India's sacred extremes

Wendy Doniger in The Times:

Manisha Ma Bhairava worships the Goddess and engages in Tantric ceremonies in the cremation grounds at Tarapith, in Bengal. Lal Peri is a devotee of the Sufi saint Lal Shahbaz Qalander. Tashi Passang lives as a Tibetan monk in Dharamsala, in India. Hari Das is possessed nightly by a god during a cycle of theyyam ritual performances every December to February in Kerala. Rani Bai is a sacred prostitute (a devadasi) in a town in northern Karnataka. Kanai is a blind minstrel who sings with the Bauls (“crazies”), an antinomian sect, at Kenduli, in West Bengal. Mataji wanders as a member of a sect of Digambara (“sky-clad”, that is, naked) Jains at Sravanabelgola. Mohan was a low-caste singer of the epics of the cavalier hero and deity Pabuji in Rajasthan. Srikanda Stpathy is a Brahmin idol-maker in the temple town of Swamimalai in South India.

What do these nine people, the subjects of William Dalrymple’s Nine Lives, have in common? All are in some ways purveyors of the sacred, but beyond that the patterns blur. They are Hindu, Jain, Buddhist, Muslim. Four women, five men. Only one (the idol-maker Srikanda, who serves as a kind of baseline point of contrast for all the others) is a Brahmin. Six of them inherited their jobs, while three of the four women, and one man, chose to renounce conventional life for various extreme forms of religion. What binds them together is the unusual suffering that they have undergone – all but Srikanda, whose chief sorrow is that his son wants to become a computer engineer instead of carrying on the family tradition.

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