Two Buddhist monks, Marine Drive, Mumbai

Coming home from your holidays can make you feel blue. Out of the deckchair and into the office is a dismal contrast. It’s helpful to have a treat waiting for you a few days after you get back. A little something to look forward to.

The week before last Autumn and I did the first week of the Coast to Coast walk (no deckchairs in sight, actually). It was a great ’summer’ holiday, but made even better by fact that smack bang in the middle of the week after our jaunt, we were off to a smashing lecture. Nothing beats a good disquisition. We were scheduled to see William Dalrymple give a talk at the RGS. That’s the Royal Geographical Society to the uninitiated. This institution is where some of Britain’s greatest explorers and travellers have set out from on their way into the wilder parts of the world. And if they didn’t leave from the RGS, they probably ended up telling their tale there when they got back.

William Dalyrymple however is not an explorer or geographer, but a historian, journalist and travel writer. I haven’t read any of his eight books, but I am a fan of his journalism. He draws vivid pictures of the places he visits,and fills them with stories using his finely tuned ear for dialogue and sympathy for the characters he meets. He’s also interested in India and the subcontinent.

His latest book is called Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India which tells the tale of nine people whose lives have been profoundly influenced by the religious traditions of that region. The talk was organised by Stanfords, the map shop. Robust, he strode onto the stage wearing a yellow, quilted Nehru jacket, with a coral red cotton scarf draped around his neck. In one hand he carried his canvas holdall and in the other, an almost empty glass of whisky. He looked like a travel writer.

The talk covered three of the chapters in his book. The first story told of a couple of cheerful Bauls, or wandering monks, from Bengal, the second the melancholy story of the sacred prostitutes or devadasi of Karnataka, and the low caste labourer and prison warder who becomes host to the god Vishnu for three months of the year finishes the book. All the stories were fascinating and affecting. His softly plummy, slightly whiskied tones eloquently conjured up these distant personalities.

The two Bauls (pronounced ‘bowels’) are friends, one is blind and the other is his eyes. Dalrymple explained that he met them in rural Bengal and assumed they were unspoilt by the modern world, but it turned out they’d been to London in the Sixties for a massive psychedelic knees-up with the Stones for the launch of their Beggars Banquet album. Prior to Mick ‘n’ Keef, they’d come from opposite ends of the social spectrum in rural Bengal. Kanai was from a poor family of labourers and lost his sight at six months old. When his parents died and his sister committed suicide, the Bauls provided refuge. Debdas was the son of a wealthy landowner, but he was a rebel and ran away from home and also eventually joined the Bauls. Now they are friends and mutual protectors.

Prostitute, Rani Bhai is a devadasi, part of a tradition of whores who used to be attached to temples. Although the Indian government has broken the official links between prostitution and temples, these women are still seen as having a special connection to the goddess Yellamma. To make it through her grim life, Rani Bhai consoles herself with dreams of retiring to a small farm and occasionally being venerated as a representative of the Goddess. Eventually, Dalrymple learns that this dream is only that: she has HIV and is unlikely to live long enough to tend to her chickens, cattle and buffaloes.

Finally, Hari Das, a stoical chap works as a labourer during the week and supplements his meagre income as a warder in a prison that makes the Turkish prison in Midnight Express sound like the Sandals Caribbean holiday resort. Not only is Hari Das desperately poor, but he’s also a ‘dalit’ – of one of the lowest castes in Indian society. However, for three months of each year he packs in the drudgery and becomes a dancer. Not just an ordinary dancer, but a cosmic dancer. In a jungle clearing, after several hours of getting dressed up and made up, he looks in a small mirror and *boom* his personality is replaced by Vishnu. Then he dances for the assembled masses and the local big wigs and Brahmins queue to touch his feet. Despite their unusual lives, Dalrymple makes the humanity of his ‘lives’ clear.

It’s probably fair to say that most books that address religion, at least in the UK, will have to contend with the ideas of Richard Dawkins. He stands like a bull-necked bouncer at the door of religious debate in the UK. For Dawkins, it’s not enough to say that God does not exist, he goes as far as saying ‘faith is an evil’, because ‘it requires no justification and brooks no argument’; in short, faith ignores scientific method. Dawkins the Bouncer isn’t bothered about scruffy trainers, but if a belief system hasn’t been subject to hypothesis, experiment and peer review, then it isn’t getting in.

It doesn’t appear that Dalrymple’s subjects have been reading The God Delusion. Neither however have they been using religion to justify hatred. It is a part of their lives that provides solace amidst hardship and offers possibilities where options are constrained. Above all, whatever these belief systems might represent, it is difficult to see them as the deluded fancies of dupes.

After we had been introduced to these spirited and curious characters, during the question and answer session an Indian man in audience asked Dalrymple, whether he was not seeking out exceptional personalities and then exoticising them. Taking his second glass of whisky, he replied that although it might be true to an extent, these wandering minstrels and ecstatic dancers do still exist in India and so surely it is worth reporting on them. Perhaps things will change when the Indian economy rivals that of the USA in 40 years time, but for now, these nine lives don’t seem that strange.