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on Human Unhappiness

India's sacred extremes

How the poor and the pious of modern India find salvation in ' a great open air lunatic asylum for the divinely mad'
by Wendy Doniger

Manisha Ma Bhairava worships the Goddess and engages in Tantric ceremonies in the cremation grounds at Tarapith, in Bengal. Lal Peri is a devotee of the Sufi saint Lal Shahbaz Qalander. Tashi Passang lives as a Tibetan monk in Dharamsala, in India. Hari Das is possessed nightly by a god during a cycle of theyyam ritual performances every December to February in Kerala. Rani Bai is a sacred prostitute (a devadasi) in a town in northern Karnataka. Kanai is a blind minstrel who sings with the Bauls (“crazies”), an antinomian sect, at Kenduli, in West Bengal. Mataji wanders as a member of a sect of Digambara (“sky-clad”, that is, naked) Jains at Sravanabelgola. Mohan was a low-caste singer of the epics of the cavalier hero and deity Pabuji in Rajasthan. Srikanda Stpathy is a Brahmin idol-maker in the temple town of Swamimalai in South India.
What do these nine people, the subjects of William Dalrymple’s Nine Lives, have in common? All are in some ways purveyors of the sacred, but beyond that the patterns blur. They are Hindu, Jain, Buddhist, Muslim. Four women, five men. Only one (the idol-maker Srikanda, who serves as a kind of baseline point of contrast for all the others) is a Brahmin. Six of them inherited their jobs, while three of the four women, and one man, chose to renounce conventional life for various extreme forms of religion. What binds them together is the unusual suffering that they have undergone – all but Srikanda, whose chief sorrow is that his son wants to become a computer engineer instead of carrying on the family tradition. (“I do feel there is something special in the blood”, he says: “At some level this is not a skill which can be taught.”) Dalrymple notes that many of his subjects had been brutally affected “by invasions, by massacres, and by the rise of often violent, political fundamentalist movements: a great many of the lives of the searchers and renouncers I talked to were marked by suffering, exile and frequently, great pain: a large number turned out to be escaping personal, familial or political tragedies”. As one of the devadasis remarked, “If I were to sit under a tree and tell you the sadness we have to suffer, the leaves of that tree would fall like tears”.


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Dalrymple reveals these tragedies to us, leaf by leaf: Hari Das, a Dalit (or Untouchable), works as a well-digger (filthy, dangerous, physically gruelling work) and as a prison warder (where the inmates brutalize and occasionally kill the warders); he also suffers, like most Dalits, daily indignities, such as not being allowed to drink water from the wells he digs for other people. Tashi Passang, who fought against the Chinese after they invaded Tibet and killed his mother, hated the invaders so much that for years he couldn’t bear to eat in Chinese restaurants. Finally, “I determined that I would try to eat a Chinese meal in a Chinese restaurant to try to cure myself of this rage”. Eventually he found a restaurant run by a Chinese woman whose mother, like his own, had been tortured to death by Mao’s soldiers. “After that we both burst into tears and hugged each other. Since then I have been free from my hatred of all things and people Chinese.”
When he was six months old, Kanai caught smallpox and went blind; when he was ten his brother was killed in an accident, and when he was eleven, his father died. With such bad luck in the family, no one wanted to marry Kanai’s sister, who hanged herself because, as Kanai recalled, “she must have thought she was too much of a burden on me, and that we could not afford the wedding” (a scene eerily reminiscent of Jude the Obscure, and the hungry children who hang themselves because “we are too menny”). Kanai left the village then and joined the Bauls.
Mohan died of advanced leukaemia in Rajasthan, when, because of his poverty, no hospital would treat him or even give him a painkiller. Rani Bai, the devadasi, services eight or ten customers a day. Her parents sold her when she was six; she was deflowered (by the highest bidder) right after her first period; her aunt said, “You should not cry. This is your dharma, your duty, your work. It is inauspicious to cry”. Her daughter died of AIDS, and she herself is now HIV-positive. Her fatherless son accused her: “He said I should not have brought him into the world like this”.
Lal Peri was driven first out of India into East Pakistan after Hindu–Muslim riots in the late 1960s and then, when Hindu–Muslim tensions and Bihari–Bengali tensions increased there at the creation of Bangladesh in 1971, out of East Pakistan into Sindh. When her father died, her uncle grabbed the land, and her family was penniless. Her best friend, a Hindu, took poison and killed herself because her family would not let her marry the Muslim boy she loved. There were devastating floods. “Things were so bad that we stopped eating fish from the river because there were so many bodies rotting in the water.” Her traumatic life left her emotionally raw. She finally took refuge in the shrines of Sindh and struggled to live the life of a Sufi woman in the male-dominated and increasingly Talibanized society of Pakistan. Manisha Ma Bhairavi, dirt poor (her father drank away their money), was beaten by her husband, rejected by her mother-in-law, and lost her home and her three daughters. She left her husband and children to join the Tantrics at Tarapith.
