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Journalism of Courage
William Dalrymple,the Scot who got friendly with Delhis djinns 20 years ago,is in the paroxysms of a new book. At his farmhouse in Mehrauli,he attends to his Blackberry and the white cockatoo that croaks Hello,embraces the colourful band of Bauls whove just walked into the garden and sits down to speak about Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in the Modern (Bloomsbury,Rs 499),a travel book after a long tryst with Mughals,both Indian and White.
The book began in 1993, he says,when I was walking up the hills to Kedarnath and met an MBA who had relinquished his worldly life as a sales manager to become a Naga sadhu. Over the next 16 years,Dalrymple came across the other eight lives who would make up what he calls his modern Indian Canterbury Tales. They are representatives of an India where the sacred co-habits with the modern: there is a Buddhist monk who takes up arms to resist the Chinese invasion of Tibet and then spends years trying to atone for the violence by hand-printing prayer flags in Dharamsala; there is a prison warden from Kerala who is also a theyyam dancer and worshipped as a deity for two months every year before he gets back to his job at the jail; there is an illiterate goatherd from Rajasthan who keeps alive an ancient 4,000-line epic that possibly he alone knows by heart; there is a devadasi who pushes both her daughters into a trade she believes is sacred. The characters are spread across the religions of the world and they tell their own tales. Dalrymple is more like a listener,an outsider who waits at the door for a nod and then is led into their worlds,deep and ancient,and their chosen destinies. I was deeply inspired by Daniyal Mueenuddins book In Other Rooms,Other Wonders. The stories talk about individual lives caught up in a larger landscape. I wanted to make non-fiction fit a narrative structure that gives as much pleasure as fiction, says Dalrymple.
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