Twenty years ago, when William Dalrymple published his first book, In Xanadu, travel writers tended to follow the example of Paul Theroux, whose huge success then dominated the genre, and to cast themselves as the heroes of their narratives. ‘With Nine Lives,’ explains Dalrymple in the introduction to his seventh book, ‘I have tried to invert this, and keep the narrator firmly in the shadows, so bringing the lives of the people I have met to the fore.’ The result is so exemplarily self-effacing — most of the words here are those of others — that it will disappoint some of his fans, who will miss the direct expression of his engaging personality. But his characteristic wit and sympathy are fully evident in the interviews he has conducted (in eight different languages), as are his love and knowledge of the sub-continent.
The question his book asks is, ‘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?’ To which the answer is most definitely yes to the former. Indeed, the wider capitalist world seems scarcely to impinge on the lives of Dalrymple’s subjects — except in the case of Srikanda Stpathy, a Brahmin idol-maker of Tamil Nadu, who is 23rd in an hereditary line going back seven centuries, to the bronze-casters of the Chola empire. ‘The blood itself teaches us our craft,’ he says, ‘just as a fish’s blood teaches it to swim, or a peacock’s blood teaches it to spread its tail.’ Stpathy naturally assumed that his son, who at the age of six made a drawing of Shiva so powerful it made the family shake, would succeed him in his sacred trade, but the boy wants to go to Bangalore to work in computers: ‘After all, as my son says, this is the age of computers. And as much as I might want otherwise, I can hardly tell him this is the age of the bronze-caster.’
They are subject to other historical forces, though. Tashi Passang is a Tibetan monk, living in exile with the Dalai Lama at Dharamsala, who found himself compelled to break his Buddhist vows and take up arms against the Chinese invasion of his country — a catastrophe he is inclined to attribute, along with everything else, to the divine principle of karma: ‘Perhaps because there was a time in the seventh century when we Tibetans invaded China and tortured the Chinese, so we are suffering this torture now.’ (The karmic principle recurs — as how could it not? — among Hindus and even Bauls, an ancient sect of near-atheistic wandering minstrels, noted for their elaborate sexual rites. Kanai Das Baul, who lost his sight before his first birthday, thinks he probably ‘did something wrong in a previous life to be punished like this’.)
The ecstatic Sufis of Sindh, meanwhile, who embrace music, poetry and dance, and are on the friendliest terms with their Hindu neighbours, find their heterodox way of life under threat from their more orthodox Muslim brothers in the Taliban, who want to impose the Caliphate and destroy all Sufi shrines, a situation Dalrymple likens to that of Europe at the time of the Reformation.
The most unreformed — and startling — of his subjects are probably the hardcore Tantric sadhus he encounters at the cremation ground of Tarapith in Bengal, living with jackals and vultures amid half-burned corpses and skulls and engaging in acts of ‘transgressive sacrality’ involving alcohol, hashish and ritual sex. They are devotees of the goddess Tara, who drinks the blood of goats slaughtered in her honour (at least 20 a day), and is usually depicted almost naked, wearing a garland of freshly severed heads, wielding a cleaver as she stands over a corpse with an erect phallus. Dalrympleji, as he is surely known in India, tells Manisha Ma Bhairavi, a reassuringly homely woman, that he finds Tara terrifying and weird. ‘Ah,’ says Manisha. ‘This is true. This is her wild side.’
Manisha mentions that the local Communist MP routinely denounces the followers of Tara as perverts and drug addicts, but always turns up with a goat to sacrifice when he wants to know the results of a forthcoming election. Like much else in this fascinating book, that anecdote beautifully illustrates the relationship between tradition and modernity in India.
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