[Vision2020] Radio Australia Interview: "Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India" by William Dalrymple

[Ted Moffett]

Last night Radio Australia (I heard it the old fashioned way, over
short wave) featured an interview wth William Dalrymple regarding his
recent book "Nine LIves: In Searchy of the Sacred in Modern India."

The interview was fascinating, though I cannot vouch for the
theological or sociological accuracy of Dalrymple's analysis, nor have
I read the book.

The interview can be listened to over the Internet at this website:

The Spirit of Things

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/spiritofthings/stories/2011/3090289.htm

>From website above:

>From voluntary starvation to ecstatic dance, India's spiritual
experiences can be both cruel and joyous, but to the intrepid Indian
resident and author, William Dalrymple, they are all fascinating
insights into a society in the throes of modernity. Untouchables mix
with Brahmins and Temple Courtesans ply their trade as prostitutes,
but social outcasts and spiritual seekers still find refuge amongst
India's many traditions. After performing at Sydney's Opera House,
William spoke to Rachael Kohn.
-----------------------
I continue to be impressed with the journalism Radio Australia offers,
which overall I think is better than NPR.

A review of "Nine Lives" is pasted in below from The Guardian:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/oct/24/nine-lives-william-dalrymple-review

Saturday 24 October 2009

Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India

by William Dalrymple 304pp, Bloomsbury, £20

William Dalrymple thrives on illuminating the points at which
seemingly antagonistic cultures intersect. His erudite essays in the
New York Review have blurred the allegedly irrevocable boundaries
between Islam and Christianity. City of Djinns, a thoughtful,
provocative travelogue, questioned the seemingly rigid lines that
separated coloniser from colonised in British India.

There is a similar awareness of the world's innate cosmopolitanism in
his new book, Nine Lives, in which he conjectures that the Hindu
goddess Tara might have the same Mesopotamian roots as a Catholic
cult. But this book, a blend of travelogue, ethnography, oral history
and reportage, isn't primarily concerned with exploring the world's
age-old interconnectedness. Instead, it is an attempt to discover if
India offers "any sort of real spiritual alternative to materialism",
or if the rapidly developing nation is just another satellite of the
"wider capitalist world".

Searching for answers, the author tails a remarkably diverse array of
characters – the dreadlocked Tantric holy man who listens to cricket
on his radio, the religious sculptor whose son will give up the
family's centuries-old trade for a job in computers – who have in
common a deep faith in religion that stands against the modern world's
technology, disease, poverty and warfare.

Hari Das, for example, is a Dalit labourer whose caste brings constant
humiliation and discrimination. However, for a few months each year he
abandons his work digging wells in Kerala to personify a god through
an ancient form of Hindu dance and storytelling known as theyyam. When
he dances theyyam, even high-caste Brahmins touch his feet and worship
him.

Dalrymple sees in this case religion as a "weapon to resist and fight
back against an unjust social system". Hari Das is far more incisive.
The satirical art of theyyam, he explains, "has completely altered the
power structure in these parts". It improves self-esteem among some
Dalits and inspires others to educate themselves. Moreover, when
Brahmins "watch theyyam they have this sense of discomfort, as they
know that the stories often criticise their caste, and seek to reform
their behaviour". Such examples of Dalrymple allowing his characters
to speak for themselves makes Nine Lives compelling and poignant.

The book's oral histories also paint an uncompromising portrait of
globalisation and migration. Tibetan monk Tashi Passang lives in the
Himalayan town of Dharamsala, the seat of the Dalai Lama's government
in exile. But when the Chinese began to oppress Tibetan Buddhists,
Passang temporarily renounced his vows of non-violence and took up
arms to defend his country and faith. The Chinese retaliated by
torturing his mother. He fled to India and joined a secret force
trained by India and the CIA, which promised he'd be parachuted back
into Tibet to fight. But the only action Passang saw was during the
1971 Bangladesh liberation war, when India sided with the nascent
country to destabilise Pakistan. "I had to shoot and kill other men,"
the monk laments. "War is far worse than you ever imagine it to be. It
is the last thing a Buddhist should be involved in."

The Bangladesh war also threatened Lal Peri, an Indian Muslim woman,
driven from her home state of Bihar because of Hindu-Muslim violence,
and then from Muslim Bangladesh because of ethnic discrimination. She
eventually migrated to Pakistan, where she gave up factory work for
life as a Sufi in the rugged province of Sindh. Dalrymple visits Sindh
and is enamoured of the region's heterodox, tolerant Sufi beliefs
while rightfully worrying that Sufism is under threat from radical
Wahhabi Muslims.

Indeed, Pakistani Taliban had blown up a Sufi shrine a week prior to
his visit. Dalrymple makes the mistake of chalking up this violence to
"a theological conflict that has divided the Islamic world for
centuries". It is myopic to exclusively associate the strife that
plagues present-day Pakistan with religious ideology when this
violence is actually underpinned by complex geopolitical factors.
Dalrymple overlooks the US's integral role in the "Soviet-mujahideen
conflict", and fails to mention the US war in Afghanistan.

This foray into Pakistan's religious radicalism makes some of Nine
Lives' omissions all too glaring. While the author takes the time to
interview a radical Pakistani cleric who yearns for an Islamic
caliphate, he totally ignores rightwing Hindu extremism that has
blossomed in India in recent decades. Since the 1990s, Hindu zealots,
backed by prominent politicians, have organised pogroms against
Muslims in more than one Indian state. In the eastern state of Orissa,
Hindu fanatics have murdered Christians. Such gaps are jarring and
inexcusable in a serious study of religion in present-day India.

The author's decision to ignore Indian Christianity is also strange,
especially in light of the number of pages he devotes to obscure Hindu
sects. Christians form the country's third largest religious group,
the religion having taken root in the subcontinent before reaching
some parts of Europe. This failure to discuss the state of
Christianity in modern India evokes a world partitioned into
anachronistic, seemingly irreconcilable compartments – a
Judeo-Christian world that is solely western, and an India that is a
colourful eastern repository of spiritualism, wisdom and suffering. It
is boxes like these that the author's other, more successful, works
have sought to break open.

Hirsh Sawhney is the editor of Delhi Noir, published by Akashic Books.
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Vision2020 Post: Ted Moffett