Pico Iyer: The surprising charms of Little Rock, AR

by Pico Iyer on

Who’d have thought that Little Rock, Arkansas, would prove so diverting?

Paris, Rio, Kyoto: We know pretty well what we’re going to encounter (or at least to savor) as soon as we set foot in any of those cities; part of their gift, polished over centuries, is for knowing how to play themselves to perfection and how to give every visitor just what she wants and expects. Such places are the equivalent of the traveling world’s celebrities, used to projecting themselves compellingly even off-screen. But there’s a different kind of charm in those lesser-known towns that will never be regarded as stars, but that can take on almost any role you ask of them: the character actors among sites, you could say. They offer you unexpectedness.

Take — of all places — Little Rock, Arkansas (yes, take it, please, as a New York comedian might say). If I knew anything about the capital of the “Natural State” before I went there recently, it was that it was small, forgettable, and, as one distinguished travel-writer had written to me, “intriguingly forlorn and melancholy.” Bill Clinton started his political life there, I knew, but that seemed the exception that proved the rule; like many people, I had driven through it on the huge freeway I-40, going across the U.S., and like most people I had taken pains not to stay there.

In short, Little Rock was perfectly positioned to disarm and entertain me as well-worn Paris, Rio, and Kyoto perhaps never could. The first two people I met after I left my hotel turned out to be serious students of Buddhism, one of whom knew and had studied under the one Zen master I happen to know in Kyoto. A brawny guy from Memphis stopped me on the street, outside the Arkansas Literary Festival, and asked me which of Graham Greene’s novels I thought his best. Most wonderfully of all, the town I saw turned out to be an unlikely center of irony, and even self-mockery; at the stately Old State House, the proud and distinguished building from 1842 where Clinton had held his victory celebrations, one whole room was devoted to the history of “Bubbas and hillbillies.”

* * * * *

One beauty of a city of surprise is that at first it offers you little at all, or only what you might have feared. I disembarked in Little Rock on a sultry afternoon in early spring, to find that its baggage carousels delivered luggage at a Samoan pace. The person who was meant to meet me was nowhere in sight. I went over to a public phone booth, to see that it had been stripped of its instrument. The same was true of almost every other public phone booth. Finally I did find a phone, but it gave me no dial tone. I found another, and it was equally mute. People were sitting in their molded plastic chairs as if on their stoops along the Mississippi, watching the world not go by.

“Things move slow round here,” said the sweet woman who did at last arrive to take me into town. “Town” seemed at first blush a euphemism: downtown was over almost before we got there. A convention center, a couple of tall buildings and then a wasteland of empty lots and deserted streets, lean black boys in hoodies drifting across the vacancy, past boarded-up stores that suggested that all life was long gone. I remembered coming into Louisville on just such an afternoon two years before; there was the same, aromatic sense of having come upon some broken capital long after the nation’s leaders had absconded with all the cash.

Then, however, I stepped into the Capital Hotel — a gleaming white historical building with an elevator so large that it had once transported Ulysses S. Grant’s horse, it was said (and once the whole state legislature) — and a smooth man in a suit with perfectly waved brown hair approached me. He made me think, somehow, of a saxophonist doubling as a used-car dealer. “I’m Billy,” he said, “and if there’s anything you want…” The next thing I knew, he was showing me around my room as charmingly as if it were his bachelor pad. A walk-in closet. Some Arkansas toffee, free of charge. The menu to the haute restaurant, Ashley’s, downstairs.

I walked out into the night, three hours later, to find the River Market district down the street abuzz. The sound of blues was pouring out of several raucous bars on a single block. Bouncers as wide as they were tall sat on stools on the sidewalk, giving prospective customers the once-over. Good old boys were revving up their Harleys in a nearby parking lot, while teams of young ladies with cheerleader-perfect hair were fingering shrimp in Flying Fish and other of the restaurants with their windows open to the night. The entertainment district stretched across all of five blocks, but it packed into that small area enough tattoos and blasts of metal and versions of Eric Clapton’s “Cocaine” to keep a stadium entertained for a good long while.

