Nomads in Changing Times

~ Desert Places, by Robyn Davidson ~

Robyn Davidson is an Australian woman with a fondness for and familiarity with camels. Some years ago she travelled the Australian desert with 3 camels, occasionally in company with Aborigine groups, and chronicled her experiences in her first book, Tracks. When visiting India she heard about the Rabari, the nomads who travel across the Thar desert, and decided to travel with and write about them.

“And there are new kinds of nomads, not people who are at home everywhere, but who are at home nowhere. I was one of them ”

I had read positive reviews of this book which put me off. Not that I have anything against good reviews :-), but the reviews tended to focus on how brave this Western woman was to give up the comforts of civilization to drink polluted water with the Rabari, ignoring the fact that she did this entirely by choice and could return to her airconditioned life afterwards with the proceeds from her book/article, while the Rabari continued on in (photogenic) poverty. (One review even described her as the ‘first white-skinned person seen in the region’. In 1980? Yeah, right.). I was expecting an old colonial style: “The Natives were friendly so we Decided to Stay the Night”.

Nope. Ms Davidson was honest about the trip, her complex reasons for undertaking this, her changing reactions to the Rabari and to India, and her physical miseries. I was liking her quite a bit when I reached midpoint, and even more by the end of the book. Yes, the Rabari were somewhat alien to her and her to them, but except for our common skin colour, so they would be to me, a city-bred Indian. She liked some and disliked some, but stays away from generalizations about the group, and does not describe their habits with a Ripley’s Believe-it-or-Not tone. I empathized with her hunger for wide open spaces, and shared her shock on discovering that the Rabari now travel in agricultural areas near sewage canals and industrial smokestacks. No vistas with camels silhouetted against vast sand dunes here!

Nor does she, entirely, ‘travel with the Rabari’. She does live and walk with them for periods of time, but when things get too overwhelming she trots off to the nearest town (usually 5-10 miles away) and recuperates in a hotel. What saves this from being ridiculous is her brutal honesty about her physical and mental limitations.

Although the book is mostly about the Rabari, it loosely touches on politicians, unexpected social mores (the nomad Rabari women had a hard life, but are freer than women in the wealthier Rajasthani farming communities who live in purdah), the Emergency, the stares (as a white-skinned woman, it was pretty much impossible for her to walk calmly and alone along any street in India), her agonies about not being able to communicate, misunderstandings with the jeep driver (she used to do a lot of physical work herself, so he basically left her to it, whereas she really wanted him to help without being ordered to. It is awkward navigating the shoals of employer-dom if your employees don’t helpfully read your mind)

The book has photos, but they are a bit odd. Oh, they are lovely enough — sand, camels, colourful Rajasthani clothing — but the captions are so terse that one can barely relate them to the book. And why these particular photos were chosen remains a mystery. For example, there is a photo of a camel-trainer in tears. She hates this man throughout the book, so the sympathetic photograph of him seems contrary. And then, though much of the book deals with her physical miseries, all the photos show her looking cheerful and healthy. I would also have liked to see more photos of the interesting people of the farm villages she describes in the book, but perhaps they didn’t want to be photographed.

I was intrigued enough by her writing to buy her first book, Tracks, about her solo trip through the Australian outback with three camels and a dog. I would also have loved to read what the Rabari and the Australian Aborigines thought of her.

‘Desert Places’, by Robyn Davidson. Viking Penguin, 1997.

This review was first published on the SAWNET (South Asian Women’s NETwork) website, now defunct.