“Nine Lives”, William Dalrymple’s “search for the sacred in modern India”,begins with “The Nun’s Tale”, the real life story of one Jain nun Prasannamati Mataji ,who in her lay life was Rekha, the only daughter of a rich merchant family from Rajasthan domiciled in Raipur,Chattishgarh.
To be honest, it razed my expectations ! I like Dalrymple’s strong addiction for both orthodox and heterodox India. “The Last Mughal” was a heart touching, thoroughly researched book.That was a real strong appetizer for “Nine Lives”. Having picked it from the College Street second hand booksellers’ stall paying less than half of the original price I missed no split second to leaf through its damp pages wearing colors of old man’s teeth as the downtown metro carried me through the tunnel. The intro was fascinating. But as I bumped into Prasannamati Mataji, the nun of the “Nun’s Tale”, my spirits sunk ! My hopes shattered and spilled!
Such live cast straight out of the pages of Indian religious culinary be it orthodox or heterodox, hardly inspires any more. It’s tiresome , irksome too. Such a good narrative style wasted on such a grim, unpalatable theme !
We have left more than two thousand and five hundred years behind us after all these epoch-makers preached, and we still fight it out in bloody sectarian wars and politics of religion. Our “souls” have had numerous “reincarnations” since and yet we haven’t moved as much of an inch consciously from where we stood two and a half millennium earlier, each trembling in his/her exclusive areas of darkness . Our social psyche hasn’t attained adulthood . There’s every doubt it will ever do. No man is an island and we think it very special to drown in the sea of self enlightenment. Completely detached from human bondage, we seek release of the soul. Caught in the whirlwind of globalization we still follow the same track of “self-improvement”, piling wealth cheating millions. We have Swiss bank accounts, our make-in-India Panama scams . We swipe clean our own courtyards dumping our own human wastes straight on the neighbor’s face . We don’t have any remorse. “Yeh sab hamara ghar hai”! Citizens of world’s largest democracy, we know our rights, but bother least about duties.
Renunciation has had many courses but what have we earned ? What have we escaped? Can we escape reality as blindfold as we pretend to be? It retaliates. My daughter is gang raped even in a crowded bus at late hours of metropolitan night . My son is stabbed or shot dead in broad daylight by coal/ drug mafia or by any rival political, religious group. My brother is falsely charged as anti-national in a students’ campaign and sent behind the bars. At government diktat my favorite news channel goes off air for twenty-four hours at a stretch allegedly having aired “anti-national” news stories .
It’s really sad to read the story of a young lady plucking her long cascaded hair one by one,for four long hours, her scalp torn, bleeding, just to become a monk. I just fail to find any harmony in such gruesome act of self-immolation, especially by one whose faith professes and also wants her not to hurt even the microscopic insect while walking, breathing, eating !! Puerile such self torture for self illumination, release of the soul !!
And what is the ultimate “mokhsa” ? It’s “sallekhana”,self-killing. You stop taking food and water through stages ! Any “western medicine” is proscribed because , the scriptures warn you, they are made from animal extracts ,plants !! These scriptural glorification of self annihilation despite, as you stop eating for days months, ,walk miles and suffer invariably from Cox’s Syndrome,advanced TB of the digestive system, when your young body swells and when suffering gets unbearable ,you “cry out loudly” because the body cannot be treated such cruelly . You have to have a doctor called in around your self-made deathbed . You have to have your “protein injection” !
Where has the victory of “the soul” over body gone !! So strange !!
অমিতাভ সেনগুপ্ত 