* * * * *

Another beauty of a place like Little Rock is that all the sights mentioned in the tourist brochures are within a few blocks of your hotel, and may give you what you never thought to ask for. Next to the great glass structure that is the Clinton Presidential Library is a Clinton School of Public Service and, not far from that, a huge place called the Heifer International Center, dedicated to social justice from Rwanda to Peru. A quaint house near the huge Public Library was selling used books and coffee and knick-knacks. A sleek Ikea-worthy café serving up specialty foods was run by an urbane gent from Delhi (“There can’t be many Indians in Little Rock,” I tried. “Oh,” came the answer, “there are so many of us here!”). In a hippie coffeehouse I sampled, the fliers were advertising “Extreme Midget Wrestling,” coming to town very soon.

Perhaps what I least expected to find in Arkansas was a sense of openness and even mischief. I picked up the local paper to read a piece by someone who presented himself as a “born and raised Southern Baptist,” yet delighted in an appearance by Christopher Hitchens, here to argue that God is not great. A stranger who identified himself to me as “born and raised on the front row of the Southern Baptist Church” asked me if I thought, from my travels, that faith was collapsing around the world. When I said no, he looked decidedly disappointed. A young woman in advertising told me she was reading aloud the latest novel by J.M. Coetzee to her husband. He, in turn, was writing a book on Tolkien.

Some places — Britain, Canada, and Australia are obvious examples — win one over, whatever their deficiencies, by their refusal to take themselves too seriously. Others (dare I mention Atlanta, Houston, or Los Angeles?) seem to be lacking all sense of perspective regarding themselves and their limitations. But I never expected to find Little Rock proudly, and impenitently, in the former category. “The corruption of law and justice has often proved a challenge to Arkansas society,” said a sign in the Old State House exhibition, apparently with delight. The state it was celebrating, it went on, with almost audible glee, has historically been “a magnet for the unlawful.” In a nearby room were a pair of Florsheim shoes worn by the current governor and a cardboard cutout of Bill Clinton, in shades and leather jacket, playing his sax on national television. Downstairs, his running shoes from 1982 were in another display case.

Arkansas politics in the 20th century, I read in yet another room in the building, was “a circus hitched to a tornado” (and I remembered that Mike Huckabee, the guitar-playing Christian who had briefly won the nation’s attention as a presidential candidate three years ago and once issued a pardon to Keith Richards, was also from here). Sure enough, not far away, I found Huckabee’s Guitar Pick and his Duck Call in a case.

On a bright, warm Saturday afternoon, two boys with art-college glasses, who looked as if they should have been at an open-mic event in a grunge café, stood at the center of the entertainment district, wearing placards that said, “There is only one Church in the Bible” and decrying every other Christian denomination. Some frat boys scribbled out a sign — “This guy is a moron” — and placed it next to one of the boy-evangelists, and posed for a cell-phone photo. On the other side of the street, two older men sipping Free Trade espresso and munching on no-fat muffins chuckled with delight. Getting into the spirit of theological debate, one cool-looking character in a two-tone shirt and shades stepped forward to engage the placard-wearers in conversation.

“You not talkin’ ’bout the Kingdom! You believe in Jesus?”

“Yes I do, sir.”

“Then why you think those who believe in Jesus are goin’ to Hell?”

“If you read Romans 8, sir…”

“You sayin’ we believe in Jesus, but we goin’ to Hell?”

The challenger’s three friends laughed approvingly. The Buddhists I met took me to a pan-Asian restaurant in a mini-mall serving Thai curries and sushi under beautifully framed pictures of faces from Mongolia and Laos and Tibet. Nearby, a bridge was lit up like the one across the Bosporus in Istanbul.

“It really wasn’t what I expected at all,” said one of my hosts, a stylish woman in her early sixties with frosted-blonde hair (who was working hard to try to eliminate capital punishment in the state). “There are a lot of people from other places who have found that this is a good place to live.” I recalled the friendly young woman, who volunteered her free time to teach adults to read, pointing out to me the condos in one tall building at the center of town, and saying that they were the priciest places in town (the $250,000 price tag she cited for them would have made them cheaper than the cheapest places in my hometown in California).

On arriving in Little Rock, I had wondered how someone as charming, quick, smooth, and intelligent as the 42nd president of the United States could have emerged from here as if from the forehead of Athena. By the time I left, I was thinking that much of the city along the sluggish Arkansas River was no less supple and surprising. Imagine — though this may not be for everyone — Bill Clinton expanded to the size of a metropolis. You can’t find that in Paris, Rio, or Kyoto. Or even in Washington, D.C.


Pico Iyer is the author of numerous books, including Video Night in Kathmandu, The Lady and the Monk, and The Global Soul. His most recent book is The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama.

[Photos: Flickr | cliff1066; cliff1066; eschipul; Afroswede; StuSeeger]

Chiloe: Chilean Patagonia’s emerald islands offer eco- and agritourism

by Laurel Miller on

I can’t remember who first told me about Chiloe, but I do recall that it was just a few weeks before my first trip to Chilean Patagonia. For a year I’d been planning an itinerary around my personal Holy Grail: rafting the thunderous Futaleufu River.

Located across the Chacao Channel from the bustling town of Puerto Montt in northern Patagonia, Chiloe is a 41-island archipelago. The largest of these is Isla Grande (“Chiloe island”), at 3,241-square-miles the second-largest in South America, after Tierra del Fuego. In 2009, Chiloe was ranked #3 on Lonely Planet’s “Best Places to Visit,” so it’s no longer a secret, but its relatively isolated location, sleepy pace, and often-tempestuous maritime climate tend to appeal to more intrepid travelers.

Chiloe was originally inhabited by Mapuche, Chonos, and Cunco indians, until the Spanish arrived in the mid 1500’s. The blending of indigenous and Catholic beliefs gave birth to superstitions and mythological creatures like the troll-like Trauco. These fanciful beliefs and icons are still a popular part of Chilote culture.

Located in Chile’s Lakes District–a breathtaking palette of cobalt-blue glacial lakes, emerald fjords, snow-capped volcanoes, and native alerce forest–Chiloe’s rural way of life is a direct reflection of its fishing and farming economies. While many of the archipelago’s 130,00 residents still subsistence farm, a low-key brand of eco-tourism has been steadily increasing in the last decade.

Flocks of sheep, not cars, clog the (frequently unpaved) roads, and ox carts, horse, and donkey are the alternate forms of transportation. Milk cans sit at the head of rutted driveways, awaiting pick-up from the dairy co-op. Brightly-painted palafitos (shanty towns on stilts) resemble children’s blocks, and colorful, handcrafted wooden fishing boats dot the coast or repose onshore. Many of the 150 Jesuit-built, 19th century churches are UNESCO World Heritage sites.

[Photo credit: Flickr user Miguel A. Gallardo]

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Many visitors choose to sea kayak or do live-aboard boat tours of the fjords and inlets of the archipelago, which is perhaps the best way to take in the spectacular scenery and surrounding views of mainland volcanoes. Land tours, however, provide a more intímate cultural experience, especially for those wanting to experience Chiloe’s nationally-famed cuisine.
Chilean Patagonia has a strong European influence due to German, Swiss, French, Welsh, and Yugoslavian immigrants that arrived in the mid-1800’s to establish small farmsteads, which is reflected in the hearty regional food. Many farmers still make their own cheese, jams, and charcuterie, and keep bees. As a result, agriturismos (farmstays) have grown in popularity the last 15 years, which supplements the island economy.

The mystery acquaintance who suggested I visit Chiloe told me to contact Britt Lewis and Sandra Echegaray, the husband-and-wife owners of Ancud-based Austral Adventures. Britt is from the States, while Sandra, a chef, grew up on a farm in Peru. She prepares all of Austral’s land-based meals from Chiloe-grown ingredients, including potatoes (which originated on the island, not Peru, a fact that Chilotes are understandably proud of), as well as mussels, clams, fish, sea urchin, lamb, cheese, orchard fruits, vegetables, honey, seaweed, and foraged native foods like murta, a wild berry used in jams and sauces.

Austral specializes in eco-tours aboard Cahuella, a 50-foot wooden boat. Their six-day live-aboard trips around the archipelago’s fjords, and four-day journeys along the northern fjords of Parque Pumalin (across the Golfo de Ancud) are considered “one of the five unique boat journeys in the world,” by the U.K. Guardian’s travel section. The couple also guide personally-tailored land tours that focus on Chiloe’s culture, food, wildlife (which includes whales and penguins) and outdoor activities such as hiking and paddling. Austral provides guides on all of its tours “to enhance the cultural exchanges.”

