Jaisalmer Musicians

Blog Post 12

3/15/2023

27O9’31” N 78O3’14” E

The musicians of Jaisalmer:

Forward note: I’m trying a new blog format where rather than some up the place I relate a specific experience. Tell me what you think.

Today I went to visit Langa musicians, which live in Rajasthan by jodhpur, India. I’ve had many adventures here so far but now I will tell you about the Langa musicians in Barnawa Jageer

We spent two hours in the morning, driving across bumpy roads, pitted with potholes to arrive in an arid desert with a small village of 250 houses at its center. This specific village was a community of gypsy musicians who had stopped being nomadic recently (I know the term Gypsy is considered politically incorrect, but they referred to themselves with the term so I will do the same). It’s extremely interesting, being a foreigner in India, because you’re treated with extreme deference and curiosity. There’s also a custom in India to treat guests as gods so when the two effects are compounded, it makes for a surreal experience. I say this because it was extremely enhanced when we visited the musicians. When we arrived, there were chairs set out for us, and a whole host of musicians waiting to play, but we were the only spectators, myself, my father, and our friend's family. At least 50 villagers came running to crowd around us, staring at us, and taking videos of us, while the musicians prepared to give us a private concert.

The music that they then played was so incredible that I will not even attempt to describe it but instead upload videos and recordings, to the website. You will not truly understand the beauty of the music unless you visit them in person, but hopefully, my recordings can give you some hint of its incredible style. We were ushered from family to family to hear their songs as every house in the town had at least one musician. And they used a host of instruments that would be unrecognizable by anybody in America. One called the sarangi which looked like a violin but with 10 times the strings hundreds of knobs to tune them, and was played like a cello. We asked how old one of the specific sarangi was and they said it was 500 years old and imported from Pakistan.

This experience was so deeply soul shocking through its shire differences and richness of culture that it is almost impossible to place it within my worldview. But that is the goal of my travels: to absorb as much of the world as I can and let it shape my philosophy and understanding. Here the blog is my savior, I will use it to frame my experiences and ideas and match them to the questions and revelations I am having. Today I have no way to place my experiences at the Barnawa Jageer village. Maybe I will have insights tomorrow, or maybe I will have them next year, but I know today that I am forever changed. Hopefully, these blog posts can impart some of that understanding to you.