Untitled Document

Community: Kalandar

Socio-Economic Status:
The Kalandars belong to the OBC category i.e. they are included in the category of OTHER BACKWARD TRIBES by the Government of India, along with the Adivasis, forest tribals, and all those communities which make their living from the forest and its resources, or work with animals as entertainers. It implies the government has recognised their economically deprived status and that they have in a way become displaced in the present development of this country and special assistance is to be rendered to them through government schemes. However the government has failed to plan any schemes of housing or land ownership, nor provided this community with employment or even the basic necessities of clean water, sanitation, and simple medical aid and primary education. The Kalandars by and large have not bothered to register themselves with the Government offices because of their lack of faith in the government’s commitment to give them their “rights”. However this attitude is changing and over the one and a half years of the investigators interaction with this community, a new aggressiveness has permeated them, significantly co-joined to their belief that the old traditional methods of earning will not suffice and they need to find new sources of employment and sustenance. Any rehabilitation scheme stands a good chance of success because of the current economic stresses and deprivations of the Kalandar community.

Origins and Sub - Divisions:
The Kalandar Community were originally Muslim gypsies with a highly nomadic life style, moving from place to place with their tents and animals. They earned a living from a large number of performing animals, for example, monkeys, bears, fighting roosters and pigeons, and kept others as pets to display to their audience such as civet cats, owls, falcons, and partridges.This mastery over animals created an appropriate awe when they tried to sell medicines and talismans as cures for illnesses, or tried to hold their audiences’ attention during the performance of magic tricks and acrobatic stunts. To a large extent the Kalandars of Karnataka still keep to this highly nomadic life and we found they moved every few days to a new camping ground, often walking 20-30 miles a day, moving far more frequently than their Northern counterparts. They still use light tents to live in, cook in the open and carry their poultry and goats and other animals with them as they move from village to village. By contrast the Northern Kalandar prefers to move between his own settlements and kith and kin even when on the road. Over the years the Kalandar community became more stratified and those dancing the monkeys came to be called “madaris”. They mastered the art of playing the tabla like instrument called the “Damru” and exclusively danced the monkeys in the village or town. Yet another category was that of the “Bazigars” who fascinated the crowds with their rope climbing, trapeze walking and gymnastics. The “Katputlis” made puppets and performed puppet shows. The “Jadugars” performed only magic tricks depending on the sleight of hand and never used any animal during their performance. The Kalandar who owned, trained and danced bears considers himself to be the true “Masth Kalandar”. They are still given a great deal of respect in the village as their potential to earn is considered to be more, as well as the bear ranks higher as an animal of mystique and worth than the other animals reared by this community. Each community used to maintain its separate identities, and never interchanged professions, or intermarried, or shared work or festivities with each other. However this has begun to change and our survey showed many bear owners had, over the last five years, sought alternate means of employment to earn a living, thus blurring these so called “caste” distinctions.

Alternative Employment Avenues:
Over the last 5-8 years, many of the bear-dancing Kalandars have only been able to afford monkeys and dance them for a livelihood. So too many of the Kalandars have moved over to magic tricks, card, rope and handkerchief tricks, to earn a living, as the use of an animal in their performances brought them more police and municipality harassment than earnings. So too while Kalandar families still insist one family member dance a bear, since it has been the family profession for several generations, other family members take up jobs outside the village although they stay in close touch with their community. Many of them work today as unskilled labour on factory and housing sites, others weave baskets of bamboo, or make metal wire bird cages, or work as scrap dealers and in workshops repairing vessels and buckets. In one village the Kalandars had begun small businesses in semi-precious stones, making astrological rings and lockets, talismans and amulets. In several villages the Kalandars had hired handcarts for which they paid a rental of Rs20 per month and eked out a living selling seasonal vegetables and fruits. Yet others have become truck drivers or apprenticed themselves as mechanics at motor repair shops. It is significant that in the last 5-10 years the preferred method of safely transporting cubs purchased at bear markets and near “Dangs” or forests has been through friendly truck drivers, according to the Kalandars, and this friendly network also facilitates their travelling through North India and Karnataka, and allows them to dance their bears in far-off cities of Jammu and Kashmir, Nepal and the North-East.

