Of The Human Spirit

By Nigel Collett, *Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India by William Dalrymple* - UPI Asia - Hong Kong

Three themes are woven through the nine tales in William Dalrymple's newest work on India, Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India, though he confesses, in his introduction, to only one of them. This, as he puts it, is an examination of the way "religious vocation has been caught and transformed in the vortex of India's metamorphosis during this rapid period of transition, while revealing the extraordinary persistence of faith in a fast-changing landscape."

He takes nine characters, all devotees of a particular faith, "to act as a keyhole" through which to see a slice of the hugely varied reality that underlies the veneer of India's modernization. In twenty-five years of travels, Dalrymple has met and re-met these nine men and women and from their stories has produced a spiritual travel book, one which, in fulfillment of the hope he expresses in his introduction, has "avoided many of the cliches about 'Mystic India' that blight so much Western writing."

So here in these pages we meet a Jain nun and a temple prostitute, or devadasi, from Karnataka, a theyyam dancer from Kerala, an epic bard from Rajasthan, a female Sufi from Sindh, a Tibetan Buddhist monk exiled in Dharamsala, a hereditary idol maker in Tamil Nadu, a female Tantric sadhu of Calcutta and a blind Bengali Baul, a singer of devotional songs.

The choice of these nine characters reveals Dalrymple's second theme, the depth of the sacred in India that lies outside the bounds of the organised major religious systems and the faiths which have grown up often in part in a reaction against them. Here is the theyyam dancer, Hari Das, a low caste Dalit labourer, who, for a season, incarnates the gods within his dance and so throws off the shackles of Brahmin contempt that mark the majority of his life: "Many of the theyyam stories mock the Brahmins […] They criticise them for the way they treat their fellow human beings, especially us Dalits." Here is "Red Fairy", Lal Peri, the female Sufi ascetic, "an illiterate, simple and trusting woman, who saw the divine and miraculous everywhere," and whose ecstatic drumming, dancing and music fuses Hindu and Muslim and defies the puritan mullahs who would destroy the shrine she serves: "Those hypocrites! They sit there reading their law books and arguing about how long their beards should be, and fail to listen to the true message of the Prophet." Here is the Baul singer Kanai, who travels the roads and railways of Bengal singing of God: "We believe that the way to God lies not in rituals but in living a simple life […] You come to understand that God is the purest form of joy -- complete joy."

From even these brief quotations you can perhaps discern the third strand of Dalrymple's spiritual quest, which is to uncover the humanity which links all those of whom he writes. This is not, I hasten to add, some simplistic and spurious idea of the unity of all faiths. It is not even anything which Dalrymple finds it necessary to discuss. Yet to those of us who have learned through his earlier works like White Mughals and The Last Mughal to see worlds of difference through the eyes of Dalrymple's own humanism, it does not come as a surprise to find that the most striking feature of this new book is the skill and sympathy with which he treats the people whose lives he lays bare to us.

These are real men and women, who, though their experiences are as far removed from our own as they conceivably could be, live and suffer as we do ourselves. Indeed, almost all of these subjects have suffered far more, I suspect, than it is possible for most of us to comprehend. It is their wildly differing approaches to faith that have provided for them the solutions to their suffering. Religion and the common lot of humankind are inseparable here. We meet the Buddhist Tashi Pasang, not long a monk when he was forced to flee Tibet in 1954, his mother tortured to death and his monastery destroyed by Chinese soldiers. This is a man who renounced his vows to kill the Chinese who were seeking to eradicate his faith and who now remains riven by what he has done, seeking to atone for his sins by ceaseless devotions and by printing prayer flags for others. We meet, too, Manisha Ma, devotee of the (to us) horrific deity Tara, drinker of blood, who dwells amongst the skulls and the burning bodies of the cremation ghats at Tarapith, who had escaped from her abusive husband and his oppressive family to find peace amongst the horrors of death.

Dalrymple introduces to us, touchingly, the Jain nun Prasannamati Mataji, who adopted as a teenager the extreme privations and wandering life of a Jain community and who for a lifetime traveled the dusty roads of western India with her companion Prayogamati. At the end, she found herself helping her only friend to die by self-imposed starvation and now waits her turn to do the same, unable to hide her sorrow for her friend despite all the precepts of the faith she has achieved. Dalrymple has come to know all these men and women as people, and he writes of them as though they are worthy of our acquaintance, too.

There is much to understand in this book, which is full of stranger and more outlandish things than any treatise on religion, and he gives us much to ponder, though not to judge. For one of Dalrymple's best attributes as a writer is that at no stage does he attempt to judge or criticize those of whom he writes; he illumines their lives and the beliefs to which they have come with the lightest of touches. He is indeed the best sort of traveler and this is the best sort of travel book, a guide to some very different manifestations of the human spirit.

--Nigel Collett is the author of The Butcher of Amritsar: Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer.