First light in Delhi. Already camel carts and sacred cows begin to crowd the streets. Taxis, bicycles, auto rickshaws, and buses fill the city air with the din of their perpetual honking - modern-day roosters announcing the dawn. And, in Shadipur Depot, a sprawling slum just outside Delhi's center, the families of 350 of India's traditional artists wake as well.
Groups of brightly dressed women carrying water jugs on their heads walk down the rutted, serpentine main street of the depot toward the community water pump. Children are everywhere, ragtag and beautiful; groups of men gather around the water pipes, discussing the issues of the day. The air is charged with smoke from morning fires and the smells of breakfast teas and boiling meat.
From one of the common alleys that run between the haphazardly placed mud huts of the shantytown, an elderly magician and his son emerge onto the main street, carrying their props; they are headed to the fort in Old Delhi, where they will perform today. Nasir Kahn prods a reluctant dancing bear into a waiting taxi for the ride to the train station, where he hopes to earn his day's wage from the tourists there. Moments later, Giarsa Natt, laden with ropes and old bicycle tires, hurries onto a bus, his beautiful, contortionist daughter Suresh close behind him. Within a few minutes, others join them: musicians and jugglers, puppeteers and folk dancers, flocking toward the crowded highway that runs alongside Shadipur. This is reveille at the Bhule Bisre Kalakar, the Cooperative of Forgotten and Neglected Artists.
Bhule Bisre Kalakar: Cooperative of Forgotten and Neglected Artists
They come from Gujarat and Bihar, Rajasthan and Hiryana - harsh places of northern India, desert and mountain. They have been living the gypsy life for more than two thousand years, moving in family groups from place to place, performing for the rural villagers. Each has only the skills taught them by their parents and their parents before them for generations. In the past, wealthy patrons paid them handsomely for their appearances at weddings and official affairs; villagers provided them shelter and food. Some sang the legends of gods and heroes, some used finely carved puppets to tell the stories of the maharajas; and some could dance the history of the world from the beginning of time. Others charmed snakes or trained animals to dance. They were entertainers in a bleak land, but they brought with them more than entertainment: They brought news from far-flung places, their arts were a repository of the history of a people, they were the connecting forces that bound a vast land.
Support for the traditional arts began to wane at the turn of the century; industrialization allowed patrons and landowners to move to the cities and run their operations from there. The advent of movies, radio, and, later, television began to erode support for the artists from even the villagers. They were no longer as integral part of the country's communications network; worse, their value as entertainers diminished as performance arts ceased to be an important shared community experience.
Faced with this new reality, many of the artists began to move to the cities in search of a new audience. They squatted on vacant lots in temporary shelters and tents, performing on street corners and in parks, trying to adapt to their changing
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