Community Life:
The Kalandars spend most of their time eking out a precarious livelihood and rearing large families, on an average consisting of 10 - 12 members. They have a tight network of social and marital relationships and the villages we visited were held together with bonds of marriage and kinship. Their loyalty to one of their clan surpasses all fear of laws or the government. Initially they suspect any member from the outside world and are slow to give respect or trust to outsiders. Their society is democratic and lives by simple rules. They elect a Panch or Choudhary and he represents them in all meetings of the Panchayat, where all the heads of the villages gather to sort out quarrels or problems.
Each village thus sent its Panch to give their point of view in any clan gathering or Panchayat, such as the large meeting we attended on 4/8/96 at BV4. At this meeting it was instructive to see the simple commonsense and fairness with which discussions were conducted and decisions arrived at by a simple consensus. All the heads of the 29 villages of North India that we were to visit were present. The investigators had to prove they could be trusted not to expose the entire ring of villages and endanger their livelihood, before we were allowed to continue. So too marriages and divorces are regulated through the panchayat, property disputes and all quarrels are settled through a meeting of the panchayat. A meeting can be convened rapidly through word of mouth using the network of buses and trucks on the highway. The decision of the panchayat is never challenged and any rebellion leads to social ostracism. Some of the villages we visited dated as far back as 200 years on the outskirts of Kanpur and Lucknow while the ones at Agra claimed to be 250 years old. One of their largest settlements outside Jaipur was a mere 75 years old. A sense of history pervades and the village elders orally pass down the tales connected with the founding of their settlement. Thus the BV 7 contained 325 members of about 35-40 families, and they traced their settlement directly to the Kalandars of Panipat, and they came here 7 “Takiyas” (generations) ago. Four brothers migrated with their families and multiplied. The village is also famous for its wrestlers, such as Dada Darbari and Mallu Pahalwan, and its hunters, such as Makhan Roshan. They pride themselves on the strength of their mud houses and their roofs made of “sapera” (snake) grass. They had constructed a cement tank to hold water and hired a school teacher for Rs 400 a month to teach their children the Koran; this rated as “progress” in a Kalandar village. BV19 and BV24 were similarly traced to ancient grants of land by the mughal kings to their court entertainers. BV24 was founded 250 years ago by Wajid Ali Badshah and papers are still available with their Panch to prove this. The village had 1500 members of about 65-70 families. A few of the settlements such as BV12, BV20, BV5, BV30 were merely tents stretching out over a barren unoccupied field. In Karnataka only two such large well established settlements above 50 years old have been traced, with a population of over 750 members; and a total of about 65 “licensed“ bears exist in the State. (Srinath, WWF, Bangalore.) However very few of the Kalandars actually own their own land even in the older established villages, and their mud huts and tents grow up around one or two of the richer clan members who actually have papers to show land ownership, and who construct their houses on higher ground using stone or brick. By and large the villages examined had only 20% permanent housing; 50% lived in mud houses which needed to be rebuilt after every monsoon, and 30% lived in tents made of bamboos with tarpaulin or plastic sheets as roofing. Large parts of all the

villages were underwater, and mosquitoes bred freely. Malaria, conjunctivitis and other eye infections, chronic malnutrition and potbellied rickety children was the norm in all the villages. Those close to the cities still did not seem to have any clinic or first aid centre near them. The further off the villages were from urban areas the cleaner and healthier were the inhabitants and their income / diet was more likely to be supplemented by goat and poultry reared by them. By and large their villages have no sewage systems and no running water and only in two cases had they “borrowed” electricity from overhead wires. The passages between the homes were unpaved and under water. Only one village had a well with brackish water and one had a tank to store rain water in. The Kalandars had to request water from neighbouring settlements. By and large no medical aid was available for the people as well as the animals and they relied on themselves for treatment. All but three villages had a Madrasah near them where the children could learn the Koran but government schools providing secular education were close to only four villages. The girls are not educated or sent to school. Most of the older Kalandars above the age of 30 yrs had 2-3 years of religious education but no secular education. The younger generation often had 3-5 years in a government school but the high degree of unemployment amongst the youth (almost 95%) discouraged them from studying further. Amongst all the villages visited, only two Kalandars had done their Masters degree and after several years of futile search for government employment, one had begun his own welding unit, while another had become a “Hakim” or rural doctor. Five others had completed high school and were idle at home being now untrained for their traditional trades.

