On a recent train journey from Ranchi to Delhi, as a shrill cacophony ended my power nap, I looked around me in disgust. The culprit turned out to be a thin, bespectacled girl holding an engineering textbook in her hand and loudly berating her father for not buying a bottle of mineral water before boarding the train. She couldn't have been more than twenty. Her father looked apologetic, almost sheepish, for the boorish behavior of his daughter. She scolded him in English: "Why you din't bring thee botal, Papa? Now we will be thurrrsty till the dinner, no?" He responded gently in Hindi, "Galati ho gayi bete. Thodi der mein hi khareed lenge." The English didn't relent. Its loud attack on Hindi continued unabated for most of our waking hours on the journey. At some point, my fellow travelers and I overheard that Ms. Loudmouth was seeking admission in some colleges in North Delhi. Just before we arrived at Delhi, a gentlemen sitting opposite me summarized the problem nicely: "Bihar ke baahar pehli baar aa rahi hai. Magar bolti hai jaise ki vilaayat se aayi hai."
William Dalrymple's new book Nine Lives addresses precisely these children of Macaulay in modern India. These unfortunates, bastard children of colonialism as they are, may be found chasing some mirage of Western-style modernity in colleges and universities, offices and malls, cafes and cinemas. Yet they are blind to the peculiar kind of non-Western modernity they are crafting. Towards received tradition, they are downright condescending. The countryside can be dismissed altogether, in the words of Aravind Adiga, as the Darkness. The Light is ostensibly somewhere in the United States. Yet they're stuck, often irrevocably, in India. Their fate is thus akin to the proverbial washerman's dog, forever wandering between its home and its master's workplace. When Dalrymple speaks to these pye-dogs in metropolitan India, he is urging them to take a peek at how religious traditions are being preserved painstakingly by some social groups, overturned by others in dissent and resistance, or re-cast in novel forms that blend the old and the new. All of these engagements with religious traditions, Dalrymple believes, occur in rural India, so he is interested in staging a dialogue of sorts between the so-called "Two Indias."
There is something particularly noble-minded about Dalrymple's latest venture. He genuinely believes in the need for dialogue between the past and the present, which he appears to equate -- erroneously, like so many metropolitan Indians -- with the rural and urban. Make no mistake: here is genuine hope that the alienated present of Macaulay's half-caste children can be somehow invigorated by an earthy dose of the sacred from the four corners of the subcontinent. The stories themselves are moving narratives of some very special yet surprisingly ordinary people. We meet Prasannamati Mataji, a Jain nun who struggles to come to terms with the loss of her female companion of twenty years; Hari Das, a Dalit jail warden who is regarded in Kannur as a deity for the three months every year during which he becomes a theyyam dancer; Rani Bai, who perpetuates the ancient devdasi tradition in Saundatti only to succumb, along with her two teenage daughters, to the deadly HIV; Mohan Bhopa, an unlettered bard whose family has preserved, against all odds, the great Rajasthani medieval poem The Epic of Pabuji in a unique audio-visual form; Lal Peri, the mojahir defender of the famous Sufi shrine of Shahbaaz Qalander in Sehwan; Tashi Passang, the Buddhist monk who has spent a lifetime atoning for his decision to take up arms in defense of his faith and country; Srikanda Stpathy, heir to the great bronze-casting tradition of the Cholas; Manisha Ma Bhairavi, the devotee of the goddess Tara, who oversees a non-imagined community of Tantric dissidents in a cremation ground a couple of hours away from Kolkata; and three wandering Baul minstrels in search of the divine within human bodies and hearts on the banks of the Ajoy river in West Bengal.
In acquainting his readers with these nine lives, Dalrymple intends to convey more than simply exotic tales about exotic people and places. He is interested to grasp the diversity of religious beliefs and practices in the localities and regions of South Asia. This diversity is entirely at odds with the uniform, Protestanized packages of Hinduism and Islam that are broadcast via modern media across the subcontinent. For the metropolitan Indian, Ramayana is associated far too easily with Ramanand Sagar's magnum opus rather than the many, mini versions of the epic poem across the land (and beyond in Southeast Asia). For these readers, the implied audience of the book, learning about the varieties of religious experience in South Asia will, one hopes, act as an entry-point into the accommodative pluralist traditions of the region.
