Nine Lives (2 page)

We had now arrived at the top of the ridge and the land fell steeply on every side. Ajay gestured out over the forests and pastures laid out at our feet, a hundred shades of green framed by the blinding white of the distant snow peaks straight ahead:

‘When you walk in the hills your mind becomes clear,’ he said. ‘All your worries disappear. Look! I carry only a blanket and a water bottle. I have no possessions, so I have no worries.’

He smiled: ‘Once you learn to restrain your desires,’ he said, ‘anything becomes possible.’

The sort of world where a committed, naked naga sadhu could also be an MBA was something I was to become used to in the course of my travels for this book. Last November, for example, I managed to track down a celebrated tantric at a cremation ground near Birbhum in West Bengal. Tapan Goswami was a feeder of skulls. Twenty years ago he had been interviewed by an American professor of comparative religion, who went on to write a scholarly essay on Tapan’s practice of spirit-summoning and spell-casting, using the cured skulls of dead virgins and restless suicides. It sounded rich material, albeit of a rather sinister nature, so I spent the best part of a day touring the various cremation grounds of Birbhum before finally finding Tapan sitting outside his small Kali temple on the edge of the town, preparing a sacrifice for the goddess.

The sun was sinking now, and the light was beginning to fade; a funeral pyre was still smoking eerily in front of the temple. Everywhere, flies snarled in the hot, still air. Tapan and I talked of tantra, as the light faded, and he confirmed that in his youth, when the professor had interviewed him, he had indeed been an enthusiastic skull-feeder. Yes, he said, all that had been written about him was true, and yes, he did occasionally still cure skulls and summon their dead owners so as to use their power. But sadly, he said, he could not talk to me about the details. Why was that? I asked. Because, he said, his two sons were now successful opthamologists 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. Now he thought he might even give away his skulls, and go and join them in the States.

Living in India over the last few years, I have seen the country change at a rate that was impossible to imagine when I first moved there in the late eighties. On returning to live again in Delhi after nearly a decade away, I took a lease on a farmhouse five kilometres from the boom town of Gurgaon, on the south western edge of Delhi. From the end of the road you could just see in the distance the rings of new housing estates springing up, full of call centres, software companies and fancy apartment blocks, all rapidly rising on land that only two years earlier had been virgin farmland. Six years later, Gurgaon has galloped towards us at such a speed that it now almost abuts the edge of our farm, and what is proudly toted as the largest mall in Asia is coming up a quarter of  a mile from the house.

The speed of the development is breathtaking to anyone used to the plodding growth rates of Western Europe: the sort of construction that would take twenty-five years in Britain, comes up here in five months. As is now well known, India is already on the verge of overtaking Japan to become the third largest economy in the world, and according to CIA estimates, the Indian economy is expected to overtake that of the US by roughly 2050.

So extraordinary is all this that it is easy to overlook the fragility and unevenness of the boom. As you leave Gurgaon and drive down the Jaipur Highway, it is like heading back in time to an older, slower, pre-modern world. Within twenty minutes of leaving the Gurgaon headquarters of Microsoft or Google Asia, cars and trucks are beginning to give way to camel and bullock carts, suits, denim and baseball hats to dusty cotton
dhotis
and turbans. This is a very different India indeed, and it is here, in the places suspended between modernity and tradition, that most of the stories in this book are set. For here, outside the great burgeoning megacities of India and Pakistan, in the small towns and villages, South Asian religion is in a state of fascinating and unpredictable flux.

Much has now been written about the way that India is moving forward to return the subcontinent to its traditional place at the heart of global trade, but so far little has been said about the way these huge earthquakes have affected the diverse religious traditions of South Asia, or explored how the people who live out these rich traditions have coped with living in the eye of the storm. For while the West often likes to imagine the religions of the East as deep wells of ancient, unchanging wisdom,  in reality 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 as Indian society transforms itself at speed.

All this raises many interesting questions: What does it actually mean to be a holy man or a Jain nun, a mystic or a tantric seeking salvation on the roads of modern India, as the Tata trucks thunder past? Why does one individual embrace armed resistance as a sacred calling, while another devoutly practices
ahimsa
, or non-violence? Why does one think he can create a god, while another thinks that god can inhabit him? How is each specific religious path surviving the changes India is currently undergoing? What changes and what remains the same? Does India still offer any sort of real spiritual alternative to materialism, or is it now just another fast developing satrap of the wider capitalist world?        

Certainly on my travels around India for this book I found many worlds strangely colliding as the velocity of this process accelerates. Outside Jodhpur, I visited a shrine and pilgrimage centre that has formed around an Enfield Bullet motorbike. Initially erected as a memorial to its owner, after the latter suffered a fatal crash, the bike has now become a centre of pilgrimage, attracting pilgrims – especially devout truck drivers – from across Rajasthan in search of the miracles of fertility it was said to effect. In Swamimalai, near Tanjore in Tamil Nadu, I met Srikanda Stpathy, an idol maker, the thirty-fifth of a long line of sculptors going back to the legendary Chola bronze makers. Srikanda regarded creating gods as one of the holiest callings in India – but now has to reconcile himself to a son who only wants to study computer engineering in Bangalore. In Kannur in northern Kerala, I met Hari Das, a well-builder and part-time prison warden for ten months of the year, who polices the violent running war between the convicts and imprisoned gangsters of the two rival political parties, the far-right RSS and the hard-left Communist Party of India. But during the
theyyam
dancing season, between January and March, Hari has a rather different job. Though he comes from an untouchable
dalit
background, he nevertheless is transformed into an omnipotent deity for two months a year, and as such is worshipped as a god. Then, at the end of March, he goes back to the prison.

