The sacred and the mundane
Razia Sultana Khan reads of strange bedfellows
The gods created man,' said Srikanda Satpathy, 'but here we are so blessed that we - simple men as we are - help to create the gods.'" This is how one of the stories in William Dalrymple's latest book Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India, begins. This seeming contradiction plays through most of the nine stories in the book: a nun who sweeps the steps before her with a peacock fan when she walks so as not to inadvertently step on any living creature, ritually starves herself to death; a dalit untouchable not allowed to use the water of the very well he helps to dig, is revered as a god for three months of the year and illiterate villagers who are still the guardians of an entire oral culture, able to recite a 4,000 line epic by heart.
In the introduction to his book, Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India, William Dalrymple explores these contradiction by introducing Ajay Kumar Jha, a naked sadhu who was once a Sales Manager with Kelvinator with an MBA from Patna University. William Dalrymple asks the question, "How is each specific religious path surviving the changes India is currently undergoing?" And also, "Does India still offer any sort of real spiritual alternative to materialism, or is it now just another fast developing satrap of the wider capitalist world?"
Also in the introduction, the writer describes the pilgrims he meets on his way to the temple of Kedarnath: ""Every social class from every corner of the country was there. There were groups of farmers, illiterate labourers and urban sophisticates from north and south all rubbing shoulders like something out of a modern Indian Canterbury Tale." And the titles of his nine stores are reminiscent of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales: "The Nun's Tale", "The Monk's Tale," and "The Singer of Epics."
Each story is a personal vignette, a combination of the sacred and the mundane, the ancient and the modern, the world we see and the otherworldly. Each tale highlights a different religious path while it reflects the changes taking place around it. Nine Lives is a book of travels, not just the physical journey of the writer but the spiritual journey each character takes.
The characters William Dalrymple brings together are strange bedfellows. He conjures them up as if from a brass lamp. They stray from the beaten track of society, separate individuals who have one thing in common: all of them are on a spiritual quest.
The book begins with the life of a Jain nun. For many of us the word 'nun' projects an image of a Christian missionary in her long white gown. The setting too is often academic. But the nuns in Dalrymple's book evoke different images: a ritual of plucking hair and hour long meals where each morsel is scrutinized for the presence of a living creature.
In the story that follows, "The Dancer of Kannur," we see a Dalit labourer who, for nine months of the year builds wells during the week and is a jail warder during the weekend. Over the three months of winter, however, he answers a greater, more glamorous calling. He becomes a vehicle through which people find god. As Hari Das the theyyam artist says, "Though we are all Dalits even the most bigoted and casteiest Mabboodiri Brahmins worship us, and queue up to touch our feet."
And so it continues each one more astonishing than the last.
One very dark story is entitled "The Daughters of Yellamma." It is the story of a Devadasi, a temple dancer or one who is dedicated to the gods at infancy. Though parents themselves dedicate their infant child to become a Devadasi, sometimes even against the wishes of the girl, she is little more than a prostitute, servicing the men of her village from the house of her parents. It is a viscous cycle where the Devadasi then herself dedicates her own daughters to the temple. And when she gets sick, she is literally thrown out or allowed to starve by the very people she had been taking care of.
A thread of sadness prevails in all the stories: the threat to the completeness of a spiritual life, and the threat for old artisans of losing their children to technology.
It is not just the accounts of the nine lives which hold us spell bound, the magic of the language weaves a spell around us:
She climbed quickly, with a pot of water made from a coconut shell in one hand, and a peacock fan in the other. As she climbed, she gently wiped each step with the fan in order to make sure she didn't stand on, hurt or kill a single living creature on her ascent of the hill, one of the set rules of pilgrimage for a Jain muni or ascetic."
The book is replete with sensory details that chisel out images for us. Such strong details give one a sound grounding of the setting which makes the stories more credible and paradoxically more fantastic.
The encyclopedic information that William Dalrymple notes almost as an aside for the reader is also noteworthy, though this at times does break the focus of the story.
The tone of the writer throughout is non-judgmental. Even when some behavior sounds bizarre, it is the reader who judges, not the writer. Dalrymple's style is different from the traditional travelogue style where the narrator is the center of the telling. Here his characters have the space to speak. It is their story.
Razia Sultana Khan, critic and poet, has been chairperson, Department of English, Independent University Bangladesh (IUB).
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