Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Saturday August 7, 2010
|
NINE LIVES: In Search of the Sacred In Modern India
William Dalrymple
Knopf
ISBN 978-0-307-272820-9
276 pages
$26.95
Reviewed by Marie Arana
Three years ago, Goldman Sachs predicted that India's gross national output would quadruple in 10 years and, by 2050, overtake that of the United States. Today, India is on the verge of besting Japan to become the world's third-largest economic power. According to the CIA, whether you count people or workers or billable cell phones, the Indian nation is second only to China. Which is why, despite a staggering poverty -- the average annual income is $1,040 -- its consumption of cars and crude oil promises to soar to unimaginable magnitudes.
So much for the arithmetic.
But what is India, exactly? Who are its people? It is certainly not the monolithic nation the British once wanted us to believe it was. Nor is it the sea of mutually hostile Hindus and Muslims that contemporary historians so often describe. As William Dalrymple shows in his strikingly colorful new book, to be Indian is to inhabit a carnival of strangely colliding worlds, a profusion of identities with sharply defined regional variants. Nowhere is this more evident than in the country's spiritual life.
"While the West often likes to imagine the religions of the East as deep wells of ancient, unchanging wisdom," Dalrymple writes, "much of India's religious identity is closely tied to specific social groups, caste practices and father-to-son lineages, all of which are changing very rapidly." Bollywood may try to persuade us that the Hindu epics are neatly homogenous -- that there is one " 'national' Ramayana myth" -- but, in reality, Indian legends are interpreted in radically different ways depending on where you look in the country. Indeed, the historian Romila Thapar has argued that it is precisely Bollywood's (or colonialism's) model of "syndicated Hinduism" that threatens to drive India's self-contained cults to extinction. As the country races toward progress and redefinition, its small gods and goddesses stand to be crushed by the "hyper-masculine hero deities" of the big screen.
That clash between tradition and momentum is what Dalrymple seeks to capture on these pages. "Nine Lives" is a collection of portraits depicting nine worshippers who practice wildly different forms of devotion in a vortex of dizzying change. Part-travelogue, part-reportage, part-anthropology, the book hews to a theme that has long fascinated Dalrymple: how cultures in peril survive. It's a subject he knows well. A resident of India and England, he is the author of a number of notable books on history and travel, among them: "City of Djinns," a delightfully entertaining narrative of New Delhi; "The Last Mughal," about the British in 19th-century South Asia; and "From the Holy Mountain," which recounts a 6th-century trip through Byzantium.
In this particular book, however, Dalrymple looks at India's religions through starkly dissimilar lives. In Hari Das, a dancer who is venerated for his skill in impersonating Lord Vishnu, Dalrymple gives us a vivid cameo of the caste system. For nine months of every year, this Dalit -- or Untouchable -- is a manual laborer who digs wells and works as a prison guard. But for three months starting in December, the man is a living god. "We bring blessings to the village and villagers, and exorcise evil spirits," the performer explains. "Though we are all Dalits even the most bigoted and casteist Namboodiri Brahmins worship us, and queue up to touch our feet." The spiritual dances he performs are meant to impart Vishnu's wisdom and inspire the Brahmins to discard their arrogant prejudices, but every March, when the season draws to a close, Hari Das puts away his costume, heads back to jail and re-enters the rigid, oppressive hierarchy that keeps him in biting poverty. There is little chance that his children will want to do the same.
Often, as Dalrymple tells tales of religion, it is India's social structure that emerges in high relief. There is Mohan Bhopa, for instance, a bard and village shaman, who, though completely illiterate, is one of the last hereditary singers of the great ancient poem "The Epic of Pabuji." It takes him five full nights of dawn-to-dusk performances to recite the entire work, and there are precious few artists in India who can do it. As Dalrymple makes clear, it is in the hands of these unlettered men that the future of an art form hangs: "The illiterate have a capacity to remember in a way that the literate simply do not," he writes, and so, with state-mandated education and progress, the number of singers able to master the 600-year-old work has only diminished. Literacy, in other words, is killing India's oral traditions.