Accommodation and pluralism are, of course, possible only if we are willing and able to enter the personal worlds of Dalrymple's protagonists and see things from their respective vantage points. Shifting from one to the other, it may be thus possible not merely to appreciate each story as charming or emotive, but also to accept difference (or heterogeneity, if you prefer) in a radical metaphysical sense: there are so many legitimate ways to apprehend the complexity of human realities that it is ultimately futile to be attached too deeply to one's own preferred way of seeing and being in the world. This kind of metaphysical pluralism, which one also finds in Chaucer's Canterbury's Tales with its panoramic view of the social worlds of the three estates of 14th century England, transcends the fake secular-religious divide that characterizes modernist writings on the subject. It is rooted in uncertainty, doubt and skepticism rather than the certainties sought by dogma and dead habit. Although based on reason, it posits no false dichotomy between reason and the emotions, but displays a willingness to view reason itself as heterogeneous. Its politics is, therefore, liberal in the true sense of the word, that is, committed to independent thinking, tolerance, and freedom from tyranny.
But is this how Dalrymple's intended audience sees it? On the evidence of the comments on the back flap of the book and at the book launch, it appears not. All four comments on the back flap refer primarily to the author's writing style and his abilities as a storyteller. Ravi Singh of Penguin, India, introduced WD as a modern-day Chaucer. The October 5 review in the Financial Times praised WD as "India's literary "Orientalist," interpreting its historical intricacies for a generation of international readers." A friend Prakash (name changed) informed me, in contrast, that Dalrymple had succumbed to the kind of Orientalism that drew Westerners to exotic places and people, especially their bizarre religious, aesthetic and sexual practices. Another friend Padmini (name changed) averred that Dalrymple's stories sounded "cute" but no one could possibly take the "ravings of illiterate villagers" seriously. Other anonymous members of Delhi's chatterati simply swooned and swayed to the beats of the theyyam dancers, the mystical songs of the Bauls, and a marvelously original rendition of thevaram hymns associated with the Tamil saints of yore. There is no doubt in my mind that very few of WD's readers will actually follow him in his search for the sacred in contemporary India. The pye-dogs shall scavenge for nourishment elsewhere.
To some extent, Dalrymple ought to bear the blame for this state of affairs. His stories may be well-written (though poorly-edited), but they are not well-contextualized. Firstly, the Kiplingesque view that the real India lies outside its cities is rather problematic. It may have been useful to explore, for instance, how new migrants to the metro cities, young people in rapidly-urbanizing small towns, and call-center employees incorporate the sacred into their lives. But Dalrymple deems these groups either too secular/modern or plainly uninteresting. Whatever the reason, the absence of urban narratives is jarring in a book exploring the sacred in an age of rapid socioeconomic change. Let us not forget that the Canterbury Tales were themselves written in a similar age of great social ferment in which the most prominent outcome was the rise of the urban bourgeoisie and the gradual eclipse of the diversity of folk Catholic practices across Europe. And despite their rustic appearance, the Tales offer a fascinating glimpse into the wider social conflicts of 14th century England, including those developing between the country and the city. Could something similar have been attempted by WD?
Secondly, it is worth pointing out, contra Dalrymple's stories, that the contexts of "popular religion" are not always radical, pro-poor or some postmodern avatar of class struggle. This is an error that he shares with much of the Subaltern Studies school of history-writing in South Asia. There are myriad uses of popular religious idioms for political ends, at least some of which are purely elitist and/or conservative ones. Most forms of theologico-political expressions in the countryside, today or a century ago, represent a complex interbraiding of elite and popular interests that ought not to be seen in a cockeyed manner as simply subaltern politics. Consider, for instance, Dalit politics in Maharashtra or UP today. There are specific empirical reasons why the subordinated classes are attracted to caste-based resistance in some cases, while in others, they seek to ally with hegemonic Hindutva interests. The explanations in each case must emerge from an understanding of local and regional contexts, particularly how "elite" and "popular" are constituted in each context. Chaucer himself was alert to this point: John Wycliffe's heretical Lollards thus appear alongside the chivalric order of knights and the monastic traditions of the clergy. Might WD have missed a trick here?
