Asking an atheist to review William Dalrymple’s Nine Lives is like sending a vegan to check out a beefsteak restaurant. I am simply not on the same wavelength. So, instead of finding Dalrymple’s journey through nine disjointed lives spiritually uplifting, I am appalled at the tragic denial of life-assertion that most of these lives represent.
There is The Nun’s Tale with which the book opens. Its most useful purpose is to give those of us who know little or nothing of Jainism a potted introduction to the philosophy and other-world-view that informs the nun’s descent into self-annihilation. It would be interesting to learn how satisfied a believing and knowledgeable Jain would be with Dalrymple’s potted version (or a Mahayana Buddhist tantric with Dalrymple’s summary of Tantrism in The Lady Twilight). But for those of us not inclined to learn more, or who would like a spiritual quickie before plunging into the all-too-human tragedy, Dalrymple’s your man.
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For my part, I was certainly enlightened. For the author is a travel writer of huge talent, even genius. He takes the trouble to inform himself and engage the reader about the metaphysical underpinnings of his protagonist’s worldview before plunging both himself and the reader into a well-told and straightforward story of where, in this material world of “too, too solid flesh”, the spiritual quest can take the pilgrim to trajectories of self-mortification which it would be almost impossible for you or me to endure.
Yet, it is perhaps precisely because the nun inflicts on herself, at no one’s behest but her own, torture that is to be found only in Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo, and bears it with such parahuman resilience, that the overwhelming mass of those who could not possibly suffer such tribulation would find the tale uplifting. Indeed, all through humankind’s quest for spiritual salvation, it is not the mundane or the quotidian but the impossible or the incredible that has caught the human imagination. Where, for example, would Christianity be but for the non-human birth of Jesus Christ, his walking on water, his turning water into wine, his Resurrection after Crucifixion? That is why in the eyes of the Pope, beatification is denied to even the saintliest of persons until there is proof of a miracle; it is not Mother Teresa’s remarkable human life but a paranormal happening that qualified her for sainthood.
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Nine Lives is about such people. There are the Daughters of Yellamma, victims of the direst poverty imaginable, the kind of extreme poverty that still traps 239 million Indians at under Rs 10 a day or the poor and vulnerable 836 million, who make do with less than Rs 20 a day. Aeons ago, the desperately poor of the northwestern corner of Karnataka decided that they would parlay the sexual assets of their women to eke out a bare living, there being no other assets they could turn into gold. They justified this travesty of human dignity in the name of a goddess, their only hope in a brutal world. But there is nothing peculiar to prostitution in the name of an idol; the story of the prostitutes of Sonagachi or G.B. Road, or indeed of the Polish call-girls trapped in London’s dens of vice, would be no different from Dalrymple’s Rani Bai. So what is the point that Dalrymple is trying to make?
Perhaps the answer lies in The Dancer of Kannur, a theyyam dancer who, as he himself so poignantly puts it, is for the period of the festival the very incarnation of God, worshipped as such by even the high-caste who otherwise spit at him, but then reverts to being a humble prison warden for the next 10 months. Spiritualism as a temporary relief from the horrors of everyday existence? Does the solution lie in escapism or a robust tackling of poverty in the Here and Now?
No one should read Nine Lives without keeping at his side Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion or Meera Nanda’s The God Market; the former to discover that Nine disjointed, wasted Lives is a universal, not just an Indian, phenomenon; and the second to check the connection between India’s emergence as a poverty-ridden global supereconomic power and the huge spiritual-tourist market this book is for.
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Why then do I not walk out denouncing the whole charade? “Only because,” to quote from my own Confessions of a Secular Fundamentalist, “of my secularism...respecting the right of others to hold beliefs that I do not hold.”
That is why I agreed, albeit reluctantly, to review this book. My apologies to all those I have offended.
