Deep in the Aravallis, in the hollow of surrounding mountains that descend into the Yamuna, nestles the sleepy village of Mangar, far, far away from the steel and glass glitz of Gurugram, barely 30 km as the crow flies from the city to Faridabad.
At the turn of the century Mangar was a sleepy hamlet of mud, mudbrick, and stone hutments of the once nomadic cattle herding Gujjars. In the 21st century, Mangar still clings on to its animal husbandry past, supplying milk and meat to urban highrises, though the settlement has since morphed into concrete houses, funded by the government's village modernisation plans.
I was invited to this little seen countryside by local wildlife conservationist and ecologist Sunil Harsana and his friend and mentor Chetan Aggarwal, both of whom have been campaigning for years against encroachments by real estate developers driven by the desire to bridge the twin NCR cities with uber condos. The Lalit Group already operates a five star nature resort at Mangar. Taj, ITC and Marriott are also not very far. Yoga guru Baba Ramdev too has acquired and enclosed a huge tract around the village for what could turn out to be his biggest spiritual enterprise, yet.
Sunil and Chetan have been actively thwarting a Gurgaon real estate mogul from commercialising a virgin tract of the forest that locals hold sacred. That story of Mangar Bani is now part of local folklore.
More recently, in the shadow of the global Covid lockdown, Sunil's rumble in the jungle led him to a jaw dropping discovery in the surrounding hills that have the making of an Indiana Jones adventure.
I will tell you that story in time.
For now, I asked Sunil, about clan memory: From where did the Gujjars come to settle in the middle of nowhere in this beautiful valley of Mangar? He said, he can't quite tell, because they have been here for as long as he can remember. But he's heard community elders say that the Gujjar's walked into this area from Gujarat, a state that bears the name of his clan because it was once ruled by the Gurjara-Pratihara dynasty from whom prime minister Modi and his sidekick Amit Shah too claim cultural descent when they talk of Gujarati asmita.
With his far more modest assumptions about the past, Sunil's not far from truth about the origin of the Gujjars, though family, and clan memories in India usually don't survive three generations. Blame it on the absence of archival histories, in general, and among nomadic pastoralists, in particular. Whatever is recollected and recounted of the origin story is mostly wrapped in folklore and usually preserved in folk songs.
Every spring and autumn, commuters in Gurgaon's high density traffic corridors witness the one-step-at-a-time movement of lone rangers in colourful turbans, Balkanic frockcoats, and ankle length trousers or tightly wrapped dhotis, herding cattle to and fro between Gujarat in the far west and the Himalayan foothills in the north, alongside high speed expressways, in the extended southwest-northeast seasonal migratory path that has been a way of life among the nomads for centuries.
But the Gujarat flatland is only part of the Gujjar origin story veiled by the mist of time.
The Gujjars migrated to the Indus-Yamuna plains in the early centuries of the Christian era from Gurjaristan, present Georgia (Persian:Gurgan), when the area began to be colonized first by Christian, and later, Islamic missionaries, and subsequently by Mongol and Turk warlords.
Resolving to hold on to their Vedic moorings, in the face of often violent proselytization, they led their flock across cold deserts and high mountain passes to their spiritual homeland over centuries.
The migration of the Gujjars to India is, perhaps, among the most peaceful translocations of any race through global history. They did not descend down the Hindu Kush either as swashbuckling horseriders or as marauding invaders knocking down edifices, cultures, and civilisational signposts. Instead, they just walked in, hard and long, shepherd's crook in hand, quietly with cattle and cart, from the Eurasian steppes. In the process, they also reversed the tread of the equally peaceful migration of Romani gypsies from the Indus to the Balkans.
The story of Sunil's "homecoming" to Mangar waits to be narrated one day, even as he takes me on some interesting treks in Mangar's surrounding mountains.
Watch this space...
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