This documentary holds perspectives from representatives of three tribes : the Bhat, the Manganiyar, and the Kalbeliya. Conveying a diverse spread of contemporary circumstances, the documentary allows nuance and alterity to exist: to convey the complex reality within India’s caste system. Recorded interviews reveal the intimate knowledge of the subject’s respective community and intangible cultural heritages. Preserved only, in uncompromised truth, through the very breathing bodies of such ancestry, all take the preservation of their culture and wellness of their communities as fidelity: as lifemission. Professional musicians by tribal heritage, all speak upon the encompassing spirit experienced in the complete interbeing with their respective art. The viewer may be incited to wonder, what does it feel like to belong to believing and to beauty? as they are challenged to consider the logos and consequences of systems of social hierarchy and modernization.

Creative Documentary. November, 2025. Fully composed of primary source material. Shot in India : Rajasthan ( Pushkar, Jodhpur, Jaisalmer, and Udaipur) and Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh. Core subject interviews : Jeetu Bhat, Kuldeep Kothari, Lomnath Sapera, Imamuddin Manganiyar, and Bax Khan. Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for Nepal: Tibetan and Himalayan Peoples, SIT Study Abroad, Spring 2025.

Methodology :

I traveled to Rajasthan — to the cities : Pushkar, Jodhpur, and Jaisalmer. With a mere month to conduct field research and congeal a documentary, I carried the abashed goal to absorb a mere survey of this arbitrarily formed category of diaspora. I digitally message and voice call contacts found on the web. I sought practicing artists, cultural institutes and collectives. Next day meetings are set up with those who respond. I go to meet them. I go wondering : How is the ontology within their communities? What spiritual and mundane convictions affect such? And the societal, historical, and environmental factors? What lifestyle is enacted out of such worldviews? What is the current circumstance? What do individuals from these communities know are the points of vulnerabilities at present? I video record the interviews. I attended Imamddin’s Manganiyar Puppet Show in Jaisalmer, and a Kalbeliya dance show in Udaipur. I went through the Pushkar carnival, seeing Kalbeliya street performers. I spent multiple evenings at Sunset View Ghat, Pushkar where traveling Sadhus camped, Kalbeliyas and Manganiyars street performed, and a group of Bhat teenager boys hung around. I befriended the boys, hung out as they jammed along the lake and at their night time gig. Kalbeliya acrobats performed one night to my fortune. The Sadhus would not speak to me. I learned the morsing/morchang, a traditional Rajasthani jaw harp. I spent three nights in the sand dunes of Jaisalmer’s surrounding desert to feel the relationship of the natural ecosystem with its human cultures. Varanasi was described to me as beloved by multiple Indian nationals. I decided to finish the exposure by going to what was described as the “spiritual home of all of Hindu Indians” to experientially glimpse the spiritual heart of context and retrieve cultural grounding.

Context :

The Thar desert sands 200,000 km2 of land in the Northwestern region of the Indian Subcontinent. In 1947, sovereignty from British colonialism divided the Indian Subcontinent {“British India”} into two independent states: India and Pakistan. This Partition drew a new, closed border through the Thar. 85% in India’s domain, the remainder in Pakistan. 14.5 million crossed the border in the following month. Millions more forcibly displaced. Uncertain numbers {100,000s to a few million} were raped, forcibly religiously converted, killed along migration routes, or went missing. Centuries old relationships of knowing, family, community, culture creation, and societal systems of sustenance were bisected. “Modern nation-states are ideologically invested in imagining themselves to be territorially discrete and internally homeogenous. Borderlands cannot be regarded as empty transitional zones, but are instead sites of creative cultural production and struggle” Shalini Ayyagari 90% of India’s Thar Desert is within Rajasthan, the largest state in India. Rajasthan’s prevalence of tribal population(12.6%) is higher than the national percentage (8.6%).“As per Scheduled Tribes Order, 1976, altogether twelve distinct ethnic groups or communities along with their synonyms, segments and subgroups has been described as Scheduled Tribes in Rajasthan out of which the Saharia were the lone PVTGs of Rajasthan. Mina, Bhil, Bhil Mina, Garasia (excluding the Rajput Garasia), Saharia and Kathodis are the major and visible tribal communities of Rajasthan.” There is insufficient documentation on the intricacies of individuation and miscegenation between the tribes, clans, subclans, and non-tribal counterparts.

Navigating the unknown multifariousness, this study hones focus on tribal identities of the following attributes : 1) hereditarily assigned arts as profession 2) art as a signifier of the tribal identity 3) the art is taught in-home, intergenerationally 3) the tribal identity is traditionally of peripatetic lifestyle 4) the identity is of low-caste status. I video recorded interviews with members of the Bhat, Kalbeliya, and Manganiyar tribes. Music is intrinsic to each of these lineage cultures: interbeing within individuals of ancestry as it intertwines with profession, religion, worldview and identity. Though the Kalbeliya are most known for their dance tradition, the dance is incomplete without its musical counterpart. These unique repositories of artistic style, musical intelligence, patron genealogies, tribal histories and wisdom are in precarious positions for preservation. Documentation is fortuitous, as the lineage is carried forth through intergenerational oral transmission. These populations are historically uneducated and continue to have disproportionately low levels of literacy. A handful of individuals from these traditions have been scouted into world-traveling folk musicians. Such has helped to found and support grassroots initiatives working for the communities’ direct needs of day to day survival and preservation of the cultural arts. The documentary captures a blink of time in a continuum of change. Notice the needs of aid explicated by the interview subjects in November of 2025. May time be in favor.

Statement of Purpose :

There is a compounding spirit loss in societies of technologized, late-stage capitalism. Nihilism takes the fore in fatigue. Chronic illness of the climate positions remediation of spirit as urgent. A deep value of interconnective life must unfurl through the global complex of global collective consciousness as cultural unifiers. It is my conviction that this possibility relies on the natural {banging at the walls of our societal conditionings} phenomenon of great {dam-exploding} feelings of indiscriminate love, purpose, meaning and belonging. Such senses of the sublime are enwrapped in ontologies of ancestral and spiritual worldviews. Such ontologies may propagate in the simple meeting of its existence within another or in its expression. Such expressions are innately “creative”, as such visceral faith comes preeminently with feeling the basal miracles of life. Thus, its expression cannot move through structured fields of institutionalized culture, but the arts may vessel. Academia and Fine/Classical Art institutions prescribes the life knowledge and practices existent independent from its complex as ‘folk’ or ‘outsider’. Implementing a jurisdiction of standard and fact, such ‘subaltern’ intelligence and arts are demeaned as exotic cultural artifacts. In this tragedy of ill logic, connection with the natural is endangered. The tribes indigenous to the Thar desert region carry sonorous relationships of knowing the natural world. What we find in the Rajasthani Folk Musicians of today, is that such lineage also carries an embodiment of spirit : of a deep conviction of life’s value. Traditionally, it was precisely their service to magnify, express, convince, supply and bestow such feeling to patrons and villages. Today, conditions of underresource attest underappreciation of such prowess and offering and deficient awareness of our vital reliance on such. The contemporary circumstance of the descendants of the Thar’s tribes may be a ‘case study’ revealing a phenomenon occurring in macro. Due to the de facto, rigid continuum of India’s caste system, positive portrayal of subjugated groups is critical to combat prejudices. Art has the ability to attest the eminence, value, and beauty of its subject. I hope my documentary helps to propagate knowingness of these communities: in humble admirations, in comraderic empathy and acts of aid, and in increasing detest of systems of social hierarchy and the technologizing canyon. .