Village Structure and habitat:

A typical Kalandar village is well set back from the national highways or main roads and generally camouflaged by dense, thorny, tree growth or scrub. In urban areas it is usually hidden behind the worst slums or in the peripheries of the town, with the path leading to it being narrow and winding. Should a police raid be conducted this gives them time to exit, as the warning reaches them before the officers. Usually the village has a set of paths behind to assist such escapes with or without their animals. In BV29 on September 20, a raid was conducted by the DFO, Chandigarh, with 8 police officers. The other communities sympathise with the Kalandars, so warning reached them minutes before the officers. Twenty bears with their owners escaped by using the roofs of their houses as exit paths which led to a narrow path at the back of the settlement. Their villages also use the dried branches of the Kikar tree, which has large thorns and heavy leafing, and droops close to the ground, as fencing between houses and to create enclosures for their bears. The bears are well hidden behind piled up dried scrub and kikar branches. Sometimes, as in BV13 ,where over 31 bears were examined by the investigators and the Kalandars often had upto 45 bears, large pits are dug among the low hanging kikars and the bears are safely staked in the pits. The curious passerby does not detect the pits; one only sees level stretches of flat marshy land

and heavy kikar growth. In BV1 the bears are simply kept in the chicken coops which are large woven baskets with a dia. of 4-5 feet and can easily accommodate bear cubs. One sees the hens pecking around and inside and only close investigation reveals a cub. It is important to note that these techniques of camouflage are needed nearer the city of Delhi or the main cities of Haryana, Rajasthan and Punjab, where raids are common and harassment is expected. There has been an increase in this over the last five years according to the Kalandars. In most of rural Rajasthan and parts of Uttar Pradesh and Karnataka, states where the Kalandars are not troubled too much, the atmosphere is more relaxed and the bears are kept closer to the homes, in front yards, and on platforms in the central meeting place area, or comfortably reclining under trees and under the rope-strung charpoys of the owners, along with the goats, monkeys, partridges etc. Counting the bear stakes accompanied with the typical shallow depressions dug by the bear to make itself comfortable, became one way of checking on the number of bears in a village, although leeway has to be kept for the fact that the bears are made to change position 2-3 times during the day according to the position of the sun. There is usually a clearing for village meetings next to the house of the Panch ; if there is a hand pump or well in that village, that too can be found here; and the entire area around each house is paved with a mixture of cow dung and mud that works as an antiseptic and hygienic flooring; even those who are in tents keep the interior clean by paving the floor with this mixture. Their cooking areas are outside the huts, so too the family cooking vessels are stored outside, large baked earthenware pitchers hold their store of drinking water, and large 3’ feet high mud pitchers are made to store grain and rice. Cow dung pats and dry twigs and branches collected by the children constitute their fuel.

Role of the bear in Kalandar Economy:
Owning a bear definitely continues to be a source of pride and holds significance for the Kalandar. In spite of the fact that the cost of a bear cub under three months was anywhere between Rs 3000 and Rs 5000; the cost of a slightly older cub varied between Rs 6000 to Rs 8000; and the cost of a fully trained adult bear ranged between Rs 15000 to Rs 25000 there is still active buying and selling, despite signs of obvious poverty. The Kalandar claims to “borrow” this money and incur heavy debts to buy a bear but our questionnaires reveal a high percentage of trade between the Kalandar and the middlemen at the bear markets as well as between the Kalandars themselves, mainly because of the high mortality rate of the sloth bear in captivity, particularly in the first three years of its life. Most of the Kalandars, about 83%, have been dancing bears in their family for 5-7 generations. However only 10% had visited the forests / capture areas to actually buy their bears and even less had witnessed the trapping process. These were significantly from the older group of Kalandars, above 50 years of age.

The younger generation confessed to not having any forest survival skills and no experience of witnessing the trapping of cubs done by the tribals. A dancing Bear works on an average 6 hours a day according to the Kalandar, but on festivals, at village fairs and at marriages, or to celebrate the birth of a child, a dancing bear could spend 10 hours a day catering to the crowds. According to the Kalandar the bear becomes extremely irritable by evening and it is difficult to control without giving it, its evening meal. Thus they too prefer to give the bear some rest in the day and particularly during the evening after its feed. The earnings from a bear average Rs 2000 to Rs 3000 per month during the good seasons which in North India are the winter months when foreign tourists visit and hotels and Kalakaar trusts arrange large shows. In BV4 for example five bears are on monthly employment with government hotels, 3-6 km away from their settlement, and they spend three hours in the morning and four to five hours in the evening, entertaining the hotel guests. So too BV10 , BV13 and BV16 had as their chief income, large shows organised in major tourist cities by hotels, both private and government run. Their income falls to Rs 1000 to Rs 1500 per month when they have to rely on a rural audience. However the dancing bear owner relies heavily on his rural audience for donated rice, wheat and other lentils and seasonal vegetables.




