Abstract
William Dalrymple sits patiently as a Jain nun sifts through her food for living organisms, travels across the deserts of Rajasthan to hear a 600-year-old epic, witnesses a Theyyam dancer of Kerala don a mask and become a god, meets a Devadasi who oozes sexuality to the wonderment of the men at a wayside tea stall, sits drinking thukpa (soup) with a Tibetan monk, meets a tantric skull feeder at the cremation grounds of Tarapith, and watches a master craftsmen craft the gods that people worship, ending his journey with the happy singing of a blind minstrel. His Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India, the seventh of his novels on different periods in Indian history, depicts the paradox of life in twenty-first-century India. His nine lives show the juxtaposition of the traditional with the modern, which is one of the hard realities throughout the fast-changing landscape of India. He weaves the mystical, religious, traditional, political, historical and the humane into one saga of life and existence in this new India.
The purpose of the book, to the ordinary reader, emerges out of the need to keep traditional India alive and breathing in the high-speed transformation taking place all over the country. Globalization has almost levelled out the playing field, as written by Thomas Freidman and many others after him, and Indians are witnessing a growth in infrastructure, a culture of entrepreneurship and innovation and global IT services industry. This development and modernization, which smacks of Western materialism, seems to threaten the idea of what the real India is to the rest of the world, validating bestsellers like Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love... As the author himself writes in the introduction, the Western ideas of Eastern spirituality as ‘deep wells of ancient, unchanging wisdom’ (p. xiii, Introduction), seem something that the West continues to hold on to, but which in reality is changing in the new growth. Dalrymple attempts to justify the changes and also provide—in the same breath—an answer to the most pertinent question: whether ‘India still offers any sort of real spiritual alternative to the materialism’ (p. xiii, Introduction) of the wider capitalistic world.
The style of the storytelling that he adopts in this book is simple. He uses spare prose and a clear narrative that is not affected by authorial comments apart from a rich historical or religious context that is useful to the reader. The author almost steps away from the scene after introducing each of his nine lives and lets them tell the story of their lives in their own way without desensitizing their impact. Although in his own words, Dalrymple worries that it might ‘be less analytical’, than what a reader might expect; he feels that by doing so, he makes it more about what is the ‘untold truth’ and less about his own spiritual journey, thus avoiding the mystical India that captures the imagination of Western authors. But even to a non-Western reader, the book is a reality check. India has remained one country where life has been continuous, spanning several centuries and where ancient and non-mainstream religious practices still survive. The nine stories tell the story of a very different India that even many Indians believe has ceased to exist anymore. Indians take religion for granted and each person is happy in his own existence and his own faith. This diversity exists side by side with the efforts to integrate religion with the national identity of the country. Along with the move towards globalization, efforts have been made to refocus Hindu and/or Islam with a national identity, and the larger and the more prominent of the images of the religions like the Hinduism of Rama and Krishna and the Wahhabi Islam from the Gulf and neighboring countries. Thus, as the story of these nine lives unfolds, the reader is taken through the kaleidoscope of religious life in India that is mystical, ritualistic and traditional, surviving with modernization.
The first life story is that of a Jain nun, named Prasannamati Mataji, who gave up a pampered life as the only daughter of rich parents to join the Order. The story of the transformation of this young girl into a woman going through the initiation process to be a perfect nun is heartwarming, particularly when she enjoys the close friendship of another young girl, like any other teenager, and at times gut-wrenching, especially when she has her hair plucked out of her young scalp and enters into a process of ritualistic starvation to die at will. This is the story of a young woman who is almost pulled away from the path of life that would have taken her to what present India is all about, and instead kept her submerged in a spirituality that very few understand or willingly join. Almost along the same lines is the story of Lal Peri, the journey of a young woman from Bengal who ends up as a Sufi saint, a woman in a man’s world. The life of red fairy’s transformation as a Sufi saint shows on one hand the egalitarianism of Sufism, at the shrine of Qalandar on the borders of Pakistan, which has become one of the largely attended pilgrimages for the Muslims across the border; on the other, it tells the story of the conflict within Islam, the struggle of the Wahabbis to eradicate this giving and accepting faith, which has found its roots in indigenous religious traditions.
