Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India

by William Dalrymple

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economy is expected to overtake that of the US by roughly 2050. So

This is a very different India indeed, and it is here, in the places suspended between modernity and tradition, that most of the

stories in this book are set. For

this raises many interesting questions: What does it actually mean to be a holy man or a Jain nun, a mystic or a tantric seeking

salvation on the roads of modern India, as the Tata trucks thunder past? Why does one individual embrace armed resistance as a sacred calling, while another devoutly practices ahimsa, or non-violence?

eminent Indian historian Romila Thapar has called the new ‘syndicated Hinduism’ of middle class urban India.

With Nine Lives I have tried to invert this, and keep the narrator firmly in the shadows, so bringing the lives of the people I have met to the fore and placing their stories

‘Every day I suffered the pain of thorns and blisters. All this was part of my effort to shed my last attachments in this illusory world.’

‘Sallekhana?’ ‘It’s the ritual fast to the death. We Jains regard it as the culmination

our life as ascetics.

Jinas.’

their hunger by curving their right arm over their shoulder. If no food comes before the onset of the night, they go to bed hungry. They are forbidden to accept or in any way handle money. In ancient India, the Jain monks were also celebrated for their refusal to wash, and like the Coptic monks of Egypt, equated a lack of concern for outward appearance with inner purity. One early inscription at Sravanabelagola admiringly refers to a monk so begrimed with filth that ‘he looked as if he wore a closely fitting suit of black armour’.

Today the monks are allowed to wipe themselves with a wet towel and to wash their robes every few weeks; but bathing in ponds or running water or the sea is still strictly forbidden, as is the use of soap.

oblation,

a natural process and you can’t go back, at least until your next life. The only thing is to accept this, and to embrace the Jain path of knowledge, meditation and

penance as the sole way to free yourself from this cycle.

‘Except for the chaturmasa, it is forbidden for us to stay long in one place, in case we become attached to it.

We cannot eat food cooked by Hindus, but we can take raw materials from them and cook it ourselves.

common humanity emerges. As wanderers, we monks and nuns are free of shadows from the past. This wandering life, with no material possessions, unlocks our souls. There is a

jaggery.

20,000 people gathered,

After that our relationship of brother and sister was supposed to end – they were to be like strangers

us. Then we said goodbye to our parents; we embraced and wished each other farewell. After this, they were no longer our parents –

never again to use a vehicle, to take food only once a day, not to use Western medicine, to abstain from emotion, never to hurt any living creature.

were taught to concentrate on not touching or crushing any living creature.

You have to be aware of every single step, and learn to look four steps ahead. If a single ant is in your path you should be ready to jump or step aside. For the same reason, we must avoid standing on green plants, dew, mud, clay or cobwebs – who knows what life forms may be there?

‘Not hurting any sentient being and protecting the dharma is really the heart...

the spirit of God – in all living creatures, even those which are too small to see. So much of our discipline is about this: only drinking filtered water, only eating in daylight so we ca...

end, it pained her to move at all, and she had difficulty moving or sitting.

Western medicine is forbidden to us, as so much of it is made

They are waiting and watching for the moment when, once a year, the gods come down to earth, and dance.

first of the dancers has just been possessed – seized by the

It’s as if there is a sudden explosion of light. A vista of complete brilliance opens up – it blinds the senses.’

You become the deity. You lose all

are just the vehicle, the medium. In the trance it is God who speaks, and all the

Suddenly it’s all over, it’s gone. You don’t have any access to what happened during the possession or the performance. You can’t remember anything that happened in the trance. There is only a sensation of relief, as if you’ve off-loaded something.’

south-west flank of the Indian subcontinent is perhaps the most fecund and bucolic landscape in India – ‘God’s own country’,

sacred groves of the countryside, and the priests are not Brahmin but Dalit. The only role for the upper caste is when, as land owners, they sometimes have the right to appoint a particular family as hereditary theyyam dancers for a particular shrine, rather like a village squire in England having the right to choose the parish priest.

theyyam as much as a tool and a weapon to resist and fight back against an unjust social system as a religious

ourselves. Even the water was left for us in a separate bucket, and he did not even allow us to draw water from the well we had dug for him. This happens even now, in this age! I can dig a well in a Namboodiri [Brahmin] house and still be banned from drawing water from it.’

There was a nice irony, I thought, in the money of the most puritanical and intolerant of Wahhabis being used to fund such a fabulously and unrepentantly pagan ceremony.

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last volume of which was published in 1905, filled no fewer than forty-six volumes, each of which averaged 1,000 pages. This

to teach him to learn it by heart,’ the rani continued. ‘Every day, he had to learn ten or twenty lines by rote, then recite the whole poem up to that point in case he forgot what went before. Every day his father gave him buffalo milk so that his memory would improve.’

was not lack of interest, but literacy itself,

that was killing the oral epic.

ability that Lakha had somehow begun to lose as he slowly learned to write.

supernatural veterinary service. ‘People call me in whenever their animals fall sick,’ he said ‘Camels, sheep, buffaloes, cows – any of these. Pabuji is very powerful at curing sickness in beasts. The farmers send a message for us to come, and we go and recite – always at night, never during the day: it is almost a sin to read the phad after sunrise.

ghosts, no spirits can withstand the power of this story.’