	Community: Kalandar	Contents

	Socio-Economic Status: The Kalandars belong to the OBC category i.e. they are included in the category of OTHER BACKWARD TRIBES by the Government of India, along with the Adivasis, forest tribals, and all those communities which make their living from the forest and its resources, or work with animals as entertainers. It implies the government has recognised their economically deprived status and that they have in a way become displaced in the present development of this country and special assistance is to be rendered to them through government schemes. However the government has failed to plan any schemes of housing or land ownership, nor provided this community with employment or even the basic necessities of clean water, sanitation, and simple medical aid and primary education. The Kalandars by and large have not bothered to register themselves with the Government offices because of their lack of faith in the government’s commitment to give them their “rights”. However this attitude is changing and over the one and a half years of the investigators interaction with this community, a new aggressiveness has permeated them, significantly co-joined to their belief that the old traditional methods of earning will not suffice and they need to find new sources of employment and sustenance. Any rehabilitation scheme stands a good chance of success because of the current economic stresses and deprivations of the Kalandar community.
	Origins and Sub - Divisions: The Kalandar Community were originally Muslim gypsies with a highly nomadic life style, moving from place to place with their tents and animals. They earned a living from a large number of performing animals, for example, monkeys, bears, fighting roosters and pigeons, and kept others as pets to display to their audience such as civet cats, owls, falcons, and partridges.This mastery over animals created an appropriate awe when they tried to sell medicines and talismans as cures for illnesses, or tried to hold their audiences’ attention during the performance of magic tricks and acrobatic stunts. To a large extent the Kalandars of Karnataka still keep to this highly nomadic life and we found they moved every few days to a new camping ground, often walking 20-30 miles a day, moving far more frequently than their Northern counterparts. They still use light tents to live in, cook in the open and carry their poultry and goats and other animals with them as they move from village to village. By contrast the Northern Kalandar prefers to move between his own settlements and kith and kin even when on the road. Over the years the Kalandar community became more stratified and those dancing the monkeys came to be called “madaris”. They mastered the art of playing the tabla like instrument called the “Damru” and exclusively danced the monkeys in the village or town. Yet another category was that of the “Bazigars” who fascinated the crowds with their rope climbing, trapeze walking and gymnastics. The “Katputlis” made puppets and performed puppet shows. The “Jadugars” performed only magic tricks depending on the sleight of hand and never used any animal during their performance. The Kalandar who owned, trained and danced bears considers himself to be the true “Masth Kalandar”. They are still given a great deal of respect in the village as their potential to earn is considered to be more, as well as the bear ranks higher as an animal of mystique and worth than the other animals reared by this community. Each community used to maintain its separate identities, and never interchanged professions, or intermarried, or shared work or festivities with each other. However this has begun to change and our survey showed many bear owners had, over the last five years, sought alternate means of employment to earn a living, thus blurring these so called “caste” distinctions.
	Alternative Employment Avenues: Over the last 5-8 years, many of the bear-dancing Kalandars have only been able to afford monkeys and dance them for a livelihood. So too many of the Kalandars have moved over to magic tricks, card, rope and handkerchief tricks, to earn a living, as the use of an animal in their performances brought them more police and municipality harassment than earnings. So too while Kalandar families still insist one family member dance a bear, since it has been the family profession for several generations, other family members take up jobs outside the village although they stay in close touch with their community. Many of them work today as unskilled labour on factory and housing sites, others weave baskets of bamboo, or make metal wire bird cages, or work as scrap dealers and in workshops repairing vessels and buckets. In one village the Kalandars had begun small businesses in semi-precious stones, making astrological rings and lockets, talismans and amulets. In several villages the Kalandars had hired handcarts for which they paid a rental of Rs20 per month and eked out a living selling seasonal vegetables and fruits. Yet others have become truck drivers or apprenticed themselves as mechanics at motor repair shops. It is significant that in the last 5-10 years the preferred method of safely transporting cubs purchased at bear markets and near “Dangs” or forests has been through friendly truck drivers, according to the Kalandars, and this friendly network also facilitates their travelling through North India and Karnataka, and allows them to dance their bears in far-off cities of Jammu and Kashmir, Nepal and the North-East.
	Community Life: The Kalandars spend most of their time eking out a precarious livelihood and rearing large families, on an average consisting of 10 - 12 members. They have a tight network of social and marital relationships and the villages we visited were held together with bonds of marriage and kinship. Their loyalty to one of their clan surpasses all fear of laws or the government. Initially they suspect any member from the outside world and are slow to give respect or trust to outsiders. Their society is democratic and lives by simple rules. They elect a Panch or Choudhary and he represents them in all meetings of the Panchayat, where all the heads of the villages gather to sort out quarrels or problems. Each village thus sent its Panch to give their point of view in any clan gathering or Panchayat, such as the large meeting we attended on 4/8/96 at BV4. At this meeting it was instructive to see the simple commonsense and fairness with which discussions were conducted and decisions arrived at by a simple consensus. All the heads of the 29 villages of North India that we were to visit were present. The investigators had to prove they could be trusted not to expose the entire ring of villages and endanger their livelihood, before we were allowed to continue. So too marriages and divorces are regulated through the panchayat, property disputes and all quarrels are settled through a meeting of the panchayat. A meeting can be convened rapidly through word of mouth using the network of buses and trucks on the highway. The decision of the panchayat is never challenged and any rebellion leads to social ostracism. Some of the villages we visited dated as far back as 200 years on the outskirts of Kanpur and Lucknow while the ones at Agra claimed