Nine Lives (3 page)
As I found on my travels, increasingly it is the small gods and goddesses that are falling away and out of favour as faith becomes more centralized, and as local gods and goddesses give way to the national hyper-masculine hero deities, especially Lord Krishna and Lord Rama, a process scholars call the ‘Rama-fication’ of Hinduism. Ironically, there are strong parallels in the way this new Hinduism is standardising faith to what is happening in South Asian Islam. There too, the local is tending to give way to the national as the cults of local Sufi saints – the warp and woof of popular Islam in India for centuries
–
loses ground to a more standardised, middle-class and textual form of Islam, imported from the Gulf and propagated by the the Wahhabis, Deobandhis and Tablighis in their madrassas.
Yet to my surprise, for all the changes and development that have taken place, an older India endures, and many of the issues that I found my holy men discussing and agonising about remained the same eternal quandaries that absorbed the holy men of classical India or the Sufis of the middle ages,
hundreds of years ago: the quest for material success and comfort against the claims of the life of the spirit; the call of the life of action against the life of contemplation; the way of stability against the lure of the open road; personal devotion against conventional or public religion; textual orthodoxy against emotional appeal of mysticism; the age-old war of duty and desire.
The water moves on, a little faster than before, yet still the great river flows. It is as fluid and unpredictable in its moods as it has ever been, but it meanders within familiar banks.
The interviews of this book took place in eight different languages, and in each case I owe a huge debt to those who accompanied me on the trips and helped me talk to my subjects: Mimlu Sen, Santanu Mitra, Jonty Rajagopalan, Prakash Dan Detha, Susheela Raman, H Padmanabaiah Nagarajaiah, Prathibha Nandakumar, Tenzin Norkyi, Lhakpa Kyizom, Tenzin Tsundue, Choki Tsomo, Masood Lohar, and my old friend Subramaniam Gautham who accompanied me on trips to both Tamil Nadu and Kerala. Toby Sinclair, Gita Mehta, Ram Guha, Faith and John Singh, Ameena Saiyid, Wasfia Nazreen, Sam Mills, Michael Wood, Susan Visvanathan, Pankaj Mishra, Dilip Menon and the late Bhaskar Bhattacharyya all gave helpful advice, while Varsha Hoon of Connexions Inc. organised all the logistics of travel, and tolerated my frequent last minute changes of plan with patience and ingenuity. Geoffrey Dobbs kindly leant me his beautiful island, Taprobane, to begin this book and it was there that I wrote the first of these stories,
‘
The Nun’s Tale
’
.
For help with translations of devotional poetry, I am indebted to A.K. Ramanujan’s two wonderful collections of ancient verse,
When God is a Customer
(University of California Press, 1994) and
The Interior Landscape
(OUP India, 1994); to Ramprasad Sen’s
Grace and Mercy in her Wild Hair
(Hohm Press, 1999); to Deben Bhattacharya’s
The Mirror of the Sky
(Allen & Unwin, 1969); to Anju Makhija and Hari Dilgir for their translation of
Seeking the Beloved
by Shah Abdul Latif (Katha, New Delhi, 2005); to John D. Smith for his translations of Pabuji verse in
The Epic of Pabuji: A Study, Transcription and Translation
(Cambridge University Press, 1991); and lastly to Vidya Dehejia for translations from classical Tamil hymns and inscriptions.
As before, many people were kind enough to read through drafts of the book and offer suggestions: Rana Dasgupta, Wendy Doniger, Paul Courtwright, Daniyal Mueenuddin, Ananya Vajpayi, Isabella Tree, Gurcharan Das, Jonathan Bond, Rajni George, Alice Albinia, Chiki Sarkar, Salma Merchant, Basharat Peer, and especially Sam Miller, who was a much more useful reader to me than I, to my shame, was to him with the manuscript of his wonderful Delhi book. My heroic agent, the legendary David Godwin, has been a rock throughout. I have also been blessed with inspirational publishers: Sonny Mehta at Knopf, Ravi Singh of Penguin India, Marc Parent of Buchet Chastel and especially Michael Fishwick of Bloomsbury who has been the editor of all seven of my books – this is our twentieth anniversary together.
My lovely family, Olivia and my children Ibby, Sam and Adam, have been as generous and delightfully distracting as ever. This book is dedicated to my gorgeous Sammy, whose own book of stories, co-written with his little brother, has been growing rather quicker, and contains even more magic, than that of his Daddy.
William Dalrymple, Mira Singh Farm, New Delhi
1 July 2009
Two hills of blackly gleaming granite, smooth as glass, rise from a thickly wooded landscape of banana plantations and jagged palmyra palms. It is dawn. Below lies the ancient pilgrimage town of Sravanabelagola, where the crumbling walls of monasteries, temples and
dharamsalas
cluster around a grid of dusty, red earth roads. The roads converge on a great rectangular tank. The tank is dotted with the spreading leaves and still-closed buds of floating lotus flowers. Already, despite the early hour, the first pilgrims are gathering.
