Desert Places

In 1978 Robyn Davidson visited, quite by chance, a camel fair in Pushkar, Rajasthan. There she found herself amidst the pastoral nomads of north-west India, thousands of whom had congregated to buy and sell their animals. She was on her way to England to write her celebrated book, Tracks, about traversing the deserts of Australia through tribal Aboriginal land - a journey that left her obsessed with nomadism, a way of life that has been with us since our origins but was about to disappear. As soon as she saw the Rajasthani nomads, she wanted to accompany them on a year's migratory cycle through the Thar Desert. The wish took the form of an image - sand-dunes, sunsets, men in red turbans and women in pink muslin decorated with silver - a romantic ideal. A decade later she was given an opportunity to live out that wish. But it was to take years, and a series of false starts, before she was able to join a dang on migration.
For the Rabari, who had always survived harsh conditions, life had become increasingly grim. The loss of grazing lands, new political boundaries, and the constant threat of thefts, murders and arrests meant that migration had become a treacherous business.
She was determined to live as they lived, to 'enter the frame'. Which meant that she too slept among five thousand sheep, drank Guinea-worm-infested water, survived on goats' milk and roti. But it was not so much the physical discomforts which exhausted her as the isolation imposed by the lack of a common language. Yet solitude was denied her too and crowds gathered wherever she went. It became a journey of extremity and sickness and frightening rages. Sometimes the countryside was beguiling, sometimes brutalized, but always a place in which desperate people fought over few remaining resources. Any lingering romanticism concerning Indian rural life was destroyed. But a profound respect and affection for her hosts was forged. She could return to comfort and security; for the nomads, it was real life.
In this brave and moving journey, Robyn Davidson travels the last pathways of the Rabari, the 'keepers of the way', and in so doing explores, with ruthless honesty, her own desert places. She scours away her original vision and finds beneath both tragedy and human greatness.

Inspired by an enchanting encounter with camel herdsmen at a Hindu festival in Pushkar, travel writer Davidson (Tracks) took a magazine assignment to accompany the nomads of Rajasthan (a region in western India) on their yearly migration cycle. Arriving in Jodhpur on the eve of the Gulf war under the aegis of her friend Narendra, a prince who equips her with an entourage of servants and an obstreperous camel-keeper named Chutra, Davidson soon discovers that the ancient culture of the nomads (who are known either as Rabari or as Raika) is slowly being eradicated, faced with diminishing grazing lands, new political boundaries and the spread of subsidized agriculture and Western culture. This book, as breathtaking but circuitous as the adventures it chronicles, begins to gather steam when Davidson is finally accepted by a dang (a migratory group) and sets off to follow them across the desert. She spends a few months sharing the shepherds' life of extreme deprivation, traveling 30 miles a day on a diet of little more than fetid water and camel's milk, sleeping two hours a night and battling illness and exhaustion, before deciding to return to Jodhpur on foot?which proves an even more perilous journey that ends when her camels die after eating poisonous weeds. By the book's end, Davidson's romantic vision of the peripatetic life has given way to a bitter account of her own dashed expectations and of the exploitation of India's nomads. Although her understanding of nomadism as an emotional and geographical phenomenon remains only partly digested, this book will nevertheless prove absorbing to even the most sedentary of bookshelf-travelers.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Compared with her native Australia, the setting for her best-known book, Tracks (1981), India seemed unbearably congested, dirty, and frenetic to Davidson. But passionately interested in nomadic life and acutely aware of its imminent demise, she was determined to travel with the Rabari, the subcontinent's few remaining traditional nomads, as they herded their sheep across the blistering northwest wasteland. What seemed like a reasonable undertaking soon degenerated into myriad frustrations and infuriating confrontations. The first white-skinned person seen in the region, Davidson was mobbed by aggressive crowds everywhere she went. She could not speak the language and felt "stripped" of her humanity, a freak among the hardworking, brusque Rabari. Her total immersion in their grueling existence exacted a toll on her body, but it was her soul that was tormented the most as she struggled to remain open-minded in spite of her outrage at India's fathomless capacity for suffering. As courageous on paper as on desert sands, Davidson will both disturb and exhilarate readers with the acuity of her observations, the sting of her wit, and the candor of her emotions. Donna Seaman

The nomadic way of life is on the brink of extinction. In this work, Davidson, an author (Tracks, LJ 2/15/81) and Australian journalist who resides in England, vividly recounts her stay among the Rabari, sheep- and camel-herding nomads in northwestern India. Davidson ate, slept, and walked endless sunbaked miles with them. She does not remain clinically aloof from her traveling companions but tells of getting poked, prodded, taken advantage of, and laughed at. Neither cynic nor sentimentalist, she was at times disgusted with the earthy Rabari, whose behavior, she notes, was a baffling mixture of aggression and passivity. At other times she was deeply moved by their kindness and spiritual equanimity. Since her travels with the Rabari consisted of several fragmentary journeys rather than one long trip, her account lacks a certain sweep and sometimes seems repetitive. Nevertheless, her book is valuable for its detail and insight. Highly recommended for public libraries and anthropology and South Asian collections.?Mary C. Kalfatovic, Telesec Lib. Svc., Washington, D.C.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.