Such paradoxes abound in this book of pilgrimages.
A woman with a tendency to go into frightening trances is beaten by her bewildered husband. She runs away to dedicate herself to the dark, Tantric goddess Tara, who drinks blood, hoards human skulls and squats on the cremation grounds of Tarapith, one of the most sacred -- and terrifying -- places in India.
A young Jain nun, the daughter of a wealthy merchant, sweeps the ground before her with a peacock fan to make sure she doesn't step on a living creature. Jainism is, we are told, more about a profound divine absence than a presence, and so what must logically follow a life of devotion is a ritual fast to the death, a supreme sacrifice that -- as convoluted as this sounds -- wrests hope from the face of oblivion.
A devadasi (a prostitute and devotee of the goddess Yellamma) laments her life as a sex worker, but revels in the worship of a female deity who has come to mean more to her than her own mother. When time comes for her teenage daughters to be pledged in service to the goddess, she doesn't hesitate, although her faith appears to have brought only suffering. Before long, it brings untimely death, as each of her daughters succumbs to AIDS.
In the end, the array of beliefs in India is so vast that Dalrymple cannot possibly cover it all. He doesn't address Christianity, for instance, which has 27 million adherents in India; or Sikhs, who number 22 million. But, to his credit, he never claims that his purpose is to be exhaustive, or even representative. His point -- which he makes elegantly by quoting many voices -- is that, as India hurtles toward modernity, it may be losing some of its soul.
Marie Arana is writer at large for The Washington Post and a Kluge Distinguished Scholar at the Library of Congress. She can be reached at aranam(at symbol)washpost.com.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
|
| Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Send Story to a Friend | Top |
KOOK: What Surfing Taught Me About Love, Life, and Catching the Perfect Wave
Peter Heller
Free Press
ISBN 978 1 7432 9420 1
326 pages
$15
Reviewed by T. Rees Shapiro
At age 45, Peter Heller was unmarried and questioning his life's path. In the throes of a midlife crisis, he and a buddy decided to -- what else? -- learn to surf in California. Then there was a second problem: He became addicted to the waves' "throb and drum of contraction and collapse, the rush and hiss around it in constant surge and recession."
The book that resulted follows Heller on a six-month journey through Mexico behind the wheel of a VW camper in search of the best swells. He starts as a "kook," derisive slang for a beginner, and quickly finds that surfing includes "sand in your crotch, salt-stung eyes, banged temple, chipped tooth, screaming back, and sunburned ears." Nonetheless, he's totally in love with the sport, dude, and willingly endures the abuse for the chance to ride the waves like a "speeding bullet, or torpedo, of euphoria." A whole lot happens along the way: The car breaks down, he gets married, and he goes back to his day job writing about other things, such as tracking the social movements of humpback whales in Antarctica.
Unfortunately, Heller describes the most promising episode only cursorily: his escapades during a brief respite from surfing spent with Hollywood actress Hayden Panattiere and animal rights activist Ric O'Barry, trainer of the TV dolphin Flipper, in the Japanese sea town of Taiji. Heller's experiences there were featured in "The Cove," the 2009 Academy Award-winning documentary uncovering a bloody massacre of the marine mammals for their meat.
While this memoir about self-discovery and the joys of surfing is enjoyable enough, a book about the tragedy Heller witnessed in Taiji would have been more interesting and possibly also more fulfilling.
T. Ress Shapiro can be reached at shapirot(at symbol)washpost.com.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
|
| Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Send Story to a Friend | Top |
|
|
 |
|
| Recent Stories |
 STILL MISSING
RED HOOK ROAD
WILLIAM GOLDING: The Man Who Wrote 'Lord of the Flies'
THE HOUR: A Cocktail Manifesto
AS HUSBANDS GO |
|
|
|
|
|
| |
