Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India

by William Dalrymple

one can learn the epic from outside our caste – it is impossible. You have to be born to this.

learned the epic line by line, and knew it in its entirety by the time I was sixteen. I also knew where every

man cannot recite Pabuji’s epic on his own. He needs his wife to support him, or else people will not enjoy and

‘There were many stories of this sort about my father. He was a great healer: headache, body ache, stomach ache, indigestion: he could cure any of these with a night reading of the phad and a handful of herbs. ‘I am not the

idea that the oral tradition was seriously endangered was something I had heard repeated ever since I first began reading about the oral epics of Rajasthan. The Cambridge academic John D.

Rural Sindh

landscape here, with its harsh mix of dry horizons of sand and narrow strips of fertile soil, more closely resembles upper Egypt than the well-irrigated Punjab to its north; but it is poorer than either – in

one of the least developed areas in South Asia. Here landlords with their guns, and

private armies, and feudal prisons, still rule over vast tracts of country; bonded labour – a form of debt-slavery – leaves tens of thousands shackled to their ...

light. There had been ten or fifteen night robberies on the road in the past fortnight alone. The same untameable landscape of remote desert and rocky hills that has made Sindh so difficult to govern, and so hospitable to brigands and outlaws throughout its history, has also turned it into a place of refuge for heterodox religious sects, driven here from more orthodox parts of the region. This, and

syncretism, with every kind of strange cult, part-Hindu, part-Muslim, flourishing in its arid wastes.

Sufism, with its holy men and visions, healings and miracles, and its emphasis on the individual’s search for direct knowledge of the divine, has always borne remarkable similarities to certain currents in Hindu mysticism.

The Hindus were said to regard Lal Shahbaz Qalander as a reincarnation of the sensual Sanskrit poet turned Shaivite ascetic, Bhartrihari,

Saleemullah, the theology of the dispute between the Sufis and the orthodox was quite simple. ‘We don’t like tomb worship,’ he said. ‘The Quran is quite clear about this, and the scholars from the other side simply choose to ignore what it says. We must not

‘Sadly this town is full of shirk and grave worship,’ he replied, stroking his long, straggling black beard. ‘It is all the Hindu influence that is responsible. Previously these people were economically powerful in this

The gaze of the bronze deity meets the eyes of the worshipper, and it this exchange of vision – the seeing and the seen – that acts as a focus for bhakti, the passionate devotion of the devotee.

We believe that unless these proportions are exactly perfect, the god cannot live in the idol. As sculptors, we

‘Only then,’ he said, ‘will a deity attract devotees. And it is only then that we as sculptors begin to do justice to the tradition we have inherited from our forefathers.’

believe God will only be there if the particular image is made exactly according to the rules.’

asked whether the gods remained in the images for ever. Srikanda explained that Hindus believe that, like humans, the idols of deities also have a defined life span: that the jivan will not stay in a sculpture for ever, though it may do so, if properly and faithfully worshipped, for as long as 850 years, the faith of the devotees in effect

if stolen or abused, the deity would leave the statue immediately.

the case with all the idols in museums, none of which was now alive.

a god is in the heart and that heart becomes corrupted, the deity cannot flow through that sculptor into the idol.

‘The god or goddess only fully enters a new idol when we open his eyes and carve in the pupils – the final piece of carving

father to son, for over 700 years. That’s part of what makes a

‘Before you drink from a skull,’ said Manisha Ma Bhairavi, ‘you must first find the right corpse.’ We

of the cremation ground at Tarapith in Bengal – a shakta pith, one of the most holy places in India, and said to be the abode of the Devi’s Third Eye. It is also the home of

least twenty goats a day are dispatched here to satisfy her hunger.

above the river

under the great spreading banyan trees decorate their huts with lines of human skulls, many clearly belonging to children.

‘Well, once you have a good skull, the next thing is to cure it. You must bury it in the earth for a while and then oil it. If you only want

for drinking, then it’s ready;

The Tantric sadhus who live here were all sitting around, ash-smeared, naked or half-naked, sipping tea and playing cards, as if living in a skull-filled burning ghat was the most normal

But usually she was depicted almost naked with matted hair and a blood-red lolling tongue and sitting upon a tiger’s skin with four arms, wearing a garland of freshly severed heads. She wielded a blood-smeared cleaver as she stood victorious, dripping with blood, over a dead corpse with an erect phallus. To my eyes she

said. ‘This is true. This is her wild side. But all this just means she can fight the devils on your behalf.’

To me, Ma is all. My life depends on her.’

Tarapith lies in a great planisphere of flat, green country: fertile floodplains and rice paddies, whose abundant soils and huge skies stretch out towards the marshy Sunderbans, the Ganges Delta and the Bay of

But here one building dominates all the others: the great temple of the goddess. Its base is a thick-walled, red-brick

the silver image of the goddess with her long black hair, half-submerged beneath marigold garlands and Benarasi saris, and crowned and shaded by a silver umbrella. On her forehead is

Tara’s preferred residence is not the temple, but the cremation ground which lies above the ghats of the river on the edge of the village. Tara is, after all, one of the most wild and wayward of Hindu goddesses, and cannot be tamed and contained within a venerated temple image. She is not only the goddess of supreme knowledge who grants her devotees the ability to know and realise the Absolute, she is also the Lady Twilight, the Cheater of Death, a figure of horror and terror, a stalker of funeral pyres, who slaughters demons and evil yakshis without hesitation, becoming as terrible as them in order to defeat them: in the tenth-century hymn of a hundred names from the Mundamala Tantra, Tara is called She Who likes Blood, She Who Is Smeared with Blood and She Who Enjoys Blood Sacrifice.

this night, and the next, we believe the goddess is at large, and more open to our prayers.’

they thought I was possessed by the goddess, and they gave me offerings and tried to interpret what I was saying during my fits. This frightened me at first, but

heard a call from Ma Tara. It was a sound which came in the breeze, Tara Ma saying, very clearly: “Come to me. All that you may lose, you will recover. I will take care of your daughters. Your place is now with me.”

here twenty years. It was here that Ma Tara

They help you to invoke her, and call her to you.

spirits, the ones that have died unfortunate deaths when they are young: they are the ones that linger on, and wander. They take a long time to reincarnate and they are the ones we can call through the midnight air. With luck, they are

bathing them in ghee, yoghurt and honey. I had a

saying these things, why don’t we solve the problem by living together? We are not greedy for property: we only need each other.” So he invited me to his hut, and from that day we stayed together.

on to a different plane. I collected many disciples, and found

The greatest pleasure we have is here, with her. It is here in this place of death, amid the skulls and bones and smoking funeral pyres, that we have found love.’