The Last Nomads of Kutchch

French tourist in a chai shop

At breakfast in the city guest house one meets all sorts of people, the current contingent hailing mostly from France and Japan, who sit in little huddles, speaking in their respective languages. But there's always a sprinkling of people from other countries, such as Austria, Switzerland, Greece, even a few British. On this particular morning there was a British Indian woman, Sonum Sumaria, who was making a documentary about the last nomads of Kutchch.

"The Fakirani Jat tribe," she told me, "are still nomadic. "There are only sixty families left, who travel with their camels during the day. They live on camel milk, selling the surplus to buy millet, which is the only other thing they eat. The camels graze on a multitude of different herbs, so their milk is very nutritious. The tribe sleep on the ground at night, beside their camels, under the stars."

"Do you travel with them?"
"Yes," she said "I have to run ahead of them in order to film them walking towards me. I take my sound technician and an interpreter. We go back to a hotel to sleep at night though.
(I'm sure she speaks Hindi, but these tribes speak Kutchch, a completely different language.)
"The children start to look after the camels when they are six years old. They have a lot of fun playing and never go to school. School would not be of any use to them as long as they continue with their nomadic life. But things are getting more and more difficult for them as their tribal lands are less protected and more and more people are buying parts of it for agriculture, where they can no longer go. Of course, before Partition they could travel from one part of the desert when it became too dry to another part where there was better vegetation. But now they cannot cross the border."

Hopefully she will show the film at SOAS in London. She told me about another film she made about the RSS (far right Hindu party who are virulently anti-muslim). Under Prime Minister Modi the RSS has gained status and popularity, a very worrying trend. Sonum told me that since Modi came to power the RSS have been visiting the villages of Kutchch twice a week, villages where Hindus and Muslims have lived together peacefully for hundreds of years; to hold meetings for the young Hindus, inspiring anti-Muslim hatred in them. She has made a documentary about this too.

These are not the Fakirani Jat camels, but rather camels employed to transport tourists (almost all Indian tourists) the short distance from an expensive tent city into the salt desert. We travelled to the salt desert and were horrified by the Disneyland atmosphere that surrounded the tent city, where people pay a hundred and twenty pounds a night to stay in a tent.