Nine Lives Read Free Page B

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.
       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,