After corresponding with Sandra, I immediately rearranged my itinerary, carving out five days on Chiloe. She made a plan to take me around the main island, where we would stay at several of her favorite agriturismos, and attend a curanto. This beloved Chilote social event is a shellfish, potato flatbread, and meat bake believed to have been inspired by Polynesian luau (via Easter Island). The food is traditionally cooked in a pit covered with seaweed or the leaves of nalca, an indigenous plant related to rhubarb. No curanto is complete without Chilote music and dancing, copious amounts of red wine, chicha (fermented fruit cider, usually apple), and pisco sours. If you’re traveling solo or as a couple, and can’t find a curanto to attend, look for a restaurant that offers “pulmay,” or “curanto en olla (in a pot).” It’s not the same experience, but it will allow you to try the foods for which Chiloe is famous.

Chiloe is connected to the mainland by ramps that have been built in the channel to form a motorway. The easiest way to get there is to fly from Santiago to Puerto Montt (LAN is the country’s main international and domestic carrier, but other domestic airlines include Aerosur, Aerolineas Star Peru, and Taca) then take a bus. There are terminals in the main towns of Ancud (North island), the capital of Castro (East coast), and Quellon (end of the road on the southeastern coast), but you can get off in any of the villages en route. Ancud has two bus terminals. Cruz del Sur, the long distance operator, is convieniently located near the Plaza de Armas. The municipal terminal is on the outskirts of town.

It’s about a 54-mile bus ride from Puerto Montt’s bus terminal to Ancud. Chiloe operates on a much slower pace than the rest of the world, but Ancud is a fairly busy, pleasant place to unwind for a couple of days. There’s an indoor marketplace where you can find produce, artisan foods, and handwoven Chilote wool sweaters. I spent night at the charming Hostal Mundo Nuevo, a Swiss-run place right on the bay. For dining, Sandra and Britt recommended Mascaron de Proa (65-621-979, and Casamar (65-624-481). Unfortunately, I didn’t make it to either due to time constraint and getting sidetracked by a nameless empanaderia off the Plaza de Armas.

The day after my arrival, Sandra met me and we rattled off in her pick-up to Tenaun, a one-street, 19th century fishing village on the eastern coast. Seaweed is a major part of Chiloe’s economy, used for culinary, medicinal, and agricultural purposes, and I watched a farmer planting pelillo (agar agar, a species used in processed foods ) on the tidal flats. Mainly, I just wandered the quiet streets, snacking on buttery plum kuchen (coffeecake) and enjoying the solitude. Tenaun is known for its UNESCO-designated church, Iglesia de Tenaún, but the village is lovely: lots of apple orchards, beehives, beached fishing boats, flower-bedecked cottages, and old Mapuche men on donkeys. I stayed overnight at Familia Vásquez Montana (owned by aforementioned seaweed farmer Guido Vasquez, and his wife/cook, Mirella; reservations required, (09-647-6750). Since my visit, however, it has expanded from four to 25 beds, and operates more like a hostal than family home. You can catch a bus from Ancud or Castro to Tenaun three times daily (one-and-a-half hours, approximately).

The next day, Sandra took me to lunch at Maria Luisa Maldonado’s agriturismo (09-643-7046), outside of village San Antonio. The adorably fiesty octogenerian is one of the founding forces behind Chiloe’s agriturismo movement, as well as a hell of a cook. She has four guest rooms (seven beds in all) on her farm, which also operates as an informal dining room for overnight guests and pre-booked visitors. We joined Luisa’s son and young niece for a gratifying meal of her farmstead cheese; cazuela Chilote, a rich, flavorful stew of grass-fed veal and vegetables from the farm, raspberry juice from fruit picked that morning, and panqueques con manjar– crepes with Luisa’s own luscious, caramelized milk spread. Heaven.

Another popular agriturismo is Los Senderos de Chepu, in the wetlands area of Chepu, outisde of Ancud. Proprietor Enriqueta Carcamo is the current president of Chiloe’s Turismo Rural association; she and her husband, Fernando offer cheesemaking and other farm activities, horseback riding, and meals sourced from their farm.

