Jaunsari Erotic

The Jaunsaris are the hill people of Jaunsar-Bawar, a wedge of steep country in the northwest corner of Uttarakhand, pinned between the Yamuna and the Tons. What sets them apart is direction: their neighbors to the east are Garhwali, but Jaunsari life faces west, toward Sirmaur and the Shimla hills of Himachal Pradesh. The region belonged to the Sirmaur kingdom before the Gorkhas overran it, and the British attached it to Dehradun only after the war of 1814 to 1816. The language follows the same logic. Jaunsari is a Western Pahari tongue, closer to Sirmauri across the river than to Garhwali next door, with a Bawari variety spoken in the higher, snowier north.

They are Hindu, but the working center of religious life is Mahasu Devta, four brother deities whose main temple stands at Hanol on the Tons. One brother, Chalda Mahasu, has no fixed seat at all: he travels by palanquin from village to village on a circuit that takes years to complete. Mahasu is judge as much as god, and an oath sworn in his name still settles disputes that might otherwise reach a courtroom. Villages are grouped into units called khats, each under a hereditary headman, the sayana. Families trace their descent to the Pandavas of the Mahabharata, and some in Bawar to the rival Kauravas. That epic claim was long the stated charter for fraternal polyandry, in which brothers shared one wife and kept the terraced land undivided. The practice has largely faded, though it still dominates what outsiders write about the place. Less noticed are customs that gave women unusual room: bride price rather than dowry, a wedding party that travels from the bride's village to the groom's, accepted divorce and remarriage, and a sharp distinction between a woman's freedom as a daughter in her natal village and her duties as a wife in her husband's.

In 1967 the government granted Scheduled Tribe status by territory rather than by community, so landowning Khasa Rajputs and Brahmins hold the same tribal label as the Koltas and Bajgis, Dalit groups who historically worked those fields as bound laborers and served as village drummers. That arrangement remains a live argument. Most families still farm ginger, tomatoes, peas and kidney beans on terraces, with apples higher up. The calendar turns on Bissu in April, with its mock archery duels called thoda, the winter feasting of Maroj, and in many villages a Diwali kept a full month after the rest of India, lit by wooden torches instead of fireworks.