HOMER IN INDIA.

Sixteen years ago, I moved to the Indian state of Rajasthan to begin work on a book. Bruce Chatwin was then my hero, and his widow, Elizabeth, had told me about a remote fortress in the desert where Bruce had written his great study of restlessness, "The Songlines." Rohet Garh was built in the early seventeenth century by a Rajput chieftain who had been given the land by the local maharaja as a reward for bravery on the battlefield. It was surrounded by a high, battlemented wall that faced out over a lake. In the morning, light would stream into the bedroom through cusped arches, and reflections from the lake would ripple across the ceiling beams. There were egrets nesting on an island in the lake, and peacocks in the trees at its side.

Though Rohet Garh was relatively close to the capital, New Delhi--only nine hours' drive to the west--it existed in an utterly different world, almost in a different century. In Delhi, the small Indian middle class among whom I lived inhabited a fragile aspirational bubble. On every side, new suburbs were springing up, on land that only a few years ago was billowing winter wheat. As you drove down the Jaipur Highway, however, cars and trucks gave way to camel and bullock carts, denim to dusty cotton dhotis. The farther you went, the drier it got, so that the color began to drain away from the landscape but for the occasional flash of a red sari: a woman winding her way to the village well.

Rohet Garh was the home of a thakur--a Rajasthani gentleman landowner. Secluded in his oasis in the Thar Desert, he had preserved the quiet, ordered way of life he had inherited from his forebears, a way of life not wholly dissimilar to that enjoyed by those reclusive tsarist landlords immortalized by Che-khov and Turgenev. To enter the gates of Rohet Garh was to walk into a world familiar from "A Month in the Country" or "Sketches from a Hunter's Album." Lapdogs careered over croquet lawns. Long-widowed grandmothers and great-aunts held court from far-flung dowager wings. Unmarried daughters would blush into their silks while their father loudly discussed their suitors. Everyone dressed for dinner.

Only the fortnightly expedition into "town" would break the daily routine. The entire family, along with lapdogs, Labradors, and a full complement of servants, would pile into the family jeep. Then they would set off, over the scrub-land, to the house in Jodhpur. There the great-aunts would be wheeled to their rival temples, the unmarried daughters and visiting nieces would buy new saris, and the boys would stock up on cartridges for their sand-grouse and partridge shoots. Thakur Sahib would visit his bank manager, and his club. I would remain in the old fort, and I used to relish the solitude. From my desk, the desert scrub was flat and dry, and its very harshness concentrated the mind. In the following weeks, the pages of the new manuscript began to pile up.

Rajasthan was a profoundly conservative state, even by the standards of India, one of the most conservative countries in the world. During the Raj, around two-fifths of India's vast landmass remained under the nominal control of its indigenous princely rulers, and much of this territory lay in Rajasthan, where semi-feudal rule had effec-tively continued up to 1971, when Indira Gandhi finally abolished the maharajas.

The absence of any overt forms of colonial British intrusion meant that many aspects of medieval Indian society had remained intact. On the one hand, this meant that the grip of the old landlords--like Thakur Sahib--was stronger here than elsewhere; cases of ritual widow-burning, or sati, were not unknown. On the other hand, castes of nomadic musicians, miniaturists and muralists, jugglers and acrobats, bards and mimes were still practicing their skills. Every prominent landholding family in the Rajput caste, I discovered, inherited a family of oral genealogists, musicians, and praise singers, who celebrated the family's lineage and deeds. It was considered a disgrace if these minstrels were forced by neglect to formally "divorce" their patrons. Then they would break the strings of their instruments and bury them in front of their patron's house, cutting the family off from the accumulated centuries of ancestral songs, stories, and traditions. It was the oral equivalent of a library or a family archive being burned to cinders.

While I was staying at Rohet, I heard about what seemed to be the most remarkable survival of all: the existence of several orally transmitted epic poems. Unlike the ancient epics of Europe--the Iliad, the Odyssey, Beowulf, and the Nibelungenlied (the basis of Wagner's "Ring Cycle")--which were now the province only of academics and literature classes, the epics of Rajasthan were still very much alive. They were preserved by a caste of wandering bhopas--shamans and bards--who travelled from village to village, staging performances.