For more than 2,000 years, this Karnatakan town has been sacred to the Jains. It was here, in the third century
BC
, that the first Emperor of India, Chandragupta Maurya, embraced the Jain religion and died through a self-imposed fast to the death, the emperor’s chosen atonement for the killings for which he had been responsible in his life of conquest. Twelve hundred years later, in
AD
981, a Jain general commissioned the largest monolithic statue in India, sixty feet high, on the top of the larger of the two hills, Vindhyagiri.
This was an image of another royal Jain hero, Prince Bahubali. The prince had fought a duel with his brother Bharata for control of his father’s kingdom. But in the very hour of his victory, Bahubali realised the folly of greed and the transience of worldly glory. He renounced his kingdom and embraced instead the path of the ascetic. Retreating to the jungle, he stood in meditation for a year, so that the vines of the forest curled around his legs and tied him to the spot. In this state he conquered what he believed to be the real enemies – his passions, ambitions, pride and desires – and so became, according to the Jains, the first human being to achieve
moksha
or spiritual liberation.
The sun has only just risen above the palm trees, and an early morning haze still cloaks the ground. Yet already the line of pilgrims – from a distance, tiny ant-like creatures against the dawn-glistening fused-mercury of the rock face – are climbing the steps that lead up to the monumental hilltop figure of the stone prince. For the past thousand years this massive broad-shouldered statue, enclosed in its lattice of stone vines, has been the focus of pilgrimage in this Vatican of the Digambara, or Sky Clad Jains.
Digambara monks are probably the most severe of all India’s ascetics. They show their total renunciation of the world by travelling through it completely naked, as light as the air, as they conceive it, and as clear as the Indian sky. Sure enough, among the many ordinary lay people in lungis and saris slowly mounting the rock-cut steps, are several completely naked men – Digambara monks on their way to do homage to Bahubali. There are also a number of white-clad Digambara nuns or
matajis
, and it was in a temple just short of the summit that I first laid eyes on Prasannamati Mataji.
I had seen the tiny, slender, barefoot figure of the nun in her white sari bounding up the steps above me as I began my ascent. She climbed quickly, with a pot of water made from a coconut shell in one hand, and a peacock fan in the other. As she climbed, she gently wiped each step with the fan in order to make sure she didn’t stand on, hurt or kill a single living creature on her ascent of the hill: one of the set rules of pilgrimage for a Jain
muni
or ascetic.
It was only when I got to the Vadegall Basadi, the temple which lies just below the summit, that I caught up with her – and saw that despite her bald head
Mataji was in fact a surprisingly young and striking woman. She had large, wide-apart eyes, olive skin and an air of self-contained confidence that expressed itself in a vigour and ease in the way she held her body. But there was also something sad and wistful about her expression as she went about her devotions; and this, combined with her unexpected youth and beauty, left one wanting to know more.
Mataji was busy with her prayers when I first entered the temple. After the glimmering half-light outside, the interior was almost completely black, and it took several minutes for my eyes fully to adjust to the gloom. At the cardinal points within the temple, at first almost invisible, were three smooth, black marble images of the Jain
Tirthankaras
,
or Liberators. Each was sculpted sitting Buddha-like in the
virasana samadhi
, with shaved head and elongated earlobes. The hands of each
Tirthankara
was cupped, and they sat cross-legged in a lotus position, impassive and focused inwards, locked in the deepest introspection and meditation
. Tirthankara
means literally ‘ford-maker’, and the Jains believe these heroic ascetic figures have shown the way to Nirvana, making a spiritual ford through the rivers of suffering, and across the wild oceans of existence and rebirth, so as to create a crossing place between
samsara
and liberation.
To each of these figures in turn, Mataji bowed. She then took some water from the attendant priest and poured it over the hands of the statues. This water she collected in a pot, and then used it to anoint the top of her own head. According to Jain belief, it is good and meritorious for pilgrims to express their devotion to the
Tirthankaras
,
but they can expect no earthly rewards for such prayers: as perfected beings, the ford-makers
have liberated themselves from the world of men, and so are not present in the statutes, in the way that, say, Hindus believe their deities are incarnate in temple images. The pilgrim can venerate, praise, adore and learn from the example of the
Tirthankaras
, and they can use them as a focus for their meditations. But as the ford-makers are removed from the world they are unable to answer prayers; the relationship between the devotee and the object of his devotion is entirely one way. At its purest, Jainism is almost an atheistic religion, and the much venerated images of the
Tirthankaras
in temples represent not so much a divine presence as a profound divine absence.
I was intrigued by Mataji’s intense dedication to the images, but as she was deep in her prayers, it was clear that now was not the moment to interrupt her, still less to try to talk to her. From the temple, she headed up the hill to wash the feet of Bahubali. There she silently mouthed her morning prayers at the feet of the statue, her rosary circling in her hand. Then she made five rounds of the
parikrama
pilgrim circuit around the sanctuary and, as quickly as she had leapt up the steps, she headed down them again, peacock fan flicking and sweeping each step before her.
It was only the following day that I applied for, and was given, a formal audience – or as the monks called it,
darshan
– with Mataji at the monastery guest house; and it was only the day after that, as we continued our conversations, that I began to learn what had brought about her air of unmistakable melancholy.