Gavari, also spelt Gavri,[1] is a 40-day long festival celebrated in July and September of each year in the Mewar region of Rajasthan, India.
Each year, bhopa shamans from Mewar's Bhil communities petition the Goddess to permit their villagers to perform the Gavari ritual and to accompany them for the weeks of touring. The average wait time for her consent is about 4–5 years, and once the ritual cycle begins, she must also be successfully invoked before each daily ceremony. Only when she visibly possesses one or more troupe members can the dance dramas begin and the ritual proceed.
Each of the 25-25 participating communities forms and dispatches its own Gavari company of 20-80 members. The troupes crisscross Mewar performing more than 600 day-long village ceremonies in all. In total, Gavari troupes in total can play to over a quarter of a million people annually.
During the 40-day Gavari season, all players practice strict austerities to maintain reverent contact with the living earth and the immanent spirit.[3] They avoid not only sex, alcohol and meat but also shoes, beds, bathing, and eating greens (which might harm insect life). They eat only a single meal each day during the season.[4][5]
In the final days, each troupe returns to its home village for a last performance and closing ceremonies. The cycle ends with an immersion rite to return the Goddess's fertility to their waters and all night raucous celebrations.
A Gavari troupe repertoire may include 10-15 classic traditional tales and new ones are still evolving, but the overarching themes are the sacredness of the natural world, radical human equality, and the feminine nature of the divine. These values are reflected in traditional Bhil society where the environment is revered, hierarchy is abhorred, and women enjoy greater rights and status than in communities outside.[6][7]
Among Gavari's many mythic dramas, two of the most popular and often repeated are Badalya Hindawa (The Banyan Swing) and Bhilurana (King of the Bhils).
Badalya Hindawa recounts how the Goddess re-greened the Earth after a life-erasing flood and fiercely defends it thereafter from greed, stupidity and harm. The playlet features a powerful guru who loses his disciples beneath a sacred banyan tree and demands that the local king destroy it as an illicit source of power. The unnerved king complies and has the tree cut down. The Goddess and her devi sisters are outraged at this desecration and slip into his court disguised as acrobatic dancers to exact revenge. They lure the king close with their artistry, reveal their true nature, indict him for cowardice and sacrilege, and mortally terminate his reign.
Bhilurana is the tale of a composite leader representing five centuries of Bhil resistance to intrusions of all kinds. The play compresses and conflates the armed might of Turkic, Mughal and British invaders and depicts Goddess-inspired Bhil warriors finally driving them all away with daring ambushes, sabotage and shrewd guerrilla tactics.
Both plays end with celebration, salutations to the Goddess, and clear warnings to interlopers to never violate Nature or their sovereignty again.[8]
Gavari drama emphasis inspired improvisation over rehearsal and memorisation. The beginnings and ends of Gavari dramas are known, but how things transpire in between is highly mutable. There are no scripts and many players are illiterate farmers and labourers.[9] Individual plays can continue for hours, contain long soliloquies and dialogues, and are only performed by a particular troupe once on four or five years. This intuitive improvisational approach fosters great creative diversity and different villages may present the same stories in many very different ways. Players strive to perform in a receptive trance known as bhava, which resembles the fluid creative state that musicians and athletes call "flow" or "the zone".
Characters
Depending on the day and the plays selected a single Gavari troupe can present dozens of different characters - goddess avatars, gods, demons, historical figures, sacred animals, corrupt officials, etc. The only constant roles, which exist outside the dramas, are the Budia figure, his twin Rai devi consorts and Kutkadia, the master of ceremonies.
Women are not allowed to tour as actors with the troupe due to the 4-5 day menstrual isolation Bhil women observe each month. Consequently, all female characters are portrayed by men.[8]
Budia embodies a powerful fusion of Shaivite and demonic energies and is a vital protective Gavari figure. He is distinguished by his dramatic horse hair-fringed mask, sacred staff and twin Rai consorts. In each day's Gavari ceremony the Budia character has three main duties: circling the arena during opening invocations in the opposite direction as the dancers to seal in and protect the energy field they are generating; patrolling the arena perimeter during dance drama sequences to prevent audience members from entering the area.
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