In conversation with William Dalrymple

1)      Here's an interview I did with William Dalrymple on his latest book Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India. 'Willie' spoke on a range of other subjects during the course of this interview and I'll be transcribing it soon and adding those bits here. In the mean time, enjoy this.

       

       

        What does the word ‘sacred’ mean to you? Has its meaning got diluted in today’s world?

The reference in the title to the word ‘sacred’ means, to me, seekers of the divine in all its glorious variety.  I’d like to state two things at the outset this is not a book of theology; I’m not setting out on a theological exercise here and I’m certainly not setting out on a personal devotional quest where I’m looking for a guru or anything.  What I’m trying to do in this book is to see how these various secret traditions have changed with India’s massive vortex of change. How has the new India Shining – in all its flawed regional variety and lack of consistency – affected these range of traditions. As everyone should know, Hinduism isn’t a  monolithic block which barely existed before the 18^th century. Hinduism is something which is constantly changing; Hinduism of the Vedas is very different than that of the Puranas. There’s been the long, long process of change with 19^th century reform movements. And now we have, what can be called the Rama-fication whereby mainstream reformed and possibly politicisation of cults are sweeping through the cowbelts at the expense of local devi cults

2)      This politicisation you refer to, has it been imposed or has it been naturally embraced by the people?

What you have is common to both Hinduism and Islam is that you get reformed, mainstream, textual, urbanised forms of religion taking over from folk deities and saints who come to be regarded as superstitious. In the case of Islam, you get a Gulf-propogated, madrassa­-taught, centralised Quranic Islam, slowly eating away saints’ shrines which are the  which are the mainstay of everyday Islam in India since the 12^th century. And you see this process in Delhi in Nizamuddin East. You get out of the car and walk past the Tableeghi Jamaat they’ll embrace you sand say “come brother, don’t go to the saints’ shrine, come to the mosque”

3)      So in that case, if you were searching for the sacred in modern India, why did you have to go to far off places like Dharamsala or rural West Bengal? Why not in urban India itself?

(laughs) One of the personal quests of this book was to get the heck out of Delhi and libraries after 10 years based in the National Archives of India! But, on a more serious note, it was a very conscious thing to return to travel writing after 10 or 15 years and to get back on the road. But the question you’ve asked is very interesting and it reveals a lot about the questioner because there’s a tendency to think that only middle-class urban India has a legitimate story and that it’s somehow illegitimate to write about sadhus and bauls.  In almost all the interviews I’ve given, I’ve had to justify writing about these people.

4)      It’s not illegitimate . It’s just that the phrase modern India throws up images of urban India hence..

Well not illegitimate but a central subject.  There are these small pockets of hypermodernity like Gurgaon, cyberabad, Bangalore.  But it isn’t just that. There’s lots more happening in the areas that are stuck between tradition and modernity; which isn’t, by any sense, an unchanging R K Narayan rural landscape of pretty girls in sarees, wandering along roads. It is a messy halfway house with all sorts of things happening.  For instance, Swamimalai, which is less than a day’s drive and within sight of Thomas Friedman India and what it represents, you have a small town businessman, who’s been doing business for 35 years.  He’s a member of the local Lion’s club, a pillar of the local establishment. But he finds that his son wants to go off to Bangalore and study javascript. Even the most extreme figure in the book – the naga sadhu drinking from the skull ­– turns out to be from a middle-class family in Kolkata, his son is an accountant for Tata and his wife used to work in a jute factory. So, we all see these guys as exotic but the reality is that they’re not.  They have human lives, cousins, aunts, friends, marriages, family businesses etc.  And one of the motives of this book is to give a human face to these ‘freaks’.

5)      But what made them turn to or embrace religion in such an extreme form?

This is the central question in the book and there are 9 different answers to that.  A fair number of people such as the bhopa of Rajasthan, the idol maker or the Theyyam dancer inherited family lineages which have been going on for generations.  Others made personal choices to embrace religious lives such as the Buddhist monk. But many of them went to religion in reaction to huge personal losses and tragedies such as the red fairy.

6)      A striking feature of this book is that most of the prose is reported speech from the people you’ve interviewed. Your own narration has been marginal. Was that a difficult thing to do – to marginalise your narration and let your interviewees do the talking?

It was something I hadn’t done before and I had to find a way to do it in the literary sense.  But it seemed an entirely appropriate way to tackle this subject. It also allowed me to get around what was the reason I hadn’t done this book before which is how to avoid the minefield of clichés that litter Western attempts at writing Indian religion. It seemed to me that the only way to tackle this subject was to be reserved and let these guys speak for themselves. They had such stories that my earlier plan of writing an A to B travelogue was immediately abandoned in favour of a very different form which I’m rather pleased with. Non-fiction short stories are a very interesting thing to attempt.

7)      You started working on Nine Lives which is a travel book after two thick books on Mughal history White Mughals and The Last Mughal. Was it difficult to re-adapt to travel writing after such a long gap?

No it was a huge pleasure. I’m naturally a restless man, I like to travel. I don’t like to be stuck inside a library for months on end. The actual process of writing these big, fat history books is extremely painful. To write those sort of books requires eight months to a year of not moving around. Also, writing books on such a subject (Mughal history) requires a lot of research.  With travel books, you can just pack up a little suitcase and wander off. For instance, I wrote one of the chapters in Nine Lives on a Sri Lankan island. If I tried doing that with the other two books, I’d probably need a truck to carry all my papers and files to wherever I’m going! Also, the form allowed me to go to parts of India I’d never seen before – rural West Bengal for instance. It was the first part of India to be colonised but it’s so far off today that no one goes there.

8)     So, what next after Nine Lives? 

        Well I’ve been commissioned to do a big Mughal project but I don’t know what it’ll turn out to be.

9)      Will it be based on the life of Dara Shikoh?

It was going to be Dara Shikoh and Akbar before that. However, Akbar was illiterate so he didn’t write anything and I’d have to look at him through the eyes of a second person. Dara Shikoh is very interesting but it’ll be difficult to write about him because all we have is mystical writings which tend to be very elusive.  There’s also the book tour which will take me to England, Sydney Opera House and hopefully America. So I really can’t say what next