‘I do not believe India is a particularly spiritual place’

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The drive to meet William Dalrymple at his Mehrauli farmhouse is like going to meet a reclusive maharaja. It’s a long, dusty, rickety ride on a road that seems headed nowhere. And yet the house arrives without a fuss, and doesn’t disappoint.
You hear children playing near the pool and roosters crowing. Goats rest under the shade of a large tree. The house too is crowded with quirky things — a royal red chattri, peacock feathers in a vase, colourful chirpy birds locked up in a red cage. Between the kitchen and the garden is a lunch table. Journalists, photographers are gathered around the table whose two long sides have benches, and at the head of the table is William Dalrymple, sitting in a wicker chair which has an exaggerated, round backrest. The sort of chair in which a smaller man would get lost. At the other end from Dalrymple is his pet sulphur-crested Australian cockatoo, Albinia, perched on a T-stand. She says "hello", and if you ask her nicely, "Albinia, how do they laugh... ha ha ha", she’s happy to mock humans.
Lunch just got over. A few long fish bones and grains of yellow rice remain in Jaipur blue pottery plates. Adraki Machchi was the main course, cooked by Dalrymple’s Baul friends, in town to perform at his book launch party. A tent pitched in the garden is for the guests from Bengal.

William Dalrymple’s seventh book, Nine Lives, a collection of non-fiction stories of nine people, was launched last week in New Delhi amidst a jamboree usually reserved for Sufi singers visiting from Pakistan. Booze was flowing, Dalrymple was reading long passages and characters from his book were dancing, singing. The show was running way past its deadline. But then, no one in Delhi, leave alone his hosts British Council, can ask Dalrymple to pack up. In fact, in the city’s posh literary mafia circles, if anyone ever feels the urge to express that while Dalrymple’s research, scale and ambition are all singular but his books are rather dull, they must whisper.
That’s because Dalrymple stands alone in a list of Delhi’s VIPs who are always "most welcome" where ever they go.
The gora sahib Dalrymple nudged out of the list of Delhi’s white maharajas, Sir Mark Tully, was standing at the back through most of the young sahib’s launch show. An ultra-sensitive Indian’s observation, both expats may remark. Probably true. But sensitivity, as I learnt, is not exclusive to Indians. Or, perhaps, writers like Dalrymple acquire an accented version of it during their long India stints.
Dalrymple is touchy about his image and credentials on which his books on India sell — a scholarly author who does thorough research and serves up Indian stories that are not just factually sound, but also offer a fresh perspective. So a line of questioning which challenges that puts him off quickly. He brings out all sorts of toys and baubles to distract. But because he is extremely polite, all digression is part entertainment. He’ll quote long passages from his book, narrate funny anecdotes, summon the cook to recount the entire cooking process of Adraki Machchi, or simply disappear to obtain a book you have absolutely no interest in.

Edited version of a conversation with William Dalrymple about Nine Lives and other stuff:

