A harmless confidence trick

William Dalrymple is a post-colonial, post-modern nabob who loves India in the manner of an awestruck Westerner. He also lives in the country, and has turned as native as it is possible to do so. When he writes about his discoveries in India, he is mostly sharing it with his readers back in England and Scotland, and perhaps a bit of Europe.

The Americans have their own army of India-buffs and they are not too charmed by the English and the Scots. So, most of the high praise that Dalrymple garners for his books in India is mainly in the British media.

There is, of course, the English media in India, which seems to be always under the spell of the Dalrymple charm. It is not surprising then that not much attention was paid to what is between the covers of his latest book, and the focus remained on the tantalising title.

The title suggests that it is about the sacred or religious aspect of India, but this volume is an interesting and harmless confidence trick because as we read about the nine persons he chose to write about, we see that the narratives are not really about religion, nor about sacredness, but more about the people themselves. It is their temporal lives, rather than their pieties, that are of interest. Of the nine, seven are from India, with one each from Pakistan and Tibet. Each piece is a biographical account.

The most moving story of them all is that of the Jain nun, Prasanna Mataji. It is not the spiritual flight but the humane pangs that evoke admiration. She speaks of the death of her close friend and fellow-nun, Prayogamati: “When I realised she had left, I wept bitterly. We are not supposed to do this, and our guruji frowned at me. But I couldn’t help myself. I had followed all steps correctly until she passed away, but then everything I had bottled up came pouring out.”

Kania, the blind Baul singer, confesses: “I was always very religious, but it wasn’t just that; it seemed a practical decision too. A blind man cannot be a farmer, but he can be a singer.” Tapan, the Tantric, is sad that his son (whom he had abandoned) doesn’t understand his religious calling of being a shaman of sorts. Manisha, a fellow-Tanric says: “I don’t know why, but it seemed that the more angry and violent my husband became, the more often I went into a state of trance. Maybe this also was the doing of the goddess.”

Hari Das, the Theyyam dancer from Kannur who goes into a trance and is ‘possessed’ by Vishnu, speaks of his other life: “For nine months a year I work as a manual labourer. I build wells during the week, then, at the weekend I work in Tellicherry Central Jail. As a warder.”

Dalrymple has done right in keeping his voice out as much as he could. However, there are places where, unable to make sense of the stories that are laid out before him, he comes up with hopeless generalisations.

Sample this: “Some of the rituals you see today in the Tanjore temple are described in the Rig Veda, written when both the Pyramids and Stonehenge were still in use. Yet, Sanskrit, the language of the Vedas, is still alive, and while Zeus, Jupiter and Isis are all dead and forgotten, Lord Shiva is more revered than ever, and the great Chola temples at Chidambaram and Tanjore are still thriving and bustling.” It is a sentence that eloquently displays ignorance and confusion. The temple rituals are not described in the Rig Veda.

They have been creatively adapted from the hymns in the Rig Veda by those who devised temple liturgy nearly two millennia later. The right comparison would be between the language and rituals used at the Pyramids and Stonehenge and that of the Rig Veda. Since we do not know much about the religion of the ancient Egyptians and the Druids, it would be better to avoid rhetorical comparisons.

Dalrymple is simply not able to make sense of this business of the sacred in India where, people who are engaged in different modes of worship in temples, seances, in song, and through making of idols, continue to lead their quotidian lives.

For a European like Dalrymple — bewitched, as most Europeans are, by all that is Orient — it is a matter of great curiosity. He picks up the many stray stories of individuals in the hope of presenting a coherent picture. The picture that emerges is a broken, distorted one. This is indeed a traveller’s tale, full of fascinating stories. Not very different in kind from those written by the 17th century French traveller Jean-Baptiste Tavernier in Mughal India. Dalrymple takes much of what he sees at face value, making no attempt to distinguish between folk practice and ritual based on canonical sources.

He accepts the accounts of his interlocutors at face value too. He does not seem to know that the Tantric practices of Tapan Sadhu and Manisha or the Baul traditions followed by Kania are not part of canonical Hinduism. There is high religion based on texts and low religion based in rites which change and evolve. The Tantrics and the Bauls have really no clue about the philosophical underpinnings of god and soul. They are nicely ignorant of such matters even while they speak of them. Dalrymple is stumped in these matters.         

Through foreign eyes
Delhi: Adventures In A Megacity by Sam Miller
A BBC correspondent wanders through the city as a tourist.
India’s Unending Journey: Finding Balance In A Time Of Change by Mark Tully
Tully focuses on the pluralistic traditions in Indian and Hindu philosophy.
Hindoo Holiday: An Indian Journal by JR Ackerley
The author documents his time as secretary to a maharajah.
In Spite Of The Gods by Edward Luce
Luce offers his insights on the evolution of modern India.