad helps Panna Mussalman, clearly indicating Avad’s mixed clientele in a pluri-religious landscape: ibid.

30. Ibid., 159.

31. Ibid., 130.

32. Karni could mean a female doer or it is a derivative of Charani, the female grazier-bard. Again, she is not a Puranic devi but was a deified local historical personage who was a powerful religious leader instrumental in the formation of Rathor state in Bikaner.

33. Paul, ‘Negotiating Sacred Space’, 54; also see Narendra Singh Charan, Karni Mata ka Itihas (Jodhpur: Rajasthani Granthagar, 2018). One of the reasons is the policy of recruitments in military and paramilitary forces, which has continued in independent India: c.f. fn. 11.

34. Harlan points out that even though Rajput kings and soldiers fought many non-Muslim enemies, the ones venerated for their bravery or martyrdom are invariably those who resisted Muslim/Mughal/Pathan opponents, like Rana Pratap Singh: see Harlan, Goddess’ Henchmen, 50.

35. Sudipta Kaviraj, The Unhappy Consciousness: Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay and the Formation of Nationalist Discourse in India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995): 113–14; Tanika Sarkar, ‘The Birth of a Goddess: Bankimchandra Chattopadhyaya’s Anandamath’, in Hindu Nationalism in India (Oxford Academic, online edition, 2022), accessed October 16, 2003, https://academic.oup.com/book/41849/chapter-abstract/354644084?redirectedFrom=fulltext.

36. Such literature claims that Sumra is mentioned in the Chach Nama, the thirteenth century history of Sindh until Arab occupation.

37. In both instances, the Bikaner Regiment emerged victorious and attributed their victory to Karni Mata’s blessings: Paul, ‘Negotiating Sacred Space’, 54; also see Max Harcourt, ‘The Deshnoke Karni Mata Temple and Political Legitimacy in Medieval Rajasthan’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 16, no. sup001 (1993): 33–48. For a discussion on the congealing of the military manpower market in the Rajputana kingdoms as a result of Mughal projection in the area, see Dirk H. A. Kolff, Naukar, Rajput and Sepoy: The Ethnohistory of the Military Labour Market in Hindustan 1450–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990): 71–75.

38. Vikram Sharma, ‘You Saw It in Border: A Temple amid the Dunes Feeds Barracks Lore’, The Indian Express, August 18, 2017, accessed April 4, 2023, https://www.newindianexpress.com/nation/2017/aug/18/you-saw-it-in-border-a-temple-amid-the-dunes-feeds-barracks-lore-1644627.html.

39. The movie claims to be based on real-life incidents and characters of the 23rd Battalion, Punjab Regiment, involved in the India-Pakistan conflict of 1971 in the wake of India’s support to East Pakistan to form Bangladesh. However, there are ample instances of fictionalisation.

40. See Neeladri Bhattacharya, ‘Pastoralists in a Colonial World’, in Nature, Culture, Imperialism, ed. David Arnold and Ramchandra Guha (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995): 76. Bhattacharya talks about how with the onset of colonial consciousness, the beauty of landscapes was evaluated through their productive propensity and human industry. The beauty of Bharat Mata is also imagined in terms of a fecund female reproductive body.

41. According to CNN IBN’s Minority Report published in 2014, of India’s one million soldiers, only 3 percent are Muslims, or roughly 29,000 soldiers in total. If the troops serving in the Jammu & Kashmir Light Infantry (JAK LI) are subtracted (50 percent of whom are Muslim troops), that percentage is much lower: see Omar Khalidi, Khaki and the Ethnic Violence in India: Army, Police and Paramilitary Forces during Communal Riots (New Delhi: Three Essays Collective, 2003); also see Sabyasachi Dasgupta, In Defence of Honour and Justice: Sepoy Rebellions in the Nineteenth Century (New Delhi: Primus, 2015), for a study of the caste-based recruitment in the Indian Armed Forces. According to Dasgupta, most recruits in the military and paramilitary forces in the colonial regime were Rajputs, Sikhs and Jats.

