Sun, Jul 04, 2010 page14

• Hardcover: US: William Dalrymple bridges the gaps

  ‘Nine Lives’ successfully straddles India’s competing dichotomies

  • By Jonathan Sidhu / STAFF REPORTER
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  Within mainstream American discourse, the idea of India can occupy a narrow space.

  Westerners often fixate on India’s deeply spiritual character with subtle condescension: India is an awe-inspiring, mystical land — with a panoply of exotic faiths, impenetrable rituals and age-old spiritual principles.

  Meanwhile, in recent years, we have seen an almost limitless number of books reflecting on economic growth in India — whose titles, like Mad Libs, always seem to include some combination of “Rise,” “Race” “Post-American” and “Imagine” (while pitting “Elephants” against “Dragons”).

  With some exceptions, these two narratives — India’s “premodern” religiosity, and its growing economy — are often presented as diametric opposites, simply unrelated, or the first and last points on something like a scale of modernity. How they interact, unfortunately, is seldom explored.

  In this context, William Dalrymple’s Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India is not only a masterful text, but it is also an extraordinarily important book. Dalrymple explores nine tales of deeply spiritual individuals whose lives are intersected by the social upheavals occurring in modern India. Many of these stories, he writes, exist “in the places suspended between modernity and tradition.” Like the suspension between “modernity” and “tradition,” each vignette almost exists somewhere between reality and fantasy.

  Dalrymple, a Scottish travel writer and historian, has previously written strongly narrator-driven books like City of Djinns, his acclaimed travelogue of Delhi. What is unique about Nine Lives is that Dalrymple has sought to “keep the narrator firmly in the shadows, so bringing the lives of the people I have met to the fore and placing their stories firmly center stage.”

  Simply as stories, each discrete episode is an emotive and moving tale of how an individual found, or inherited, a path to spiritual dedication. Dalrymple, like the poetic Rajasthani bhopa, or bard, he follows, tells stories that are lyrical yet deeply ruminative.

  But often, these nine lives capture larger issues or trends, beyond the specificity of each individual’s story. One tale is a devdasi in Karnataka — a woman “dedicated” to the goddess Yellamma — who is essentially a sex worker; she was forced into this life by her poverty-stricken family, and ultimately she did the same to her daughters, later watching them die of AIDS.

  Dalrymple, in his introduction, highlights a main theme of this book: India’s recent social transformations have had a profound effect on spirituality. He explains, “For while the West often likes to imagine the religions of the East as deep wells of ancient, unchanging wisdom, in reality much of India’s religious identity is closely tied to specific social groups, caste practices and father-to-son lineages, all of which are changing very rapidly as Indian society transforms itself at speed.”

  These tensions can manifest themselves in fascinating, and unpredictable, ways. Near Kolkata, for example, Dalrymple meets an ash-smeared Tantric sadhu living at a cremation ground, who cures human skulls to protect against evil spirits. The sadhu laments the family he left in his lay life: “’They are not spiritual, and probably don’t even believe in God ... My niece is a professor, and her husband does electrocardiograms. My son is now an accountant with (the) Tata (company) ... But they reject the world I live in. I don’t think I can ever explain it to him.” While explaining, Dalrymple never passes judgment; instead, the reader is forced to personally reconcile this jarring generational shift.

  There is Lal Peri, a female ascetic committed to the Sufism of Lal Shahbaz Qalander, in rural Sindh in Pakistan, defying sectarianism as her tradition draws from Hindu scriptures, yogic practices, as well as Islam. She was a refugee fleeing violence on more than one occasion, and Dalrymple writes, “The more I heard the details of her story, the more her life seemed to encapsulate the complex relationship of Hinduism with the different forms of South Asian Islam, swerving between hatred and terrible violence, on one hand, and love and extraordinary syncretism on the other.”

  Dalrymple notes that India’s heterodox and pluralistic religious traditions are becoming subsumed by centralized, national-level notions of Hinduism. Yet, he still finds that

  “older India endures,” as, for example, holy men continue to agonize over classical questions.

  “The water moves on, a little faster than before, yet still the great river flows,” Dalrymple writes about religion in India. “It is as fluid and unpredictable in its moods as it has ever been, but it meanders within familiar banks.” Indeed, India’s pluralistic religious traditions will continue to swirl, subside and sometimes even surge. And Dalrymple’s “Nine Lives” has made that water more clear.

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