ABSTRACT
Although mobility has been extensively practised throughout South Asian history by peasants, traders, artisans and pastoralists (Rao and Casimir 2003), regional scholarship has been ‘strangely oblivious’ (Agrawal and Saberwal 2004: 37) to their presence. Noting this, Ratnagar (2004) terms nomads in general as the ‘other Indians’, while Berland (2003: 108) describes them as the ‘tenebrous others’ in the body of anthropological work on rural village life. In respect of mobile pastoralists, this neglect is particularly striking because agrarian and pastoral activities are closely integrated within the same landscape in all but the most arid or mountainous regions of India (Casimir 2003; Ikeya and Fratkin 2005; Kavoori 2005). Pastoralism is practised across a range of ecological zones virtually all over the country (Joshi 2008). Rao and Casimir (2003: 1) suggest that ‘nowhere else is there such a variety of creatures systematically herded’. There is vertical movement of yaks, cattle, sheep and goats between summer and winter mountain pastures; and horizontal migration of sheep, cattle, goats, camels through the dryland areas of Western India, the central Deccan Plateau and towards the south – where, in the State of Karnataka, remarkably, ducks are ‘herded’ too (Nambi 2001).