42. Anjum Rajabali, ‘Foreword’, in Historicizing Myths in Contemporary India: Cinematic Representations and Nationalist Agendas in Hindi Cinema, ed. Swapna Gopinath and Rutuja Deshmukh (London: Routledge, 2023), states how the figure of the Indian Muslim in Hindi cinema has undergone significant change since the 1990s. Earlier, Indian Muslim characters were included in narratives to uphold the theme of Hindu-Muslim brotherhood in a multireligious country, whereas films like Roja, Gadar and Bombay, embarking on the theme of militancy and cross-border violence, clearly began apathetic representations of Pakistani Muslims with the Indian Muslims as their rioting allies. In this scheme, the good Indian Muslims are rare exceptions.

43. ‘Tanot Mata Temple’, Makemytrip.com, accessed April 3, 2023, https://www.makemytrip.com/travel-guide/jaisalmer/tanot-mata-temple-religious.html.

44. Nilesh Langhi, ‘A Road Trip to Longewala War Post’, Stoptoexplore.com, August 19, 2020, accessed April 3, 2023, https://www.stoptoexplore.com/a-road-trip-to-longewala-war-post/.

45. In an informal conversation with a member of the Jaisalmer Bhati clan, it was revealed that Avad Mata had had many followers among the Sindhi Muslims who had resided in Jaisalmer district until recently.

46. Syncretic practices abound across this region in many other pilgrimage destinations too. For instance, the traditional worshipping practices of the folk deity, Goga, and the evolution of the religious space of Gogamedi in Hanumangarh, Rajasthan, have shifted from historically belonging to the diverse marginal castes and Muslims to being subdued and appropriated today by the monolithic Brahmanical practices of upper-caste Hindus. For a detailed discussion on Gogamedi’s transformation, see Rajshree Dhali, ‘Pilgrimage to the Abode of a Folk Deity’, International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage 4, no. 6 (2016): 33–41. Moreover, critiques of ‘syncretism’ have resulted in doubting the utility of this term in understanding medieval and pre-colonial religious practices. ‘Syncretism’ assumes rigid and exclusive faiths with fixed boundaries and origins, which forecloses the existence of fluidity. As the works of Elizabeth M. Thelen about urban centres in medieval Rajasthan and Tony K. Stewart’s work on pre-colonial Bengal have shown, diverse communities coexisted, shared resources and participated in a wide array of cultural, communal and religious practices together: see Elizabeth M. Thelen, Urban Histories of Rajasthan: Religion, Politics and Society (1550–1800) (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. 2022); Tony K. Stewart, ‘In Search of Equivalence: Conceiving Muslim-Hindu Encounter through Translation Theory’, History of Religions 40, no. 3 (2001): 260–87.

47. Jain, Gods in the Bazaar, 11.

48. Sumathi Ramaswami, The Goddess and the Nation: Mapping Mother India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).

49. Nilanjana Mukherjee, ‘Could Kali be Bharat Mata? Interrogating Iconicity in Indian Goddesses’, in Making the Woman, ed. Sutapa Dutta and Shivangini Tandon (London: Routledge, 2024) This essay shows how a relatively benign mother goddess form is embraced and advocated in a range of nationalistic literature, art and iconography with a revolutionary temper such as in Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s own song, ‘Vande Mataram’, in Ananda Math, Kiran Chandra Bannerjee’s play, Bharat Mata (1873), Sri Aurobindo’s Bhavani Bharati (1904–8), or even Rabindranath Tagore’s patriotic songs. Among other things, the essay also discusses how Durga represents a more manageable femininity in comparison to other goddesses in a society contesting colonial prejudices and censure.

50. Tanika Sarkar and Indira Chowdhury-Sengupta have traced a tendentious linkage of the figuration of Mother India with that of Queen Victoria and Britannia: Tanika Sarkar, ‘Nationalist Iconography: Image of Women in 19th Century Bengali Literature’, Economic & Political Weekly 22, no. 47 (1987): 2011–15; Indira Chowdhury-Sengupta, ‘Mother India and Mother Victoria: Motherhood and Nationalism in Nineteenth Century Bengal’, South Asia Research 12, no. 1 (1992): 20–37.

