Swimming Up the Down Current

On my last few trips to India I have been accompanied by a pile of William Dalrymple’s books, including City of Djinns (1993), a book that allowed me to make some kind of sense of Delhi, and the slightly terrifying collection The Age of Kali (1998). Other books Dalrymple has written include In Xanadu (1989), From the Holy Mountain (1997), White Mughals (2002), and The Last Mughal (2006). He’s received numerous awards for his work. Dalrymple has lived, on and off, in and around Delhi since 1989 and the breadth of his engagement with, knowledge of and respect for India is extraordinary. He’s the founder and co-director of the Jaipur Literature Festival.

I caught up with him, far too briefly, at the Sydney Writers’ Festival, which he attended to promote his latest book, Nine Lives, a book of interviews with spiritual practitioners. Nine Lives conveys both the rapidity of the changes that have taken place in that country in the last twenty years as well as the resilience and complexity of its many spiritual practices.

Sophie Cunningham: Do you make your living as a writer?

William Dalrymple: Yes, I play with telly, radio and film and so on, but I’m extremely fortunate that the kind of books I want to write are also books which people want to read. I know writers who, for example, are interested in eastern Europe, and there is very little market for that kind of stuff.

Sophie: How did you find working in longer form, as you did with the history White Mughals, compared to the collections of shorter pieces, such as The Age of Kali and Nine Lives?

William: There’s only one collection of work really until Nine Lives … The Age of Kali is the only collection. In Xanadu is a travel book.

Sophie: But White Mughals is much denser, and longer, than any of your other books.

William: White Mughals was my first encounter writing narrative history as opposed to memoir and travel, and I spent five years completely obsessed. I made the classic mistake of putting everything in or not cutting enough out, certainly.

That’s how, in a sense, Nine Lives happened. There is so much going on in India. Even so, Nine Lives hasn’t got any Jews in it, it hasn’t got any Sikhs in it, no Parsis. It hasn’t got any Christians in it. All these religions have stories that are profoundly interesting.

Sophie: Is there still a large Jewish community in Fort Cochin?

William: Not huge, but they’re slightly clinging on. The biggest Jewish community is in Bombay, it’s a fascinating history. A very good book on that is Sadia Shepard’s The Girl from Foreign. She grew up as a Muslim Pakistani and then discovered that she had a Jewish grandmother. It’s a rich and fascinating story of how a Bene Israel Bombay girl ended up marrying a Pakistani Muslim. A great story …

Sophie Cunningham: I was interested to read, in the introduction of Nine Lives, that in the past you’d always been encouraged to write a travel narrative with you at the centre.

William Dalrymple: That was how travel books had been written, it was all about you.

Sophie: But in Nine Lives, you’re giving other people voice, and I wanted to know why you made that decision to move away from the convention. Do you think that writing from the ‘I’ position is a Western construct?

William: I think that’s bollocks. I think the history of travel writing in other countries, whether it’s Li Po or Xuanzang or any of the great Eastern travel writers, they use the same approach. One of the nice things about travel writing is how similar it is across different traditions. Many of the traits that are sometimes judged in postcolonial writing to be exclusively orientalist, European and imperial are completely present in, for example, the writings of Persian travel writers visiting India in the eighteenth century—all these half-naked savages wearing loincloths read very much as if written by a colonial bigot. One of the things that’s interesting about travel writing is it’s something that’s universal across a huge range of cultures.

Sophie: It’s almost an oral form of storytelling, isn’t it?

William: Well, certainly it’s as old as epic poetry. It depends how you define travel writing: if you include things like The Epic of Gilgamesh then you can take it right back to man’s earliest oral outpourings. It certainly predates the novel and literary fiction by a couple of millennia. So I think that the basic idea of writing down a journey that a human being has done is one that has occurred to people for a variety of motives in a variety of cultures throughout human history.

Think of the voice of Usamah Ibn Munqidh, a thirteenth-century Syrian writer who wrote Memoirs of an Arab Syrian Gentleman, regarded the Crusaders as complete barbarians. His descriptions of a hunting expedition and how he regards it as a military expedition where there should be no talking is very like the way my father would go shooting in Scotland on the moors when I was growing up, aged eight. And Ibn Munqidh does have wonderful stories about how the Franks refused to shave their pubic hair and used to wander around the bathhouses in Syria stark naked with a ‘forest attached to their lower bellies’ and this sort of thing.

