In this modern world where everything is attached to technology, the shepherd is living with innocence. I met shepherds who practice paganism in the first district of Bhakkar, South Punjab, Pakistan. Their lives revolve around two goals: eating themselves and grassing their mall (sheep and goats). In this technophobic world, why is this paganistic world of shepherds so important? It’s strange that many shepherds in my area are still living in the 20th century, with no cell phones, internet, or even watches for a time, because they count their time with sun shades, just like in the Middle Ages. Muslims first used this kind of technique in their gold period.
Shepherds feel suffocated while engaging with this modern world. Their life and death depend upon their marriage with their mall. When I met them, they complained about this modern world. First, they say that a few decades ago we used a specific language, but now we are the last generation who can speak the Charro language (a special version of the Saraiki language).
In their daily talk, they are mainly focused on the past to get pleasure from this anti-humanistic world. In the 21st century, they are finding grass and water for their mall, but the modernization of agriculture has vanished everything and this process is still going on. Their whole lives revolve around water, grass, and shade. A life with few objectives has satisfaction. That’s why they are living a life of satisfaction. They do not have COVID-19, flu, depression, or anxiety. People lived to gather society in the past when humans were hunter-gatherers, but greed destroyed everything after feudal and capitalist societies, but shepherds still have a union in their societies. Local scholars describe this union with the Urdu word Ijtimyat.
In this chaotic world, we have many luxurious things, but we have no satisfaction because we have a lot of demands with insufficient resources. We know every action demands peace, and peace can come with a simple life but not with a luxurious technophobic world. I was talking to them when they asked me some questions. The first question they put up was, “Why is modernism killing our old cultural values, language, and historical heritage? Due to this modernism, we feel suffocated because it is cancer for our mall. You taught people to feel strange in this world because you people are destroying our nature, but we feel content when we talk to nature.
You destroyed our world’s ecosystem, and now you blame our nature for it? We have been living for centuries in these deserts, frosted with our sheep, in peacefulness, but you people destroyed our world. Our mall is a part of this nature, but you people build the concrete on it. Due to your political foolishness, my green grass has vanished. What did we do wrong with you people? I feel ashamed because I do not have the answers to shepherds’ questions because I am also a victim of this brutal, capitalistic world.
