William Dalrymple’s City of Djinns changed the way I, an Indian, looked at Delhi, transforming it from a city of smog and dusty old bureaucrats, to a city of a living, vibrant history, waiting to be discovered. Later, his White Mughal and the Last Mughal, showed us another aspect of India under the British Raj—something all those history lectures in school could never do.
Dalrymple comes to the Sydney Writers Festival once again this year—and he brings not only his new book, Nine Lives, but also an associated show of south Asian devotional music and spiritual transformation.
Here, in his characteristic witty style Dalrymple talks to Indian Link about the book and the show, as well as his own experiences in immigrating to India, travelling for 25 years to peak into its complex social, historical and religious textures as well as running the critically acclaimed, as well as hugely popular Jaipur Literature Festival.
You are often referred to as a travel writer and Nine Lives as a travel book... do you still see yourself as a traveller in India after having lived there for all these years?
I've lived in India 25 years, it’s my favourite country and Delhi is home; and yet I can never be fully Indian—even in the way my Delhi-educated kids could be. Some part will always be Scottish. It’s the classic immigrant’s dilemma.
I refer to myself simply as a writer, rather than a travel writer: after all I've written a variety of different types of non-fiction, and most of my recent work has been historical; but given that I'm still itinerant in all sorts of ways, so maybe a travelling writer is the best description.
Religion often divides people in India - quite violently too. Keeping that aspect of India in mind, why did you decide to write this book? And how in your research, did you find diverse religions co-exist in India? How much of the "unity in diversity", and "religious tolerance" is a reality?
The politicisation of religious intolerance is something, sadly, that unites South Asia: as true of Taliban Peshawar as it is of Bal Thackeray's Bombay. But while politicians divide, popular religion unites: a Sufi shrine in Sindh, a Baul Mela in Bengal, a theyyam dance in Kerala: all these attract devotees across religious divides, and act as balm on the festering wounds and divisions created by malignant political power.
As for why I chose to write this book, it was curiosity more than anything else: a fascination for the way that modernity has altered religious practice: the way that my theyyam dancer, Hari Das, spends nine months a year as a prison warder; how the idol maker in Tanjore now manufactures for the Tamil diaspora in California, Neasden and New Jersey, and the fact that his son wants to become a computer engineer; how a naked Naga Sadhu I met above Kedarnath can have an MBA, and a tantric skull feeder I met in Birbhum has children who are opthamologists in New Jersey.
In The Red Fairy you write about Sufism as a popular movement that seems to bridge the gulf between Hinduism and South East Asian forms of Islam... can you talk a little more about this aspect? Did you find any other such 'bridges'?
Sufism has always acted as a bridge between Islam and the religions that surround it: Coptic Christianity in Egypt, Orthodox Christianity in Turkey, Zoroastrians in the Persian world and Gujerat, Hindus in South Asia and Buddhists across the Far East.
But Hinduism is an even more syncretic religion, and the way it cross-fertilises with say, Christianity or Judaism in Kerala, or Buddhism in Cambodia, is extraordinary. The porousness and malleability of Hinduism has always been one of its great strengths, and its sad to see the way that modern urban Hinduism-- especially the mainstream Vaishnavite sects of the North and the Shaivite ones in the urban south-- have lost some of this richness, with a hardening of belief and practice that has made the religion in its modern urban middle class form behave more like the Semitic religions: something text-based and self-consciously defined, with clear and firm boundaries.
In the Introduction to the book you talk about the fast paced change in India and its impact on religious diversity. What do you see as the impact on India's religious diversity? Homogeneity and the death of many such religions? Is this book then a call for preservation?
Its a very personal and subjective belief, but for me much of the richness of modern Hinduism exists on the fringes. Real religious diversity survives mainly in the villages and in the provinces, and it is very much on this traditional fringe that this book focuses: on the ancient regional sects and cults, many of them deeply heterodox, that are often forgotten-- the Bauls and Tantrics of Bengals, the incarnating theyyam dancers of Kerala and the epic singing bhopas of Rajasthan. These are fragile survivals of a more ancient and syncetic world, and things that deserve to be celebrated and written.
For example the Epic of Pabuji is a Rajasthani variant on the mainstream Ramayana: in it, it is Pabuji who goes to Lanka, and he does so not to rescue his kidnapped wife but to rustle cattle. But today, the camel herders who used to be the audience are migrating to the cities, and the few audiences these days are prepared for the all-night eight hours declamation of the epic: thanks to television and Bollywood they have only two or three hour attention spans. So the oral epic is slowly dying as the last of the old bhopas are dying, and with the death of the epic, one of the great regional Gods is being forgotten.
In White Mughals you wrote about the many bridges and connections built between the British and the Indians. Growing up in India, we were taught in school that the Hindus and Muslims in India too lived merrily together until the British's divide and rule policy. What have you found during your research about the historical relations between these two religions?
It was the onset of modernity, and modern thought, not British policy, that brought about the divide. The evidence is the way the same process of religious polarisation happened across the Ottoman world, much of which was never colonised, yet here too Muslim, Christian, Jew, and Yezidi all fell out as each became self-aware, and fell under the influence of Western ideas of nationalism. The Deobandi movement in Islam, and the Arya Samaj (and later, in a more extreme way, the RSS,) began to un-knit the patchwork of common plural culture more effectively than the Brits could ever have dreamt of doing.
Can you tell us about the Nine Lives show you are bringing to Sydney - what kind of music will the audience hear, and what can they expect to see?
It’s a wonderful show- I can say that as I'm only the ringmaster, knitting the show together with readings about each performer before they come on. First up, are Paban Das Baul and the Bauls of Bengal, performing the beautiful Tantric teaching songs of the Bauls. Paban is a fabulously charismatic performer. Then we have the Fakirs of Bhit Shah, performing the hypnotic Sindhi songs of Shah Abdul Latif. Then there is a theyyam performance by Hari Das, who will incarnate the god Guliagan the Destroyer and generally let rip. And finally we have the gorgeous Susheela Raman ramping things up with her performance of the thevaram hymns of Tamil Nadu. She's an extraordinary singer, with real power in her voice, and never fails to get the whole audience to their feet.
Finally, can you also please tell us a little about the Jaipur Literature Festival that you organise. What has been your most rewarding experience running the festival?
I had the idea for the Jaipur Literature Festival in 2004, as wherever you went in the world there were festivals celebrating Indian writers—everywhere except India. So Namita Gokhale and I started one in Jaipur, and in six years it has grown from 20 old aunties to 35,000 punters last year.
Everything is free, and the directors are unpaid; as a result it feels more like an Indian wedding than a formal lit fest. But everyone seems to love it: Tina Brown dubbed it as the "the greatest literary show on earth", Simon Schama said it was "the most fabulous literary love-fest on the planet" and Salman Rushdie said it was his favourite literary festival in the world.
In the New York Times, Pico Iyer had this to say about us: "I've been to so many literary festivals, from Shanghai to Bogota, and this one is definitely the least dry, the most carnival-like. Where else would you go from Shakespeare to contemporary politics to V.S. Naipaul and then Sufi music-each in such a full-bodied way? The music definitely had a cleansing, clarifying quality after that clash of ideas, like a sorbet in the middle of a rich meal."
I've never had more fun running everything, but it is turning into a major commitment and now gobbles up about three months a year.
No comments:
Post a Comment