51. See Neeladri Bhattacharya, ‘Predicaments of Mobility: Peddlers and Itinerants in Nineteenth Century Northwestern India, the State and Circulation’, in Society and Circulation: Mobile People and Itinerant Cultures in South Asia, 1750–1950, ed. Claude Markovits (Bangalore: Permanent Black, 2006): 49–85; see Daniel Haines, ‘Constructing State Power: Internal and External Frontiers in Colonial North India, 1850s–1900s’, Environmental History 20, no. 4 (2015): 645–70. This article talks about how canal irrigation was introduced in the arid belts both in Sind and Balochistan with the intention of settling nomadic pastoralists in what was planned as the external and internal frontiers of the colonial state space.

52. Mohammed Iqbal, ‘Human Chain Formed on Rajasthan Border’, The Hindu, Jaipur, August 14, 2018, accessed April 4, 2023, https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/other-states/human-chain-formed-on-rajasthan-border/article24693263.ece.

53. ‘Indian Army Unveils World’s Largest Khadi Tricolour in Jaisalmer’, The Times of India, Jaipur, January 16, 2022, accessed April 4, 2023, https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/jaipur/photos-indian-army-unveils-worlds-largest-khadi-tricolour-in-jaisalmer/photostory/88928154.cms#:∼:text=On%20the%20occasion%20of%2074th,hill%20near%20Jaisalmer%20military%20station.

54. ‘Unique War Museum’, Review of Jaisalmer War Museum, Tripadvisor.com, accessed November 15, 2023, https://www.tripadvisor.com/ShowUserReviews-g297667-d8599168-r560983771-Jaisalmer_War_Museum-Jaisalmer_Jaisalmer_District_Rajasthan.html; also see the Wikipedia entry on ‘Jaisalmer War Museum’ for similar reference: ‘Jaisalmer War Museum, Wikipedia, accessed November 15, 2023, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaisalmer_War_Museum.

55. The themes are conflated with a dominant political agenda which is commonly noticeable in both war genre and historical films trending in India today. These movies weave in Hindu masculine nationalism into the dramaturgy by shaping battles in medieval India such as between regional warrior classes and Mughals—e.g. the son et lumière shows Padmavat (2018), Bajirao Mastani (2015), Tanhaji (2020) or Samrat Prithviraj (2022) and border clashes between India and Pakistan in postcolonial India such as Uri (2019), Kesari (2019), Shershaah (2021) as simply Hindu-Muslim conflicts. In most cases, these dramas glamorise death as sacrifice undertaken to defend faith, land and community: see Swapna Gopinath and Rutuja Deshmukh, ed., Historicizing Myths in Contemporary India: Cinematic Representations and Nationalist Agendas in Hindi Cinema (London: Routledge, 2023); also see Aditya Menon, ‘Hail the Hindu Male! How Bollywood Is Selling Hindutva as History’, Thequint.com, November 21, 2019, accessed January 25, 2024, https://www.thequint.com/opinion/tanhaji-panipat-ajay-devgn-saif-ali-khan-marathas-hindutva-muslims-hindus. This light piece exposes how filmmakers in recent times use the analogy of ‘surgical strike’ to equate battles between Maratha/Rajput and Mughals with India’s tension with Pakistan, underlining a communal narrative.

56. ‘Rajasthan Set to Promote Border Tourism’, The Times of India, July 25, 2022, accessed April 4, 2023, https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/travel/travel-news/rajasthan-set-to-promote-border-tourism/articleshow/93105943.cms.

57. Ibid.

58. Vimal Bhatia, ‘Pakistan Army “Exercising” near Border Adjoining Jaisalmer’, The Times of India, September 28, 2016, accessed February 1, 2024, https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/jaipur/pakistan-army-exercising-near-border-adjoining-jaisalmer/articleshow/54555612.cms.

59. Jain, Gods in the Bazaar, 144.