Finally, Dalrymple has this unsettling habit of casting timeless oppositions between the mystic and the mullah, the syncretic and the orthodox, the oral and the written, the subaltern and the elite. There are, of course, instances where he corrects this bad habit by noting the interrelationships between the Little and Great Traditions (how the great Sufi mystic-poet Rumi gained fame as a maulana in Konya, or how the seemingly heterodox devdasi and Baul traditions are but tributaries of the great river of Hinduism). But these are exceptions that prove the general rule of structural oppositions. In the story of Lal Peri, these oppositions are most disagreeable because they imagine a sharp distinction between Sufism and what Dalrymple calls "Orthodox Islam." This is the same dichotomy that WD had proposed in his previous work, The Last Mughal, to distinguish between the religious beliefs of Bahadur Shah Zafar from those he labeled simply as fanatics and fundamentalists. It is, in fact, no more than a sophisticated, or at least well-intentioned, version of the Good Muslim-Bad Muslim distinction criticized justly by Mahmood Mamdani. There is simply no eternal or structural opposition by which “good guys” such as Rumi, Dara Shukoh and Lal Peri can be opposed to today’s “baddies,” all of whom are, according to Dalrymple, funded by Saudi Wahhabis and their South Asian admirers. What needs explanation is why, at this point in history, the sufi shrines of Sindh and elsewhere have come under threat from those who regard the veneration of saints as idolatry. WD is thus a victim of what is essentially an error of historical method here. In any case, very little in human affairs is timeless.
Similarly, it is incorrect to imagine a sharp contrast between the materialist philosophies guiding Tantra practices and mainstream Hinduism in Bengal. One the one hand, the materialism underlying Tantra has historical roots stretching back to identifiable brahminical texts such as the Barhaspataya-sutras of the late centuries BC. On the other hand, WD’s two stories on Bengal display no awareness of Vaishnavism as the dominant mystical tradition in the lower reaches of the Gangetic valley. In a single paragraph, he presents a simplified account of how medieval Saivite and mother goddess cults were upstaged by upper-caste reformers and Christian missionaries from the 19th century onwards. This thumbnail narrative of Bengal’s religious history over the last millennium is, to put it bluntly, factually incorrect. Nonetheless, this is not the space to detail the sorts of accommodations by which various cults transcending the orthodox-heterodox divide came to cohabit the floodplains, forests and mangrove swamps of Bengal. What is relevant here is that the stories of Manisha Ma and the three Bauls, like that of Lal Peri, could have been contextualized far more accurately than WD in fact does. And the heterodox-orthodox divide WD finds on his travels is meaningful more in the context of post-1970s Bengal than in some eternal sense.
To sum up, William Dalrymple sets out with Chaucer-like ambitions, as he notes on the very first page, but ultimately falls short in fulfilling those ambitions. It is somewhat like a fast bowler huffing and puffing on his run-up all the way from the boundary only to deliver a medium-paced ball at the end of it. Part of the problem is poor contextualization, or more accurately, an unresolved tension between the short-story form, ethnographic travel writing, and historical research. The rest is a combination of critical gaps or omissions in the narrative and a general disinclination among the metropolitan chatterati in India and abroad to engage meaningfully with the sacred. However one may choose to view the matter, Dalrymple promises much, but delivers less than what one might have expected. The problem lies as much with the author as with his implied audience. We may be as far away as possible from Chaucer. But there is every likelihood that someone soon will escape the limitations of Nine Lives and produce an outstanding work of scholarship or literature on the same theme. I’m not a betting man, but I’d put my money on fiction, the postcolonial novel to be precise.
