The Raika Life: Story of A People in Motion
“I was owned by no one, and I believe that is the only life worth living," said Jomaram ji Dewasi
In the Jalore district of Rajasthan, Khushboo Charan runs an alternative school called Sureshwar, a name shared by both the village and the school. The village is home largely to members of the Raika community, pastoral nomads who are found across Rajasthan, Gujarat, Haryana, Punjab, and Madhya Pradesh, though Rajasthan remains their heartland.
The school, in its simplicity and warmth, a space where Raika children could experience equality, safety, and a sense of belonging, became our window into the community. Many of these children don’t have such spaces even at home, as their parents, active members of the nomadic Raika, Dewasi, and Rabari community, are often away, travelling on their dera (caravan).
Between the sacred & the stifled
With their belongings fastened atop cattle and camels, Raika families journey from their base, most often Rajasthan, migrating on foot through the Kutch, Haryana, Punjab, Malwa, Madhya Pradesh, and at times, as far as Maharashtra. But like many other nomadic communities in the Indian subcontinent, the Raikas are facing what can only be called a slow, long-drawn erasure.
While there isn’t an accurate census of the Raika population, the League for Pastoral Peoples estimates their numbers to be around one million. The community is internally diverse, with the Maru Raika spread across Rajasthan and the Godwad Raika concentrated in the Pali, Jalore, and Sirohi districts. Historically, they were camel breeders for royal households, and their origin myth connects them directly to Lord Shiva and Parvati, Shiva having created them to care for camels born of Parvati. This sacred origin is also why camel meat is never consumed by Raikas. Yet, despite their rich heritage, the community has faced a quiet but systematic dismantling of its way of life. Colonial forest laws in the 19th and early 20th centuries restricted their access to grazing lands, while post-independence policies prioritised agriculture and conservation over pastoralism. Development projects and changing land-use patterns further disrupted ancient migratory routes. As commons vanished and mobility was stigmatised, the Raika found themselves edged out of both geography and public memory.
Their lives, once entwined with nature and movement, are now on the verge of a total shift. More families want to educate their children, and for all the right reasons. The sentiment being “our way of life is not possible now and the kids deserve better”.
With education comes the desire, sometimes the pressure, to settle. Young adults no longer wish to live the life of constant migration while the older generation finds it harder to continue, not just because of age but because the very landscape that supported their lifestyle is changing.
Turbans, textiles and timeless classics as identifiers
The Raika have a distinct identity like most communities, yes, but their sartorial presence makes them unmistakably commanding. The men stand tall, wrapped in crisp white attire and crowned with a vivid red turban. A life spent in the open, herding, walking, weathering the elements, has shaped their posture, their stance, their very aura into something striking.
They move with herds of a thousand sheep, a lathi (stick) resting on their shoulders, hands hanging loosely. There’s even a saying, you could walk alone through the jungle and fear no one, but you’d think twice before messing with a Raika and his lathi. They belonged everywhere and nowhere at once, feeling most at home on the roads, in the forests, collecting ber, timroo, mahua, heading towards whichever direction they chose from their desert homes.
While the men are draped in red and white, the Raika women are the embodiment of gothic elegance, dressed in shades of blue or all black, their blouses cut and stitched in ways that would give even the boldest Indian designers a run for their money. And ah, the jewellery! One can not help but marvel at its timelessness, how effortlessly it carries tradition, and yet, how often it is being replicated by Indian and international brands without a whisper of acknowledgment to its origins.
But the Raika stand out most in the way they perceive life, time, and existence itself. Their entire understanding of these concepts is so radically different from the mainstream worldview that it almost feels unsettling. Like there might be more to it, that it can’t be so cut and dry, but it is. They don’t dwell on the past or worry about the future, they do not obsess over accumulating wealth for their children. They are taught by the lives they live, they exist purely in the now.
In conversation with a Raika elder, we asked what filled his mind during the long walks and endless journeys. He simply said, “We don’t think. We just are.” To him, thinking, “sochna”, was not just unnecessary, but a burden, something that weighed people down. In fact, he dismissed it entirely, saying “yeh aaj ki bimari hai”—"a sickness of today."