Sophie: In Nine Lives you explore the tension between modernity and more traditional religious practices—but hasn’t this tension always existed, for example, between the Sufis and the wider culture? Haven’t they always been at odds too with more middle-class and conventional communities? Or has it got worse in recent times?

William: Certainly many of the [richest] traditions in that book are reactions against middle-class convention …

Sophie: I can understand why you’d abandon your family and go wandering at the age of forty-five, it sounds very tempting.

William: I haven’t done that, I have my family with me, they’re at the zoo at the moment. But it’s an interesting point, how many of the traditions are reactions against the sense of middle-class orthodoxy. Buddhism certainly, though now a kind of state religion, is a reaction against materialism in early urban India, around the first millennium BC, as is Jainism. Bauls have always been unorthodox. ‘Baul’ simply means ‘the mad men’. They’re Tantrics, swimming up the down current, as they say; they exist entirely to react against convention.

Sophie: Are the Bauls’ Tantric practices different to Buddhist Tantra?

William: Tantra basically involves defying convention, so it’s possible for it to exist in a huge range of religions. Certainly Tantric Buddhism is the dominant form of Buddhism in the Mahayana tradition. But Tantric Hinduism is more countercultural than Buddhist Tantra, which in a sense is the state religion in Bhutan, as it was in Tibet.

Sophie: I did a one-month retreat in Nepal with Tantric teachers but they didn’t seem to have the kind of sexual wildness you describe in Nine Lives.

William: It’s possible to translate Tantra as ‘heterodoxy’. Tantra simply involves going against convention, so there are many ways of doing that obviously, ranging from the basic Hindu forms of Tantra. In orthodox Hinduism you have to keep personal pollution at bay, you have to avoid sexual pollution, you have to avoid meat, you have to avoid alcohol, you have to avoid polluted places. So Tantrics can have sex in cremation grounds after drinking wine and eating meat. I think the West has got the importance of sexuality in Tantra completely out of proportion, it’s one element among very many, the Bauls practise it. They’re at the festival. They’d be happy to give you a quick course on Tantric sex …

Sophie: How to cork my bottle, or whatever the phrase is?

William: Yes, to ‘close the mouth of the snake’ is the way they describe it. Using that as an example, the point of Tantric sex in Tantra is to channel the human urge of sexuality into a spiritual urge, and in that sense have the gravitational pull of everyday life become spiritual. So to reduce it to this ‘not coming’ is a gross simplification and perversion in a sense.

Sophie: Could you talk about homoeroticism in Indian culture? I ask because in both the story of Jain nuns and with the Bauls at the end, the people you talk to share strong same-sex bonds.

William: I don’t think there’s any reason to assume that either of those relationships are sexual.

Sophie: But they’re very passionate.

William: It’s a long and complicated story …

Sophie: The Jain nun, she just broke my heart.

William: I think the Jain nun’s is the strongest story and, weirdly, she’s the one I knew for the briefest period. I went off to interview two other women, a mother and a daughter who had become Jain nuns, and I only met that woman at the end [of those interviews]. I was with her for less than seventy-two hours and I’ve never seen her again, unlike those other characters who are here at the Sydney Writers’ Festival today. They’re old friends. These people don’t have mobile phones. You can’t just ring up a Jain nun.

Homoeroticism is a complicated story in religion. It’s very present in a lot of Islamic poetry and in medieval Persian culture, which strays into northern India. It was considered completely acceptable, although it’s non-Qur’an. There’s a book called The Mirror for Princes which was written by a Seljuk chieftain. It’s a book of a father to a son and the general tone and advice are: moderation. On the question of boys against girls, he simply advises ‘boys in winter, girls in summer’, or perhaps it is the other way around. In Hinduism it is present but more subtle.

The Jain nuns have an extremely intense and loving relationship but, again, I’d be extremely surprised, knowing how seriously they took their vows … and what was interesting was the way she had obviously not even considered how strong her relationship with her friend was until her friend died, and suddenly she realised that she had a very profound attachment.

Sophie: Am I right in thinking that Islam was your original point of engagement with India?

