The Last Straw: The camels are vanishing from Rajasthan
HE SUN HAS JUST risen around 7 AM in Khimel, a village in Rajasthan’s Pali district, when Mewari’s daughter anxiously searches for her mother. By 7.20 AM the anxiety has given way to full-blown panic and she begins a plaintive bleating which resonates through the fallow fields of the village. Thirty-eight-year old Madha Ram, who is kneading dough, pauses and reminisces: “This is what I dreamt of every night when I was away. Me, with the herd, in a field, getting ready for the day. I can’t live any other life.” Madha Ram is a Raika, a Rajasthan Tribe which breeds camels. Mewari and her daughter are part of a herd of 150 camels he now tends to with five others. There was a time when each of the six owned herds of more than 100. “The camels are dying, as is the Raika way of life. We are the last generation doing this. All our children are working in restaurants and malls in big cities,” says Gamna Ram, a grizzled 60-year-old co-owner of the herd, as he begins to untether their camels. Mostly, men of his generation too have abandoned this way of life. Some like Madha Ram, who worked at an Ahmedabad eatery for two months, came back. “I dreamt of camels every night. Not my children, my wife or my mother, but camels, so I came back. We will see the end of our days together,” he says.
