The Thar, which is today divided by an international boundary, has historically been a frontier region connecting Punjab, Multan, Sindh, Gujarat and Rajasthan. Nomadic Narrativeslooks at the desert as a historical region shaped through the mobility of its inhabitants, who were warriors, pastoralists, traders, ascetics and bards, often in overlapping capacities, exchanging mobile wealth and equally mobile narratives.

It challenges the frames of Mughal-Rajput relationships generally employed to explore the histories of the Thar, arguing that Rajputana remains an inadequate category to explore polities located in this frontier region, where along with Rajputs, a range of groups like Charans, Bhils, Meenas, Soomras, and Pathans controlled circulation, and with whom the Rajput states had to constantly negotiate.

The narratives that emerged from Rajput courts, and later from British administrator-historians, obfuscated the intertwined histories of Rajputs and other groups, giving primacy to the former and ascribing marginality and criminality to the latter. It is only in the oral narratives of these marginalized and criminalized groups that references to shared histories and indeterminate mixed identities are preserved.

Sifting through a wide range of Rajasthani written and oral narratives, travelogues of British administrators, and vernacular as well as English records, this book explores long term relationships between mobility, martiality, memory and identity in the desert expanses of the Thar.

Glossary -- Geographical imagination and the narrative of a region -- Mobility, polity, territory -- Itinerants of the Thar : mobility and circulation -- Expanding state contracting space : the Thar in the nineteenth century -- Narratives of mobility and mobility of narratives.

"Discusses the emergence of socio-historical identities in the Thar Desert with the mobility of its inhabitants"--