William: Correct. It’s seen in a slightly different light today because Islam has been made out to be the big bad guy. Christianity, and Islamic culture developed out of Hellenic Mediterranean culture, and the heartlands of Islamic civilisation—by which I mean Damascus and Istanbul—grew out of the same common culture compost as the best of Western civilisation. When the eastern empire fell to Islam, the richest provinces, the Roman Empire, went with them. We often think of the Roman Empire as being something that’s based in Italy and involving a European community. In reality the richest provinces of the Roman Empire were always Syria, Antioch, Egypt. Egypt was the breadbasket, Syria was the second capital, Antioch was briefly the capital of the Roman Empire under Julian the Apostate.

Islam is therefore more familiar to Westerners, and when generations of Brits arrived in India they often found it easier to understand Islam as a monotheistic religion with Hellenic roots than Hinduism, which was profoundly different, chaotic, there’s not one text … and the first thing the Brits do is start trying to tidy up the whole range of polytheistic culture and calling it Hinduism, which didn’t use to exist as a religion at all.

I think I was unconsciously following in an old tradition by identifying with the more familiar aspects of the strange culture I found myself in.

Sophie: Has that changed for you?

William: Yes, I think it has. I’ve always been interested in Hinduism but I’ve always felt slightly uncertain in my own credentials to write about it and knew less and felt less at ease with it. I always enjoyed listening in to temples and so on but I didn’t have the vocabulary or the knowledge to describe it. So it doesn’t feature as much as Islam in my work. Nine Lives is really my first proper Hindu book. Though many Hindus would say that Jainism and Buddhism are Hindu heresies or Hindu heterodoxies …

Sophie: Is the aestheticism of Jainism what Buddha was reacting against? Is that where he developed the idea of the Middle Way?

William: Yes, absolutely, this is all controversial stuff that scholars argue over, but yes, I think the Buddha was going against extreme aestheticism in Hinduism and Jainism, and didn’t think it was particularly helpful to punish the body and deliberately give it pain in the way that, say, the Sadhus would deliberately meditate next to hot fires in high summer or sit on beds of nails or take vows to stand for twenty-five years. I met people who’ve done that …

Sophie: Really? So do they sleep standing up or don’t they sleep?

William: They sleep on a swing. The only one I’ve ever interviewed took a vow to stay standing … And he kept it up, a gorgeous shrine in the north—you could see all the way to the source of the Ganges—and he was leaning against a swing. He’d been there for seven years, wandered around for a couple of years and then decided to do it again. He was on year five of his second round.

Sophie: Do you spend half your time in India?

William: We live there ten months a year and then we take a two-month break in the height of summer, I’m about to begin that break now.

It’s twenty-six years since I first went to India. Then I went to university for three years, during which I travelled back to India in the summer. I was always going back and forwards, and then there was a period in the middle when we had a house in Delhi but the kids were at school in the UK. So the time when we’ve been ten or eleven months a year in India is only 1989 to 1994, and then from 2004 until now.

Sophie: There’s a sense of chaos which seems to save it from homogenisation.

William: Yes, it has resisted it, and that’s why it’s still a fun place to live. Tiziano Terzani, who was the wonderful Italian writer, lived in Asia all his working life …

Sophie: Did he write A Fortune Teller Told Me?

William: Yes, and he thought Asia was the last place really to resist Americanisation, and even China had gone by the end. India he still loved.

Sophie: Terzani died of cancer, didn’t he?

William: Very bravely. He was in an ashram, meditating himself out of it for about five years, and finally it beat him, but he fought it off without drugs for a long time …

Sophie: How much has India changed in the time you’ve lived there?

William: In many ways Delhi is unrecognisable. For a start there’s [the new areas] Gurgaon and Noida, both of which have about five million people. They weren’t there when I first went. Delhi has grown from a small Punjabi city full of refugees of maybe two million people to a metropolis of maybe 50 million people, most of whom are from other parts of India. It’s no longer a government and media city, which is what it was when I first went there, it’s now got industries and it’s a commercial hub. It’s a capital city. It was a Canberra and it’s now a London. It’s not an immediately attractive city in the way that somewhere like Madras is, but it’s full of interest.

How has India changed? Delhi is an example. There’s all this massive change, and yet everything I loved about Delhi is still there, you can still find the Sufis, you can still find the old frock-coated Muslim gentlemen and you can still find the calligraphers, the Kabuto singers, all that is there, and there’s a few new rings on the tree. What I like about it is you’ve got all the new stuff, Coke, for example, beer, wine, all the creature comforts that weren’t there twenty-five years ago, but still all the weird stuff: the unexpected and surprising.