Q. About your book...
A. This book is emphatically not a sort of spiritual journey in search of a guru. It’s a fairly detached literary exercise in tracing how these nine completely different, diverse religious paths are coping with the new India...
Indian religion is a terribly difficult thing for a Westerner to write about. Because it is so full of potential minefields — minefields of cliché, minefields of prejudice, minefields of aspiration in the sense that each successive generation of Westerners seems to reflect onto India, India’s huge religious diversity, its own aspirations and prejudices... And trying to find a way through that and write about this subject without imposing myself on it was the thing that stopped me... But just by writing about one person, rather than an institutional group of people, by not making it about my journey to them or my impressions of them, keeping 80 per cent of it in recorded speech, seemed to be a way of avoiding imposing myself on the material and muddying it. So I revisited the Bauls about whom I had written at some length in 2003, revisited Jains, the Buddhist monks and reworked them into stories of single individuals.
Q. You say that writing about Hindu religion and spiritualism is a minefield of...
A. Not just Hindu. Any Indian religion. It’s no different... Take Buddhism. Every second-rate Hollywood actor seems to be on a dharmic-karmic path...
(Albinia screams. Dalrymple fetches her wooden T-stand, to which she’s chained, and puts it next to him. "She’s quite moody... high maintenance. You know the sort (scratches her neck). Once she’s being pleasured, she’s happy." Laughs).
Q. And yet, if somebody was looking at India as a spiritual place these are the sorts of clichés...
Q. I didn’t say India was a spiritual place at all. My neighbours in Punjabi Delhi are the most rampantly materialistic people (laughs). And I was very keen to avoid all those clichés. I don’t believe India is a particularly spiritual place at all. There are terrible rogues, wild philanderers (laughs) and, particularly in Delhi, brutish materialists. That said, (Albinia, feeling neglected, screams again, Dalrymple resumes scratching)... Look at the life of the Buddha — he decided to go out in reaction to the materialism and sensuality of his court. So, I think, India has always produced the spiritual in reaction to the vile, the materialistic, the ruthless, all of which are here too...
Q. So when you started, were there only nine or...
A. No there were many, many and nine really was a title that came at the end when it emerged that there were nine good ones. Some of the best stories never quite came through for a variety of reasons — one particular one was about a middle class Kashmiri whose aunt had been raped by CRPF jawans and who went off to the camps, trained, came back as a Hizbul Mujahideen commander, ran operations in the Valley for a while, was sickened by what he saw and ended up being a Sufi by the Dal Lake...
Q. You have said in the introduction that the interviews for the book were done in eight languages. So for each story you had a translator?
A. Yes... I find that often people like Hari Das, the prison warder (from the story The Dancer of Kannur), speak incredibly poetically, and with far greater articulacy than you would imagine from semi-educated dancers. I went out of my way to find really good translators. Unless you have a translator who is fabulously fluent in the language, you miss a lot... the two most important things really were to find the right interviewees and the right translators. No one is gonna know Tibetan, Kannada, Malyalam, Bengali...
(Albinia screeches again. "She’s spoilt", Dalrymple says and scratches her neck. Albinia shuts her eyes, tilts her head. "She’s the most flirtatious girl...")
Q. Do you feel uncomfortable writing about someone, say like Mohan Bhopa (in the story The Singer of Epics), who is carrying on an oral tradition in a language you don’t know?
A. No, I mean, I am permanently in a state of befuddlement by this country and that is what has kept me here. The moment I begin to understand anything about India, I might leave it (laughs)... Like you, I’m someone who is used to taking a notebook and going out talking to strangers. Did you feel uncomfortable coming here today? No. That’s what you do every day. In the same way, since I was 19, I have been taking my notebook and talking to people...
Q. You’ve talked of how all these nine lives are at a stage of change...
A. India is undergoing change. Some of these devotional paths are flourishing. Such as Bauls... every time you go to the Kenduli Mela, it’s double the number of Bauls there — it makes Glastonbury look like a Rotary Club dinner (laughs). And you have all these guys singing and dancing, smoking ganja and drinking Old Monk. Disgusting Old Monk. There’s a Ph.D. to be done on the link between Old Monk and Bengali poetry (laughs at the thought).
Q. While you were doing the interviews, did you have to fight Western notions about these people...
A. Difficult question to answer. It’s all interviewing people. And I have lived here 25 years, I’m not exactly fresh off the plane, you know. (laughs) Give me a break.
Q. While writing, are you, sort of, because Indians are very sensitive...
A. Nooooo (speaks in a loud, comical voice). Nooooo. You can’t be serious.
Q. How much do you edit? How much do you censor yourself?
A. I edit a huge amount, but I don’t censor myself. The word f*****g is f*****g in this book (laughs). (Albinia screams)
Q. We are okay with f*****g.
A. (Laughs loudly) I tell you. You don’t get to be two billion or something... (Albinia screams)
Q. What’s your process of writing? Do you go away somewhere...
A. I go to a pool here (points in its direction)... and the point about it is that it is beyond the wireless Internet in the house (laughs)... The first and most important rule of modern writing is, turn off the Internet somehow, or get beyond its reach. And what I do, what I have done with the last two books, it’s like Chinese cooking — you spend a lot of time gathering the material. You get it all in order, all prepared, accessible... and then you close down. You stop going out. You get up early. You go on a diet... I quite become a brahmachari.... Work continues till I’m a complete vegetable...
For some reason I find that the most resuscitating thing after a day with fakirs or tantriks or Bauls is a really old-fashioned BBC docudrama involving white bodice and stage coaches and handsome men called Mr Darcy. We veg out having tele-supper at the end of it, with Jane Austen (laughs).
Q. What’s your diet when you write?
A. I go vegetarian. Lots of Gazpacho for lunch, cold yogurt soups. It’s a purifying thing. If I could, I won’t drink. But I’m too much of an alcoholic. I drink Pernod.
Q. What’s next?
A. If this book is a success, I would love to write a sequel. Otherwise, I’ll have to spend another five years reading Urdu and Persian manuscripts... I’ve got more Mughals. Aurangzeb. He’s a very interesting, complex character. Aurangzeb’s letters are fantastic... And he was self-aware. He knew he had f***ed up in the end. He really did.