“We would walk all day,” one recalled. “And at night, we’d unload everything– tents, food, clothes, whatever the animals carried, and spread it around us in a small space, making that patch of land, under the open sky, our home for the night. The next morning, after our cup of camel milk, because tea was entirely foreign to us, we’d eat whatever we had brought with us, pack up everything again, and start walking. Every single night, we did this.”
Of bajra, ber and belonging
Food, its ingredients, recipes, and traditions, is a mirror of who people are and where they’ve been. When we set out on this journey, we assumed that, given their extensive travels across three to four states, the Raika diet would reflect a fusion of regional influences. While we can’t say for certain that this isn’t true, what we observed told a different story.
Perhaps because they had no fixed home, no permanent anchor, the Raika held tightly to the foods they carried from home. Their diet consisted of familiarity—bajre ki roti, fresh milk (a daily staple, as they travelled with their cattle), and small, foraged ingredients like timroo, peelu, and kachchi kairi along with simple unembellished dishes like dal, kadhi, khichda, bajri ki raab.
Camel milk made up a large part of the Raika diet, a beverage second only to water. Raika men were often seen storing aak ke patte (calotropis leaves) in their turbans, using them as makeshift bowls to drink camel milk whenever the opportunity arose. Today, while camel milk is gaining recognition for its medicinal properties and institutions like the Camel Research Center in Bikaner are exploring the field of camel breeding and its potential through products like camel milk ghee, kulfi, and cheese, the animal itself is in sharp decline. India's camel population has seen a sharp dip, from nearly one million in 1961 to just around 200,000 today. This decline is most visible in Rajasthan, home to nearly 80% of the country's camels. For the Raika, who have revered and relied on camels for generations, the loss of these sacrosanct animals is not just ecological, but personal.
In response, the Center is also training members of the community to produce and commercialise these camel milk-based products, an initiative that offers the Raika a path toward sustainable settlement but also puts their traditional knowledge of camel breeding to use in stabilising the state’s declining camel population.
While these raika’s in and around Ahore, had their own experiences, among the Rabaris now settled in Surachand village at the border of the state, food and the stories behind it had taken on a different form– one shaped by acute scarcity. With limited resources, they had learned to make flatbreads and meals from ingredients one wouldn’t even think could be turned into food — like shaving the trunk of the khejdi tree, turning it into flour, and using it to make rotis.
An elder woman of the community confessed, “You ask why we didn't use wheat. We never even saw wheat, let alone eat it!” This was a common thread we saw running across the food culture of the community, that wheat really wasn't the center of their diets, in fact they never even ate it as adults and as a result some still can't digest it because their body is not used to it.
In the mid-20th century, as India faced severe food shortages, the Green Revolution introduced high-yielding wheat varieties along with chemical fertilisers and irrigation. While this increased wheat production and helped ease food insecurity, it pushed traditional grains like millets and local jowar to the margins. Without subsidies, these indigenous crops became less profitable for farmers and too costly for rural families.
“We suffered a lot,” one elderly woman told us. “We’ve seen difficult times. If I sit and remember, I might cry. But the truth is, even through the struggle, our bodies were strong. We didn’t know illness. We didn’t know doctors or hospitals. We had little to eat, yes, but whatever we had was pure. Today, you people don’t even get pure ghee, or even real grain, so what does the rest of it even matter?”
The women, with a hefty dose of humour and honesty, shared how they gave birth in the jungle, often sitting upright or in the Indian squat position, something that, in all honesty, makes more physiological sense than the Western practice of lying on one’s back. They laughed as they said it, but there was wisdom tucked into that laughter, something undaunting passed from mother to daughter, generation to generation.
For the Raika, inheritance isn’t material. If a Raika man today runs his own business, more often than not, he is the first in his lineage to do so. What they truly inherit isn’t land or wealth — it’s a set of values, a natural need for the open sky, and the memory of a borderless world they once called home.
Change is the nature of all that exists. We can’t afford to look back and only romanticise or criticize the past based on the lens we choose. What we can do, and must do, is look forward with openness, embrace progress where it’s needed, but also remember. To take note of what once was.
Because this is inheritance too. The kind that lives in stories, in food, in the folds of a turban, and in the sheer confidence of a community that has walked miles with nothing but faith in their way of life.
Written by Hemlata Chauhan during field research trip in Godwar region of Rajasthan, March 2025