to be 250 years old. One of their largest settlements outside Jaipur was a mere 75 years old. A sense of history pervades and the village elders orally pass down the tales connected with the founding of their settlement. Thus the BV 7 contained 325 members of about 35-40 families, and they traced their settlement directly to the Kalandars of Panipat, and they came here 7 “Takiyas” (generations) ago. Four brothers migrated with their families and multiplied. The village is also famous for its wrestlers, such as Dada Darbari and Mallu Pahalwan, and its hunters, such as Makhan Roshan. They pride themselves on the strength of their mud houses and their roofs made of “sapera” (snake) grass. They had constructed a cement tank to hold water and hired a school teacher for Rs 400 a month to teach their children the Koran; this rated as “progress” in a Kalandar village. BV19 and BV24 were similarly traced to ancient grants of land by the mughal kings to their court entertainers. BV24 was founded 250 years ago by Wajid Ali Badshah and papers are still available with their Panch to prove this. The village had 1500 members of about 65-70 families. A few of the settlements such as BV12, BV20, BV5, BV30 were merely tents stretching out over a barren unoccupied field. In Karnataka only two such large well established settlements above 50 years old have been traced, with a population of over 750 members; and a total of about 65 “licensed“ bears exist in the State. (Srinath, WWF, Bangalore.) However very few of the Kalandars actually own their own land even in the older established villages, and their mud huts and tents grow up around one or two of the richer clan members who actually have papers to show land ownership, and who construct their houses on higher ground using stone or brick. By and large the villages examined had only 20% permanent housing; 50% lived in mud houses which needed to be rebuilt after every monsoon, and 30% lived in tents made of bamboos with tarpaulin or plastic sheets as roofing. Large parts of all the
	villages were underwater, and mosquitoes bred freely. Malaria, conjunctivitis and other eye infections, chronic malnutrition and potbellied rickety children was the norm in all the villages. Those close to the cities still did not seem to have any clinic or first aid centre near them. The further off the villages were from urban areas the cleaner and healthier were the inhabitants and their income / diet was more likely to be supplemented by goat and poultry reared by them. By and large their villages have no sewage systems and no running water and only in two cases had they “borrowed” electricity from overhead wires. The passages between the homes were unpaved and under water. Only one village had a well with brackish water and one had a tank to store rain water in. The Kalandars had to request water from neighbouring settlements. By and large no medical aid was available for the people as well as the animals and they relied on themselves for treatment. All but three villages had a Madrasah near them where the children could learn the Koran but government schools providing secular education were close to only four villages. The girls are not educated or sent to school. Most of the older Kalandars above the age of 30 yrs had 2-3 years of religious education but no secular education. The younger generation often had 3-5 years in a government school but the high degree of unemployment amongst the youth (almost 95%) discouraged them from studying further. Amongst all the villages visited, only two Kalandars had done their Masters degree and after several years of futile search for government employment, one had begun his own welding unit, while another had become a “Hakim” or rural doctor. Five others had completed high school and were idle at home being now untrained for their traditional trades.
	Village Structure and habitat:
	A typical Kalandar village is well set back from the national highways or main roads and generally camouflaged by dense, thorny, tree growth or scrub. In urban areas it is usually hidden behind the worst slums or in the peripheries of the town, with the path leading to it being narrow and winding. Should a police raid be conducted this gives them time to exit, as the warning reaches them before the officers. Usually the village has a set of paths behind to assist such escapes with or without their animals. In BV29 on September 20, a raid was conducted by the DFO, Chandigarh, with 8 police officers. The other communities sympathise with the Kalandars, so warning reached them minutes before the officers. Twenty bears with their owners escaped by using the roofs of their houses as exit paths which led to a narrow path at the back of the settlement. Their villages also use the dried branches of the Kikar tree, which has large thorns and heavy leafing, and droops close to the ground, as fencing between houses and to create enclosures for their bears. The bears are well hidden behind piled up dried scrub and kikar branches. Sometimes, as in BV13 ,where over 31 bears were examined by the investigators and the Kalandars often had upto 45 bears, large pits are dug among the low hanging kikars and the bears are safely staked in the pits. The curious passerby does not detect the pits; one only sees level stretches of flat marshy land
	and heavy kikar growth. In BV1 the bears are simply kept in the chicken coops which are large woven baskets with a dia. of 4-5 feet and can easily accommodate bear cubs. One sees the hens pecking around and inside and only close investigation reveals a cub. It is important to note that these techniques of camouflage are needed nearer the city of Delhi or the main cities of Haryana, Rajasthan and Punjab, where raids are common and harassment is expected. There has been an increase in this over the last five years according to the Kalandars. In most of rural Rajasthan and parts of Uttar Pradesh and Karnataka, states where the Kalandars are not troubled too much, the atmosphere is more relaxed and the bears are kept closer to the homes, in front yards, and on platforms in the central meeting place area, or comfortably reclining under trees and under the rope-strung charpoys of the owners, along with the goats, monkeys, partridges etc. Counting the bear stakes accompanied with the typical shallow depressions dug by the bear to make itself comfortable, became one way of checking on the number of bears in a village, although leeway has to be kept for the fact that the bears are made to change position 2-3 times during the day according to the position of the sun. There is usually a clearing for village meetings next to the house of the Panch ; if there is a hand pump or well in that village, that too can be found here; and the entire area around each house is paved with a mixture of cow dung and mud that works as an antiseptic and hygienic flooring; even those who are in tents keep the interior clean by paving the floor with this mixture. Their cooking areas are outside the huts, so too the family cooking vessels are stored outside, large baked earthenware pitchers hold their store of drinking water, and large 3’ feet high mud pitchers are made to store grain and rice. Cow dung pats and dry twigs and branches collected by the children constitute their fuel.