Dalrymple vividly evokes the lives of these men and women, with the sharp eye and good writing that we have come to expect of his extraordinary travel books about India, such as City of Djinns and The Age of Kali, and his histories (White Mughals, The Last Mughal). But Nine Lives is different from his other works; it is not so much about places as about the religious lives of people who live in those places, and is a glorious mixture of journalism, anthropology, history, and history of religions, written in prose worthy of a good novel. Each chapter places the biographies in the context of the religious activities and history of the place. For Rani Bai’s role of temple prostitute, for instance, Dalrymple explains that British reformers in the nineteenth century, and the Hindu reformers who aped them, “have not succeeded in ending the institution, only demeaning and criminalizing it”. Signs are posted: “Dedicating your daughter is uncivilized behaviour”.
In the descriptive passages, the book is rather old-fashioned, driven by a taste for the exotic and the picturesque, somewhat reminiscent of the memoirs of Raj adventurers such as William Crooke or Sir Richard Carnac Temple; not since Kipling has anyone evoked village India so movingly. Dalrymple can conjure up a lush or parched landscape with a single sentence: “Kingfishers watch silently from the telegraph wires”. “Flotillas of ducks quack and stretch their wings.” “Goats picked wearily through dusty stubble.” He also has a gift for evoking India through comparison with England: “At times the road seemed to pass through a long dark wooden tunnel, with the roots rising above and to either side of the road, like flying buttresses flanking the long nave of a gothic cathedral”. “Round his waist was a wide grass busk, as if an Elizabethan couturier had somehow been marooned on some forgotten jungle island and been forced to reproduce the fashions of the Virgin Queen’s court from local materials.” And he has an ear for vivid phrases from the people he interviews: “At least my mind no longer goes off like a yak that has escaped its herder”. Dalrymple delights in the oft-satirized flowery metaphors that Tantrics use, such as “the full moon at the new moon” (sex with menstruating women), “drinking nectar from the moon” (ingesting a drink compounded of semen, blood and bodily fluids), “close the mouth of the snake and boil the milk of bliss” (make love without ejaculating), and “make the frog dance before the serpent” (I’ll leave you to figure that one out for yourselves); they speak of using Tantric sex as a “booster rocket” to drive the mind out of the gravitational pull of everyday life.
The contrast between the colourful religious festivals and rituals and the bitterness of individual lives is stark indeed. Has religion been a balm to their wounds, or is it one of the wounds? This is not a question that Dalrymple cares to ask. He is determined to “keep the narrator firmly in the shadows, so bringing the lives of the people I have met to the fore”. Very occasionally, he lets us catch a glimpse of him, as when Rani Bai remarks of a client, “He was very hefty, very fat. Much fatter even than you”. I wish that the author had stepped out of the shadows a bit more. It is in any case disingenuous of him to think of himself as invisible, as no anthropologist since Malinowski would be so naive as to do; though he never explicitly editorializes, his biases are evident not only in the stories that he chooses to tell, but in the quotations that he chooses to include. If the book leaves the reader with an overwhelming sense of sadness, it is because Dalrymple chose to tell sad stories. As he himself admits in the introduction, he made the decision to root many of the stories “in the darker and less romantic sides of modern Indian life”. To some extent, his selections reify the old Orientalist cliché of South Asian renunciation as pessimism, as a flight from life only because the particular life in question is unliveable, rather than because (as the renunciatory religions themselves argue) life itself is inherently tragic.
But the people in this book often depict religion as balm rather than wound. The women who left their families and found love and community in these bands of religious ecstatics tell why they renounced their homes. Mataji, who came from a well-to-do and loving Jain family, just happened to meet a holy man one day: “I was very impressed and started thinking. It didn’t take long before I decided I wanted to be like him . . . . I was only sad that I had already wasted so much of my life”. Lal Peri “was an illiterate, simple and trusting woman, who saw the divine and miraculous everywhere”; after her years of oppression and flight, she started to associate with wandering Sufis and began to think that she might become one herself. As for Kanai, the death of his father, brother and sister drove him “mad with grief”. Unable to remain in the village, he remembered a Baul guru whom he had met. There was, moreover, another consideration: “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”. Manisha did not want to sleep with her husband; her mother-in-law disliked her and kept saying: “What are you crying for?”. When she was forced to move into her husband’s bedroom, she was possessed by the Goddess, and had a fit for the first time. For years she kept going into trances; her husband beat her; “It seemed that the more angry and violent my husband became, the more often I went into a state of trance”. She ran away from him and slept in the temple, and from that day, her trances became less frequent. It doesn’t take a psychoanalyst to connect the dots here.
