Nine Lives Read Free

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