	Role of the bear in Kalandar Economy: Owning a bear definitely continues to be a source of pride and holds significance for the Kalandar. In spite of the fact that the cost of a bear cub under three months was anywhere between Rs 3000 and Rs 5000; the cost of a slightly older cub varied between Rs 6000 to Rs 8000; and the cost of a fully trained adult bear ranged between Rs 15000 to Rs 25000 there is still active buying and selling, despite signs of obvious poverty. The Kalandar claims to “borrow” this money and incur heavy debts to buy a bear but our questionnaires reveal a high percentage of trade between the Kalandar and the middlemen at the bear markets as well as between the Kalandars themselves, mainly because of the high mortality rate of the sloth bear in captivity, particularly in the first three years of its life. Most of the Kalandars, about 83%, have been dancing bears in their family for 5-7 generations. However only 10% had visited the forests / capture areas to actually buy their bears and even less had witnessed the trapping process. These were significantly from the older group of Kalandars, above 50 years of age.
	The younger generation confessed to not having any forest survival skills and no experience of witnessing the trapping of cubs done by the tribals. A dancing Bear works on an average 6 hours a day according to the Kalandar, but on festivals, at village fairs and at marriages, or to celebrate the birth of a child, a dancing bear could spend 10 hours a day catering to the crowds. According to the Kalandar the bear becomes extremely irritable by evening and it is difficult to control without giving it, its evening meal. Thus they too prefer to give the bear some rest in the day and particularly during the evening after its feed. The earnings from a bear average Rs 2000 to Rs 3000 per month during the good seasons which in North India are the winter months when foreign tourists visit and hotels and Kalakaar trusts arrange large shows. In BV4 for example five bears are on monthly employment with government hotels, 3-6 km away from their settlement, and they spend three hours in the morning and four to five hours in the evening, entertaining the hotel guests. So too BV10 , BV13 and BV16 had as their chief income, large shows organised in major tourist cities by hotels, both private and government run. Their income falls to Rs 1000 to Rs 1500 per month when they have to rely on a rural audience. However the dancing bear owner relies heavily on his rural audience for donated rice, wheat and other lentils and seasonal vegetables.
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