ABSTRACT
This chapter follows the life story of Daud, rewal horse breeder, trainer, and rider, and a worker in a gas cylinder warehouse in Haṅgāmī Āvās for the past three decades. It focuses on the Node community connections across the city of Bhuj, and that of Kachchh district, but it also travels with Daud to rewal horse competitions, training, and intimacy that is created between the horses and their trainers/riders, and introduces Daud's love, Marwadi mare Maṇkī મણકી, to whose memory this chapter is dedicated to. The chapter suggests that rewal horses provide a resistance and alternative to that of the Hindu nationalist “Other” connecting the intimate relationship with the horse to that of social, cultural, and of economical respectability.
