What Nobody Told Me About Barumal

In January 2013, I was a final-year undergraduate student of Anthropology at Hans Raj College, University of Delhi - twenty-something, and curious. The Department of Anthropology had organised a fieldtrip for its students as part of the degree's practical component, and that year, our cohort was sent to Barumal – a tribal village of roughly 2,700 people in the Dharampur taluka of Valsad district, Gujarat, situated 34 kilometres from the nearest city (Valsad), connected by a road busy with shared auto-rickshaws.

We were there for a week - a grudgingly short time by any standards of anthropology - and my specific brief was to study the village's religious specialists: men and women who healed, mediated, and carried the medicinal and spiritual responsibility of their communities. I arrived with a notebook, a list of questions, and the anxiety of a person who had studied people in theory but yet to meet them in person.

Anyone could have walked in. Yet, nobody did.

Truthfully, the village received us better than we had anticipated.

Every home I entered - and I entered many – across the thirteen faliyas that divided Barumal's landscape into communities as much as geography ensured I was fed before answering a single question; gestures that made me believe I was a guest and that guests ought to eat first. I left each conversation a little fuller and a little more aware of how much I didn't know.

Barumal is a largely dry county in Gujarat’s Valsad district, tucked into foothills near Dharampur. It was gentle in January but the homes are quiet and dark inside, lit by the bright yet thin beams of light that filtered through uneven window openings, the air thickened by smoke from wood fires where women cooked their afternoon meals. From the outside, we’d hear life in the village first before even taking our first steps.

I was there to study the village's religious specialists - Bhagats – men who received their “powers” through dreams, who read suffering in the patterns of scattered rice grains, and who tied divinely blessed threads around aching wrists. I gathered their stories from multiple people, piecing together a portrait along the way.

What stayed with me - the thing I kept returning to - was the mere fact that I didn't have to ask all. I simply had to walk.

Along with being “dry” (literally and figuratively), Gujarat is also a state largely without meat and Barumal, a Hindu tribal village where the dominant Dhodiya Patel community had given up meat and alcohol after the visit of a saint in 1961, seemed to bear this out. There was a particular quality of moral tidiness about the village; temples in every faliya; bhajan mandlis gathering to sing; and more.

Every place carries unfinished stories, and sometimes the most important thing a traveller can do is simply observe.

Then, in one corner of the village, we found meat.

It was in the faliya occupied by Dalits - Kolchas, to be specific, who were once regarded as "untouchable". No wall or barbed wire fence separated their part of Barumal from the rest. The path was open. Anyone could have walked in.

Yet, nobody did.

That separation was maintained entirely by behaviour, by an understanding so old and shared that it no longer needed to be spoken or enforced.

Meat existed. The neighbourhood existed.

Any traveller passing through Barumal would see open fields, quiet homes, the largest Shiva temple in the region rising from the Satgurudham faliya, women walking with brass pots on their heads. They would be fed. They would be smiled at. The village would be warm to them, because the village was warm to everyone. But they might not see what I saw - a living community, whole and self-contained - in a space that the rest of the village had decided, without actually deciding, did not quite exist… or that it existed but unacknowledged.

That, I think, is the kind of thing that travellers deserve to see, not because it is comfortable. It is because no village anywhere between India’s corners of diversity is just about temples, festivals, and hospitality.

Every place carries unfinished stories, and sometimes the most important thing a traveller can do is simply observe.

And, in doing so, ask themselves, “Where are paths open, and why is no one walking upon them”?