The positive effects of certain religious traditions are also in evidence. Very poor, and very pious, women see the devadasi system as “providing a way out of poverty while gaining access to the blessings of the gods, the two things that the poor most desperately crave”. Unlike other women, a devadasi can inherit her father’s property. Tashi remarked: “In the monastery I was happier than I had ever been. In my life as a herdsman, I had to worry about the wolves, and my yaks, and to look after my grandparents – life was full of anxieties. But as a monk you only have to practise your prayers and meditation, and to hope and work for Enlightenment”. It was in the monastery, too, that Tashi learnt to read the Tibetan alphabet. As for caste, Hari Das claimed that, during the season when the god possessed him in nightly performances, “Though we are all Dalits even the most bigoted and casteist Namboodiri Brahmins worship us, and queue up to touch our feet”. The stories enacted in the theyyam, too, often tell of a member of the lower castes who “transgresses accepted caste restrictions and is unjustly punished with rape (in the case of women) or death (in the case of men, and sometimes women too), and then is deified by the gods aghast at the injustices perpetrated by the Brahmins and other ruling castes”. The Brahmins attending the performance are said to be discomforted “and seek to reform their behaviour”. Hari Das admits that after the performance season, for the rest of the year, “no one here would even greet me or invite me to share a cup of tea with them . . . . They may pay respect to a theyyam artist like me during the theyyam itself, but outside it they are still as casteist as ever”. Yet he sees the theyyam as a weapon of resistance against an unjust social system, instilling self-confidence in the younger generation of Dalits and inspiring them to seek an education.
One of the unexpected benefits of Tantric religion is its comfortable domesticity. As Dalrymple remarks, “For all the talk of what might elsewhere be considered black magic, in the daylight at least, the cremation ground that surrounded Ma’s little hut made an oddly domestic scene . . . an oddly villagey and almost cosy feel”. The Goddess receives, in addition to the more usual offerings of coconuts, white silk Benares saris, incense sticks, bananas and bottles of whisky. Sitting around the fire as the corpses burn, people sip tea, play cards and listen to cricket matches on the radio, “as casual, eager, relaxed and at ease as their British equivalents would be on Guy Fawkes night”. Some of them work at oiling the skulls that they use in their rituals and painting them red, to keep them from going mouldy in the monsoon. A Bollywood director, who is the local Bihar Communist MP, comes here with a sacrificial goat when he wants to find out what the election results will be. By the end of the chapter, the reader begins to feel that there is nothing weird at all about drinking warm blood or decorating your home with skulls.
Manisha Ma’s children became quite used to her trances; “they thought all mothers were like this”. Even after she abandoned them (“I missed my children, of course – the youngest was only four, and none of them were old enough to understand. Often I would weep”), her devotees filled the place in her heart that her children had occupied. Other Tantrics have other problems with their children; one of them refused to cooperate with Dalrymple because his two sons were now opthalmologists in New Jersey. “They had firmly forbidden him from giving any more interviews about what he did in case rumours of the family dabbling in Black Magic damaged their profitable East Coast practice.”
The embourgeoisement of some Tantric orders was in part a survival response to two challenges to Tantra which arose in the nineteenth century: Hindu reformers, many of whom began to appear in Bengal in reaction to British missionaries, attacked not only the devadasis, but also the Tantrics. At the same time, the rise of devotional (bhakti) sects worshipping Krishna and Rama threatened to eclipse Goddess cults and blood sacrifices. The solution, simple but brilliant, was to incorporate bhakti into Tantra. As Manisha Ma put it, “I am beginning to think that Tantra only really works properly when it is coupled with intense devotion, with bhakti . . . . What you need is to find a balance between bhakti and tantra. With the two of them together, with both love and sacrifice, I believe you are on the right path”.
Dalrymple steps out of the shadows to praise this world. He speaks of “living in a mystical anarchy in a great open air lunatic asylum for the divinely mad” and describes the asylum:
"There is a palpable sense of community among the vulnerable outcasts, lunatics and misfits who have come to live there, and those who might be locked up, chained, sedated, hidden, mocked or shunned elsewhere are here venerated and respected as enlightened lunatics full of crazy wisdom. In return they look after one another and appear to tolerate one another’s eccentricities. It is a place where even the most damaged and marginal can find intimacy and community."
And he ends the book with an upbeat passage which could have come straight out of A. A. Milne: “‘We have a song about this. You would like to hear it?’ ‘Very much,’ I said”. After they have finished their song, Kanai says, “It makes us so happy that we don’t remember what sadness is”. This is religion with a happy face.
