In an antique land

His baul friends figure prominently in Nine Lives,a book which can be best described as collection of non-fiction stories of nine people. They endear the readers with their bohemian ways and address philosophy through simplistic logic. “You can’t help having a good time with these guys. They are always singing and dancing,smoking ganja and drinking Old Monk. And before you know it they will rustle up some mustard hilsa,” laughs Dalrymple. As if on cue,a waiter arrives with an unusually large menu and asks him to place his lunch order. “Why is it that you don’t have hilsa? There is only betki in the menu,” he chides the waiter good-naturedly.

Since I have spent a good part of my last few hours immersed in the life of Prasannamati Mataji (one of the protagonists of Dalrymple’s Nine Lives) I wonder how a man so content with a glass of beer and a bowl of chips can write compassionately about an ascetic Jain nun? “I admire her isn’t that enough?” he asks.

In Nine Lives,Dalrymple abandoned his usual military campaign-like research procedure for a novel,to be guided by instincts. “White Mughals and The Last Mughal had me labouring through mountains of documents and research materials. For Nine Lives I visited places I wanted to go to,revisited the bauls about whom I had written at some length in 2003,revisited Jains,the Buddhist monks and reworked them into stories of single individuals,” he says.

Since these interviews were conducted in eight different languages,Dalrymple had to employ the services of interpreters. “I was worried that this would put the interviewees in guard. But I shouldn’t have worried. Take Hari Das,(the theyyam dancer from Kerala ) are so articulate. His accounts of the possession ritual were sheer poetry. It’s amazing how people like him and Rani Bai (a Devdasi) speak with such confidence. They don’t have education backing them,they only have s strong belief in something,” says Dalrymple. Certain lives in the book seem to mirror each other. Lal Peri,the pirouetting lady fakir of Sehwan (Pakistan),could easily have been Tarapith’s Manisha Ma Bhairavi. Both have escaped unhappy lives to seek solace in the arms of religion,both believed that their chosen deity were motherly figures,who have “saved them,looked after them when they were most vulnerable”. “Yes,quite a few of these stories sound similar. I wanted to include the interview of a Christian exorcist from Kerala too in the book but had to edit it out because it sounded too much like Hari’s story,” he says.

How did he manage to keep cynicism at bay when he was interviewing people so steeped in religion? “These people and their stories are so strong that there was no space for cynicism. I chose to keep the narrator and his thoughts firmly in the shadows so as to not divert attention from these people,” he says.