Tradition · painted scroll & sung epic
Pābūjī kī Phaḍ
Also known as Phad, Pabuji ki Phad, Bhopa, Shahpura, Pābūjī kī Phaḍ — Rajasthan’s painted epic
A cloth scroll several metres long, painted at Shahpura in Bhilwara by hereditary Joshi chhipa families, unrolled at night before a lamp while a bhopa priest-singer and his wife sing the deeds of Pabuji, a fourteenth-century Rathore chieftain of Kolu who became a pastoral deity of the Rabari camel-herders.
- Function
- Text & inscription
- Confidence
- Not assessed
- Location
- 25.620, 74.970
Worth knowing
The performance is a reading of a picture rather than an illustration of a song: the bhopa's wife holds the lamp to the exact panel being sung, so the audience sees only the part of the scroll the story is currently in. A finished phad is consecrated and, when worn out, immersed in a lake at Pushkar rather than discarded.
Connections (3)
- AnalogueMānganiyār & Lāngā
Both traditions run on the jajmani tie rather than on an audience: a Manganiyar family sings for named patron households across generations, and a bhopa serves the shrine of a specific deity whose scroll his family carries. In each the performer is a Muslim or low-caste specialist and the patron is usually not, and in each the twentieth-century festival circuit has replaced a patron who could no longer pay.
- Ritual transferPushkar
A phaḍ is a consecrated object, not a picture: when the cloth is too worn to be read from, it is taken to Pushkar and immersed in the lake in a rite called thanda karna, cooling it, which releases the deity from it. The bhopa's family then commissions a new one from the Joshi painters at Shahpura. The painting is therefore a life-cycle object with a beginning and an end, which is why very few old phaḍs survive.
- Patronage networkMehrangarh & Jodhpur
Pabuji was a Rathore, of the same clan that ruled from Jodhpur, and the phaḍ tradition belongs to the Marwar countryside that Mehrangarh dominated — sung for Rabari camel-herders and Thori and Nayak patrons rather than at the court itself. The story turns on Pabuji dying to protect a herd of cows he had promised, which is a pastoral morality rather than a dynastic one, told about a member of the ruling house.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Phad painting”. Sangeet Natak Akademi documentation; and the standard field studies of each tradition named in the entry.
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