Dalrymple's Nine Lives brings to life the stories of the faithful and their search for enlightenment, peace and God

 By Huma Imtiaz

Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India

By William Dalrymple

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Pages: 304

Price: Rs 995

After months of an uneasy lull, the calm before the storm, Pakistan has been ravaged by an ongoing war and suicide bombings, its citizens nervous, paranoid and scared, terrified at dying at the hands of militants who want to enforce their brand of faith by force on to millions of people. Faced by an omnipresent fear of dying at the hands of a fellow Muslim, even faith in the divine can falter.

In times like these, celebrated travel writer William Dalrymple's Nine Lives is a fitting reminder of why one has faith, and the wondrous, colourful lives of the faithful. From the shelter of Dharamsala to the courtyard of Sehwan Sharif, Dalrymple brings to life the different places in the subcontinent, which are venerated sites of various religions and more importantly, touches upon the different reasons of what brings people closer to God, their sacrifices to achieve peace, the highest state of spirituality and the difficulties they face in maintaining their unwavering devotion to their God.

Sketches of nine characters in the subcontinent that have devoted their lives to their faith, Dalrymple has chosen to let his subjects' voices tell the story. Each character, whether it is the Dancer of Kannur, who works as a policeman in a jail, or the Lal Pari of Sehwan Sharif, a woman who was forced to face both the Partition and the separation of East Bengal before settling down for the life of a Sufi devotee at the Lal Shahbaz Qalandar shrine, have fascinating lives, but are similar in the respect that all of them have devoted their life to their faith, whether it was part of their family tradition or not.

Nine Lives reveals some fascinating lives, religions and traditions; "The Daughters of Yellamma," the devadasis, were once symbols of fertility, and in the ancient times, some of the most literate women in the area. Today, they are reviled, from the lower caste, and labelled as sex workers. "The Monk's Tale" reveals the story of a monk who left his faith to fight against the Chinese Army in Tibet, and his return to a life as a monk in Dharamshala decades later. Manisha Ma, an inhabitant of a cremation ground in Tarapith, Bengal in "The Lady of Twilight," recounts her practise of collecting skulls, as a devotee of the Goddess Tara.

But where some of the stories are full of faith and hope, others evoke a sense of depression; some of the characters are deprived of medical treatment, others face harassment from Wahabi Muslims and Communist leaders, many are treated with derision from members of the upper castes. Yet despite their hardships, they derive the strength to go on from their faith.

With each story, the author has also taken pains to explain the historical significance of the respective religion and the current problems its devotees face, whether it is the lure of modernisation threatening to take their sons away from the art of idol-making or sheer negligence leading to the extinction of the art of reciting epic poetry at religious gatherings.

Without the aid of photographs, Dalrymple has tried to bring the scenery and objects of religious devotion to life. While one does wish they had seen, for instance, the phad, an illustrative textile painting and portable temple that is described in The Singer of Epics, for the relevance and beauty of the painting to fully sink in, yet it is perhaps a true test of the author to evoke the environment and subjects through the power of language, something Dalrymple successfully manages to do. Supplemented by translations of poetry, songs and prayers that the nine characters recite, some are beautiful even in their simplistic translation, "You and I are bound together/In the six-petalled lotus of the heart."

In writing this book, Dalrymple has not just brought to life the lives of those who sacrifice everything for faith and the threads that bind them together, but has done a great service by preserving these stories for many of us, who may never get the chance to meet the characters or see any of the places that make up Nine Lives.

Huma Imtiaz works as a journalist in Pakistan and can be contacted at huma.imtiaz@gmail.com

Zia Mohyeddin column

(A tribute)

Taufiq Rafat: "If nothing else will a poem might start".Since his death --and even before he died -- many well-meaning literary figures have talked about how Taufiq Rafat had struggled to create a Pakistani idiom. They seem to imply that Taufiq's efforts were to adapt the English language so that it became, as it were, a Pakistani language. I think this is grossly unfair to Taufiq. What he strove to achieve was a better and larger understanding of English versification. He worked hard at it and his grasp of the language improved enormously as the years went by. He took Eliot's advice to heart that "every word should be at home, taking its place to support the others" and he had made sure that "the common word was exact without vulgarity." When he found himself at ease with the language he began to reveal himself with precision and economy:

"And this is my joy: words have gathered my ache

to an ardent heap, each twig and bark of regret;

that I make still and will continue to make,

in the hope it will catch to a bonfire yet,

With trembling hands I rake the ashes, so,

and blow on the smoldering stick and blow, and blow."

