“My grandfather was a bandit,” 67-year-old Bhom Singh boomed from his elevated position on an unmade matrimonial bed fashioned from plywood, while his courtiers and clients sat on the rough floor of his kotri, a room in which guests—male guests—are received. The kotri, in the village of Sanawara in Rajasthan’s Jaisalmer district, was a windowless cell, but morning light streamed through the open door, exposing empty beer and bootleg-liquor bottles in the corner. An ornate ensemble of bed, sofa and easy chair, carved out of desert teak, completed the furniture.
Singh’s grandfather was locked away in a jail in Bahawalpur—now a border town in Pakistan—for twelve years. “On his way back, he traded a male riding camel for two female camels. One of the females got lost, but the other one he brought back to Sanawara and started breeding,” he said, after taking a deep drag from his hookah. “Before that, only the maharajas were breeding camels while we ordinary folk totally relied on cattle. When I was ten years old, I dropped out of school to herd camels. Over decades, our herd grew to about a hundred and twenty camels.”
With his slicked-back grey hair, aquiline nose and dark glasses—necessitated by a recent eye operation—Singh has the aura of a mafia don. But he is widely revered locally for his razor-sharp mind and ability to cut through conflicting arguments. Local people rely on him to dispense justice and settle disputes. Whether Hindu or Muslim, high-caste or low-caste, for him, “we are all of the same blood.”
“He is keeping us safe,” Babu Khan Manganiyar, an elderly Muslim visitor to the village, who mostly speaks in verse and is renowned in the region as a reciter of poetry, said. In 2007, Singh was unanimously elected president of the Rajasthan Camel Breeders Association.