In Jaipur, I spent time with Mohan Bhopa, an illiterate goatherd from Rajasthan, who keeps alive a four-thousand-line sacred epic that he, now virtually alone, still knows by heart. Living as a wandering bard and storyteller, he remembers the slokas of one of the great oral epics of Rajasthan, praising the hero-God Papuji. Mohan told me, however, that his ancient recitative art is now threatened by the lure of Bollywood and the televised Hindu epics shown on Indian TV, and he has had to adapt the old bardic tradition in order to survive. The epic which Mohan recites contains a regional variant on the ‘national’
Ramayana
myth. In the mainstream Ramayana tradition, the hero Lord Ram goes to Lanka to rescue his wife Sita who has been captured by the demon king Ravana. In the Rajasthani version of the myth, the hero is Papuji, and he goes to Lanka not to rescue a kidnapped spouse, but to rustle Ravanna’s camels. Now whenever boys in his village see the televised version of the Ramayana, they ask him where the camels have gone. It is exactly these sort of regional variants, and self-contained local cults which are being lost and menaced by the slow homogenisation respresented in what the eminent Indian historian Romila Thapar has called the new ‘syndicated Hinduism’ of middle class urban India.

    Other people I met had had their worlds impacted by modernity in a more brutal manner: 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. Tashi Passang, for example was a Buddhist monk in Tibet until the Chinese invaded in 1959. When his monastery came under pressure from the Chinese, he decided to take up arms to defend the Buddhist faith: ‘Once you have been a monk, it is very difficult to kill a man,’ he told me. ‘But sometimes it can be your duty to do so.’ Now living in exile in the Indian Himalayas he prints prayers flags in an attempt to atone for the violence he committed after he joined the Tibetan resistance. Others, banished from their families and castes, or destroyed by interreligious or political violence, had found love and community in a band of religious ecstatics, sheltered, accepted and even revered where elsewhere they might be shunned.

With stories and dilemmas like these slowly filling my notebooks, I set out to write an Indian equivalent of my book on the monks and monasteries of the Middle East,
From
the Holy Mountain.
But the people I met were so extraordinary, and their own stories and voices so strong, that in the end I decided to write
Nine Lives
in a quite different form. Twenty years ago, when my first book,
In Xanadu
, was published at the height of the eighties, travel writing tended to highlight the narrator: his adventures were the subject; the people he met were sometimes reduced to objects in the background. With
Nine Lives
I have tried to invert this, and keep the narrator firmly in the shadows, so bringing the lives of the people I have met to the fore and placing their stories firmly centre stage. In some cases, to protect their identities, I have changed the names and muddied the details of some of my characters, at their own request.

As each of these characters live in the self-contained moral universes of their own religious and ethical systems,  I have tried not to judge, and though my choices and arrangement no doubt reveal something of my views and preferences, I have tried to show rather than tell, and to let the characters speak for themselves. This may leave the book less analytical than some would wish, but by rooting many of the stories in the darker sides of modern Indian life, with each of the characters telling his or her own story, and with only the frame created by the narrator, I have made a conscious effort to try avoid imposing myself on the stories told by my nine characters, and so hope to have escaped many of the clichés about ‘Mystic India’ that blight so much Western writing on Indian religion. For this is not the story of my religious journey, but of that of the nine subjects of this book. And though some of the stories deal with those on the wilder and more exotic fringes of Indian religious life, I have always attempted to humanise rather than exoticise those I have encountered.

     
Nine Lives
is conceived as a collection of linked non-fiction short stories, with each life representing a different form of devotion, or a different religious path. Each life is intended to act as a keyhole into the way that each specific religious vocation has been caught and transformed in the vortex of India’s metamorphosis during this rapid period of transition, while revealing the extraordinary persistence of faith and ritual in a fast-changing landscape.

  It is, of course, a personal and entirely subjective selection: these are simply the stories of nine people from nine traditions that happen to interest or appeal to me. The book makes no claims to be comprehensive, and there are many traditions which I have completely left out: there are, for example, no Sikhs, Christians, Parsis or Jews in this book, though all have long histories in the soil of South Asia.

    Nor do I deal at any length with the politics or economics of modern Indian religious life, or the mobilization of religion by elements within the Indian state and its political parties.  Although as a young foreign correspondent newly arrived in India in the late eighties I covered in detail the rise of Hindu fundamentalism in India, and reported from the ground on LK Advani’s Rath Yatra, the destruction of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya and the massacres of thousands of Muslims in Gujarat, these are not subjects I discuss here. Equally, I do not investigate the world of gurus and ashrams and TV Godmen, though these are all fascinating subjects, as is the whole story of the slow erosion of Nehruvian secularism in the face of massive revival of middle class religiosity: to give just one very telling statistic, over fifty percent of package tours organized in modern India are to pilgrimage destinations.

     Instead
Nine Lives
focuses beyond the political sphere and behind the headlines, on the diverse traditional religious systems of South Asia, and particularly the deeply embedded heterodox, syncretic and pluralist religious and philosophical folk traditions which continue to defy the artificial boundaries of modern political identities. It is these which are being eroded as Hinduism’s disparate, overlapping multiplicity of religious practices, cults, myths, festival and rival deities are slowly being systemised into a relatively centralised religion that now increasingly resembles the very different structures of the three Abrahamic faiths.