I am not suggesting that we should not look at Taufiq's work in the context of Pakistani English poetry. Of course, we should, but I doubt if his work is going to be included in the canon of English poetry because of his 'idiom'. Taufiq's verse is not in Pakistani English and I do not think he ever, consciously, tried to make it so.

Whatever is meant by Taufiq's 'Pakistani idiom,' has nothing to do with the use of such words as Sheesham and baithak and koel and gul mohar. He himself pointed out that 'idiom' was not created by the use of Urdu words. "Its roots are much deeper and it reflects our responses to situations and to our sensibilities, our history and our heritage."

Most of the poetry (written in English) in our part of the world, is in free verse, usually no more than writing it as prose and printing it to look like verse. Such poems are "like flowers that are cut and put in a vase of water". As John Wain put it, "they have no roots and no soil clinging to them."

Taufiq Rafat's poetry is rooted in Punjab, its climate, customs, beliefs and assumptions. If I were to compare him with anyone it would be Cavafy, the 19th century Greek poet, who lived in Egypt and wrote extensively in English. Both of them have given a unique sensibility to English poetry.

The critic, Khaled Ahmed, who knew Taufiq Rafat as a mentor, has written somewhere that young poets of his generation who wrote in English were largely a product of I-fall-on-the-thorns-of-life-I-bleed tradition. "And yet Taufiq Rafat took endless amount of trouble to encourage the poetasters of the seventies to write in a de-orientalised style". This announced a new era in poetry-writing in English. "Versifying in English", writes Khaled Ahmed, "was no longer a lonely business covering up adolescent guilt".

He also speaks of Taufiq's generosity as a host. I too, acknowledge that whole-heartedly. In the early fifties one of his elder brothers had moved to a house on Ingle Road in Karachi. It was a lovely, sprawling, spacious house with 19th century tiles on the floor. I visited Taufiq in that house many times and enjoyed his un-ostentatious hospitality. We usually sat in the verandah or in one of the outer reception rooms which had widows all around. A delightful breeze wafted in, no matter what time of day.

And not just in Karachi. He once invited me to Sialkot to watch a cricket match between Pakistan and an unofficial MCC team. I was a guest at his father's house, a huge mansion on Paris Road. Taufiq's brother, a famous cricketer himself, had invited some of his posh friends as well. They were all highly anglicised. The men called each other "old boy" and "old bean." Their talk was shallow, to say the least, but their women were gorgeous looking creatures. Taufiq and I sat quietly at a distance from this "sophisticated" gathering and admired the ease and confidence with which those perfectly coiffed and lavishly dressed women handled their men. It has never stopped amusing me that Taufiq referred to them as budhiyan.

Most of his mature poems point to the incongruity of life. He does it without malice or bitterness.  In some of his last few poems there is a rueful confession about his inability to show tenderness:

" To those I really love

I don't know how to show affection.

…..

Only when I am alone

as now, hands stroke invisible hair,

endearments break in flood".

Even before he had turned his back upon the world his loneliness had become so deeply entrenched that if he sat in a stalled van for two hours, waiting for the rain to stop, his mind was occupied not with the inequities of the world, or the callousness of human beings (of which he had written a lot) but to

"  shy away from the thought

of a warm bed

and a snuggling wife

light another cigarette

(to hell with ulcers)

and be cheerful of heart

if nothing else will

a poem might start "

Life had a sense and a meaning only when he could express it in a poem. I know very little about why Taufiq Rafat "switched off" during the last ten years of his life. I was not in the country, but I heard from the late Khaled Hasan that he did not talk to anyone. No one has been able to explain to me why he had turned his back on the world and spend all his time staring at a television screen showing meaningless trivia. Was it the "hurts" he had received, or was it that he felt he had missed out on his real vocation? This is how he ends an intensely introspective poem:

" ….

but I am wondering oftener now

if my background – bank-clerk,

oilman, insurance salesman, toy-maker,

father of a growing family –

has brought me any nearer

to the only thing

I've ever wanted to be:

A hermit in a mountain cave".

 An unbelievably modest man, Taufiq once declared, "I am just an ordinary person who is trying to say things that mean something to him. But I do not think I have done it in any clearly different or effective way." It brings a lump to my throat for he created some exquisite poetry.

"A poem", says Taufiq, "is a monument" and he has given us many splendid monuments. His greatest contribution is that he made our sensitive young people realize that versifying in English is not necessarily "a lonely business covering up guilt".

(concluded)