Faith and pelf
"It is a mistake to regard modernity as something which is sounding the death knell of India's highly diverse religions," says , as the din of traffic floats into the lawns of a hotel in downtown Delhi where we are sitting.
The 44-year-old historian-travel writer is promoting his new book , an Indian Canterbury Tales of sorts, where he tells the stories of the lives of nine ordinary people across the country - and in one case, across the border in Pakistan - to explore the power of the sacred in modern India.
"Faith is not dying in India even as people become more materialist," he says. I couldn't agree more: faith in India is changing and mutating. We are witnessing the rise and rise of cults, and a thriving, cosy co-existence of local deities with the big, pan-Indian ones.
Divine enterprise is also flourishing - religion is big business.
Some of the stories in Nine Lives - presented largely in reported speech - are stunning examples of how the quotidian makes for the most engaging material - an austere Jain monk who starves herself to death, a Buddhist monk who joins the Indian army to fight the Chinese and ends up fighting the Pakistanis, awho is a fan of Test match cricket, a low-paid prison warden who plays God for two months a year. Some of the early story drafts date back six years; and Dalrymple says he whittled it down to "nine lives, nine moral universes" from a long list of 23 stories.
Some years ago, worried about "spiritual pollution" due to the unbridled rise of materialism in India. I thought Tully was worrying too much. Even Dalrymple wonders in Nine Lives: "Does India offer any sort of real spiritual alternative to materialism, or is it now just another fast-developing satrap of the wider capitalist world?" I lob the question back to him.
"There has always been materialism in India," he says. "And one of the reasons there have been so many great renouncers in the country was because they were reacting, in part, against the excesses of materialism". Dalrymple says that when he is quizzed by inquisitive readers on his book tours abroad about materialism in India, he says: "My neighbours in Delhi are some of the most brutally material people I have ever seen in my life!" 
Dalrymple is correct. In a hierarchical and class conscious society like India, open display of wealth and a desire to hoard acquisitions has existed since time immemorial. Only the rich could afford the excesses once upon a time. Now as the middle class reaps the gains of liberalisation, it flaunts its riches too. The poor aspire equally. So when their representative, a poor, untouchable politician gains power, she splurges on birthday parties and jewels, builds her statues and shows off her new-found wealth. Her dirt-poor supporters say her ostentation inspires them to aspire for a better life. How much more materialistic can a people be?
A quarter-of-a-century's experience of travelling and living in India and writing on it has given Dalrymple the opportunity to avoid the "western gaze" and offer a deeper perspective of things. So he sets out, as he writes, to explore how religion and faith are coping with a fast-changing India. The non-fiction short stories, he hopes, will "have avoided many of the clichΓ©s about 'Mystic India' that blight so much Western writing on Indian religion".
I ask him about the "western gaze" that leads to a lot of such writing. Dalrymple says that by allowing his subjects to talk about themselves in these stories, he is trying to "reduce the danger of my own presence on the material". It works to a large extent and is reminiscent of the approach to non-fiction. "I want to be an insider and outsider," he says. He succeeds here as well, with a sort of semi-detached approach to the pithy narratives. The only thing that I am not sure about is whether the stories offer very powerful examples of how faith is trying to adapt to a fast-changing society.
An idol maker's son wants to study computer engineering. The prison warder who plays God worries whether his children will carry on the family tradition. A singer of epics bemoans that the younger people in his village are hooked to TV and prefer abridged versions of his work on CDs. The tantric at a cremation ground is hooked to Test match cricket. None of this is really unexceptional and entirely unexpected. None of them convey a sense of any intense battle between religion and modernity. So are there no such battles at all? I suspect a few are taking place - and is reflected in the way, say, a muddled Hindu nationalist party like BJP is fast losing ground in India. I hope Dalrymple will shine a light on some such tales one day.
Nine Lives is published by Bloomsbury
.
Comments
or to comment.