But the uglier face of religion, religion as wound rather than balm, is visible too. Other Hindus persecute both the Tantrics and “poor, widowed, and socially marginalized women, who are accused of practicing witchcraft and ‘eating the livers’ of villagers, particularly when some calamity befalls a community; indeed they are still occasionally put to death, like the witches of Reformation Europe and North America”. Mataji underwent two ceremonies in which the hairs on her head were pulled out one by one, a process that she chose instead of having her head shaved. “The whole ritual took nearly four hours, and was very painful. I tried not to, but I couldn’t help crying.” Her only friend died of TB and malaria, in great pain. Though the sect are not allowed to use Western medicine, they finally took her to a hospital for an MRI scan, but “One doctor said that if we had come earlier they could have helped, but we had left it much too late”. Lal Peri eventually ran into the Wahhabis, Muslim reformists who opposed the Sufi movement; they blew up the shrines, silenced the music, and persecuted the women, blaming Sufi liberalism on friendly contact with Hindus, which they viewed as pollution.
This last factor is the source of the greatest suffering caused by religion: inter-religious hatred. Dalrymple raises, but does not answer, a very good question: “Why does one individual embrace armed resistance as a sacred calling, while another devoutly practices ahimsa, or non-violence?”. Tashi is the only one of the Dalrymple Nine who engaged in armed resistance himself, when he fought in the Indian army against the Chinese. He tries hard, but in vain, to justify his actions: “They would make us drink rum and whisky so that we would do these things without hesitation and not worry about the moral consequences of our actions. Every day I saw corpses . . . . War is far worse than you ever imagine it to be. It is the last thing a Buddhist should be involved in”.
Communist and Buddhist ideas about liberation are rather different; when the Red Colonel told the Tibetans that he had come to liberate them, “the abbot replied that he could not liberate us, as the Lord Buddha had showed us that it was up to each man to liberate himself”. Yet Tashi bends over backwards to justify his violence in religious terms. He notes a number of precedents, great figures, both divine and human, in the Tibetan tradition, who performed “acts of great violence in order to protect Buddhism and defeat its enemies, both human and demonic”.
A more interesting argument is Tashi’s evocation of Buddhist scriptures which say “that in certain circumstances it can be right to kill a person, if your intention is to stop that person from committing a serious sin. You can choose to take upon yourself the bad karma of a violent act in order to save that person from a much worse sin”. Buddhists believe that one person can give another his good karma (or his accumulated merit) or take another’s bad karma upon himself. (Some Hindu ascetics in the medieval period worked the system selfishly, in reverse: they went so far as to trick people into treating them unfairly, in order to steal their good karma.) Therefore, by killing people before they can kill you, you are actually doing them a favour: you get the bad marks that will give you a bad rebirth and they go to a better rebirth than they would have had if you had let them kill you. In addition, Tashi says, “I have prayed for the souls of the men I have killed, and asked that they have good rebirth. But still I worry”. And with good reason. “If anything I prayed more in the army than I did as a monk”, he insists. “But within my heart, I knew I was going against ahimsa.”
For Tashi, at least, religion was not the solution to the problem of violence. But for many of the others, it was. The relationship between Hinduism and Islam in India has long ricocheted between love and extraordinary syncretism on the one hand, and hatred and terrible violence on the other. Lal Peri, who later suffered from the violence, grew up in a time of peace, when “it seemed as if the Hindus and Muslims were like brothers and sisters . . . . There was a mosque and a temple not far from each other, and if people wanted something, they would usually go to both”. This situation still obtains in parts of India today, despite widespread communal tensions and frequent outbursts of hostility. In particular, peace is preserved in many fringe religious groups, including the Tantric gatherings and Lal Peri’s shrine, “where for once you saw religion acting to bring people together, not to divide them . . . a balm on South Asia’s festering religious wounds. The shrine provided its often damaged and vulnerable devotees shelter and a refuge from the divisions and horrors of the world outside”.
This aspect of the book gives an answer to Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and those who would condemn all religions for the sake of the fanatical fringe, who assume that anyone who believes in anything theologically heavier than Santa Claus is a jihadist. If you believe that anyone is mad to believe in anything at all, the people in this book are surely among the maddest. But they have found a world of peace and love to live in, and they don’t kill anyone. Some are full of joy, though many of them also mention, in passing, their enduring unhappiness, and end up saying, well, life is like that; there is always sadness. Why did these people choose peaceful, if often painful and/or anti-social, ways of life instead of striking back at the society that made them miserable? The writer in the shadows does not ask, but he skilfully points us where he wants us to go. Here is religion at its most extreme, and often ugliest, but also religion responding to human life at its most extreme, and ugliest, and responding in a way that the walking wounded of the material world find healing.

William Dalrymple
NINE LIVES
In search of the sacred in modern India
288pp. Bloomsbury. £20.
978 1 4088 0061 4

Wendy Doniger is Professor in the School of Divinity, and the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. Her most recent book, The Hindus: An alternative history, was published last year. Her translation from the Sanskrit of books 15–18 of the Mahabharata is forthcoming.