Rooted in the same indigenous religious tradition that seemed to have stood the test of time were the lives of Rani Bai, the Devadasi, and that of Manisha Ma Bhairavi. Rani Bai had lived her life as a Devadasi, dedicated to the temple, praying to the goddess Yellamma, since she knew nothing else, but the coming of modernization had seen her livelihood being stripped from her and forced her to take up the non-religious version of the trade, prostitution. And in the twenty-first century, she balances her life between these two versions of her existence, believing it to be the goddesses’ curse or disease that will ultimately claim her as it had claimed her two daughters. Another story of survival and finding happiness in mystical traditions of the old is the life story of Manisha Ma, who gave up her life with her abusive husband and family in the busy suburbs of Kolkata, to find meaning of the spiritual trances that she would go into. The changing life in Kolkata had no room for that kind of tantric spirituality, which was considered demonic and archaic. Her life in Tarapith, as a skull feeder, at the shrine of the mother goddess Tara and at the foot of the Tantric god-man, was the happiest that she had lived in years. She found a fulfillment and peace at a place that most people would stay away from, the cremation grounds that emit the sounds and spirits of the dead.
This engagement with the spiritual and the godlike was evident in the other stories that dealt with the life of men who lived their lives as part-time gods or created statues that exuded that same divinity for the ordinary in modern India. The second story in Nine Lives was that of the Theyyam dancers, particularly of one, Hari Das, a Dalit (low-caste untouchable) who divided his time between being a prison guard and a dancer. The Theyyam dancers of Kerala in southern India go between their calling as these dancers for three months from December to February and back to their normal jobs for the rest of the year. It is during these three months that they wear masks, takes on the persona of the deity and attain such heights of spirituality where even the Nair Brahmin seeks their blessings. In another story, the master craftsman, Srikand Stpathy in Tanjore, tries to invest that same spirituality in the images of the bronze statues of the gods and the goddesses that he creates. He is a Brahmin from a long line of bronze statue artisans, hoping to keep alive the craft in the face of modern challenges. His greatest fear is that his craft will die with him, since his son was more interested in computers than learning the craft. But Srikanda continues to make the statues and every time he performs the ceremony that spiritualizes these deities in the early hours of the dawn, he re-lives the lives of his ancestors, without any fear of the future.
The other two stories also feature this same theme of a conflict of surviving an old folk tradition in the face of modern challenges. The serenity of the evenings in the deserts of Rajasthan are broken by the lilting music of folk instruments and the singing of an epic of Pabuji, who is the patron god of the cowherds, before a mobile temple or shrine called the ‘Phad’, which like the epic takes on the semblance of divinity. Mohan Bhopa and his wife, Batasi, are the epic singers who, although illiterate, can recite the epic from memory, which takes the whole night to complete. Like the Theyyam dancers mentioned above, Mohan and his wife are keeping alive this 600-year-old folk tradition, but face the challenge of modernity as to who to pass this age-old tradition on to. Also, in a similar vein, is the story of the blind minstrel, Kanai Baul who, like the Bhakti saints of the past, reminiscent of the Ramanujas and Mirabais, is keeping alive their versions of religion, finding a peace in their singing to the divine that eludes most men. Kanai and his friends are the last few of the Baul singers from Bengal, travelling everywhere, living unconventional lifestyles, bringing their music and happiness into the lives of those who happen upon them.
Travelling to the northern part of the country, the last story is that of a Tibetan lama in Dharamshala. As the monk retells the story of his life, he relives the horrors of the Chinese invasion of Tibet and the subsequent resistance movement. The monk speaks of his remorse at having shot a Chinese man and is now doing penance for that crime by painting flags, and living a life of paucity and nothingness. It is ironic that the monk from Tibet would come and find spiritual peace in his exile in India, almost lending truth to the idea of India being the haven for hope and peace in this modern world.
In these nine stories, Dalrymple rediscovers an old India living within the new; each story is unique in that it provides a way out for the person to find spiritual upliftment and raison d’être for their existence in the new India that is fast becoming cruel and materialistic. Each of the stories tells the story of the downtrodden and the marginalized, historically, socially or religiously, making choices that keep them tied to the bizarre and non-mainstream religious practices. But each one of them found peace and solace in these strange manifestations of their faith.
William Dalrymple’s contribution to Indian history and literature remains unparalleled among Indian and Western authors, writing on a wide variety of topics on colonial and modern India. His research is intensive and he manages to infuse each of the books with the romance and mystery that turns a historical novel into a bestseller. Reviews of his latest novel on the British invasion of Afghanistan have evoked a similar response among readers and historians alike. The Nine Lives stand out as one of his efforts to delve into the secret lives of a people, which is fascinating, moving and painful as well as hopeful at the same time. Although some might mistake it for a travel diary, it is much more than that. Dalrymple’s art of crafting this incredulous journey into the old within the new of modern India are the voices that he uses, that are unmistakable in their honesty and purity of purpose.
And yet again, William Dalrymple delivers, objectively viewing India from his own vantage point, and bringing together nine lives to tell an unforgettable story of what India is still all about.