The Halo Men

Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India William Dalrymple Bloomsbury Pages: 304 Rs 499

William Dalrymples previous book,The Last Mughal,stirred a hornets nest. It was Indian historians versus him. At one point,an angry exchange ensued in newspapers and magazines,as Dalrymples quotes were taken to suggest that Indian historians were not writing popular history read accessible to those who do not have a bachelors in arts in the subject. Dalrymples scholarship was enthusiastically welcomed and praised as well as put down and harshly critiqued,and mistakes were pointed out all in all,the book and the things around it meant an energetic debate about the existence and role of the public intellectual/historian in India. Now,in case sleeves are being rolled up in Indias history departments for his latest book,Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India,they can rest and stay calm. Nine Lives is a search engine with a difference and poses no such burning questions.

There are Jain nuns,Tibetan Buddhists who have made Dharamsala their home,Baul singers from Bengal and a Tantric who lives off cremation grounds and looks for skulls to drink out of even as she fights anti-superstition cells that are out to get her and other Tantrics. Most of the stories are very detailed and,as the author promises in the introduction,they are a break from the older narrative where the author dominates the plot. Here,the nine lives and the circumstances under which they opt for a road dedicated to the Supreme Being take centrestage. There is graphic recounting of personal horrors and tragedies and each story is often reflective of other ills that plague the India story the trauma of prostitution and AIDS through the lives of Devadasis; the Chinese repression of Tibet through the eyes of a Buddhist monk; and even the sadness at the age of the oral tradition passing on in the story of the singer of the epics in Rajasthan. Among the better lives focused upon by the author is the dancer of Kannur. The life of a Dalit who performs Theyyam conveys not only the ongoing caste repression and the fightback,but also the more current political horrors,like the bitter and bloody feuds between the RSS and the Left in the district in north Kerala.

Each life is somehow very grey and the angst is very much of this world. Dalrymple is not exploring the characters spirituality per se,but the horrific circumstances that enforced their choice. Theists of all description could end up frowning at both the style and content of the interpretation of Indian spirituality and the context it has all been located in.

A good thing is that Dalrymple has not picked celebrities; instead,he has painstakingly hunted down subjects,visited and revisited them. The book is informative,again for those not lucky enough to have studied history or dealt with it in depth for instance,there is an excellent account of the oral tradition of Amir Hamza and the Mahabharat,and how India impacted on the form and stories that Hamza absorbed; and while discussing the Devadasis,Dalrymple gives a sophisticated understanding of how sexuality has been described and discussed in art works and literature of pre-colonial India,uninfluenced by more repressive traditions as in the West at the time.

But,in terms of sheer scholarship and contribution to help understand India,it is a break from the fresh insights The White Mughals and The Last Mughal offered.

One of the most striking things about Dalrymples work centring on India has been his passionate hunting out of all that is syncretic here. No bald talk this; the historian in Dalrymple outlined a bold interpretation of the last few years of the Mughals not just the decadent and wine-swivelling times of the Awadh Nawabs,as portrayed in Satyajit Rays Shatranj ke Khiladi,but of the prosperous and solid base of harmony and kinship experienced by all faiths in India at the time,and how profoundly this system felt assaulted by barbaric British traders. It is very surprising,therefore,to see that the only Muslim picked to search for the sacred in Nine Lives is located in Pakistan! Dalrymple has picked an interesting life of a female devotee of Lal Shahbaz Qalander,a very well known Sufi saint also known as Jhule Lal and immortalised by popular qawwalis and remixes. While the ladys life connects with India she is from Bihar,torn by the twice partitioned subcontinent,it appears as a very odd inclusion,especially by someone so familiar with India and is a genuine admirer of its pluralism. Why not the several Sufi saints,such as Baba Budangiri,who is even said to have introduced coffee from Yemen? Dalrymples fans are eagerly awaiting the biographies of the three Mughal emperors he is said to be working on.