My most memorable meal on Chiloe, however, came the day Sandra took me to the home of her friends, Hugo and Wanda Brenni. Hugo, who is Chileno, is the founder of Berkeley’s 35-year-old La Pena Cultural Center (oddly enough, I used to live just around the corner). He started La Pena while working as a cook in the Bay Area, “to create an awareness of solidarity” during Chile’s period of dictatorship.

Hugo prepared our lunch from ingredients grown and foraged on the property or purchased from neighboring farms. While he cooked, Wanda, who is from the States, told me, “What’s amazing about Chiloe is you can just walk down to the beach and collect as many shellfish as you can carry, get king crab from the kids on the corner, harvest wild berries. The local people are so traditional, the soil is so rich…there is always food. That’s the miracle of this place.” We sat down to a lunch of roast duck with a piquant salsa de murta, freshly-dug fingerling potatoes, a beet salad, and Wanda’s sourdough bread, cultured from wild yeast. Miraculous, indeed.

Potatoes in Chile Sauce

Recipe by Sandra Echegaray, Austral Adventures

serves 8

2 lbs. waxy new potatoes, such as Yukon gold, cut into ½-inch cubes
olive oil
salt and freshly ground black pepper

Drizzle potatoes with olive oil and seasoning, and roast in a pre-heated 350-degree oven until cooked through. While potatoes are roasting, prepare chile sauce.

Chile Sauce

1 medium yellow onion, diced
4 garlic cloves, minced
¼ cup olive oil
1-1 ½ cup dry red wine
4 tablespoon tomato puree
4 ripe tomatoes, peeled and chopped
1 teaspoon fresh oregano leaves, finely chopped
2 fresh red chilies, minced
salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste
finely chopped Italian parsley, for garnish

In a medium size pot, sauté onion and garlic two tablespoons of olive oil for until tender, approximately two minutes. Add chilies and cook until tender. Add tomato puree, salt, and pepper, and sauté two minutes, stirring constantly. Add fresh tomatoes, half of the wine, and oregano. Cover and simmer the mixture at low heat for ten minutes, stirring occasionally. Add the rest of the wine, and continue to cook at low heat for 10 more minutes.
Just before serving, add the warm roasted potatoes. Serve immediately, garnishing with parsley.

[Photo credit: church, Flickr user James Byrum]

Smithsonian opens up its attic

by Sean McLachlan on

The Smithsonian is often called “America’s attic.” This October, America’s attic will be opening up its attic to give visitors a behind-the-scenes look at how it operates.

October is American Archives Month and and the Smithsonian will be celebrating by hosting a free Archives Fair on October 22 at the National Mall in Washington, DC. Experts working with the Smithsonian’s collections will be talking about the institution’s hidden treasures and giving tips on how to preserve your old mementos. You can even make an appointment and have your heirlooms examined by an expert.

If you can’t make it to DC, check out the Smithsonian Collections blog, which will be running a 31-day blogathon throughout October. Curators will post about how they preserve and restore the objects in the world’s biggest museum.

[Image courtesy ultraclay! via Gadling’s flickr pool]

Surrey County mulls livestock to limit public sex

by Tom Johansmeyer on

No trip to Surrey County, it seems, is complete without a little outdoor sex. The thrill of pull-your-hair-out-ecstasy intimacy under the stars … or the sun, or a neighbor’s watchful eye … is apparently too enticing to pass up. I’m not sure what makes Surrey such a desirable location, but county residents are looking to change it. More than 300 Puttenham residents have written to the county council that “a field near the Hog’s Back lay-by on the A31 was ‘being used for all kinds of sexual activity night and day’ by doggers.”

The complaints have some legitimacy, as the prime sex spot is visible from the Puttenham Church of England Infant School.

The council won’t shut down the rest area and nearby café, so as not to deprive “legitimate visitors,” but they are ready to deploy an unlikely ally in chasing the doggers away: livestock. The thinking isn’t clear, but it’s seems safe to assume that the presence of bulls would make the spot less attractive to public frolickers.

The locals aren’t buying it. According to the Telegraph:

Speaking about the idea of putting bulls into the field to deter the doggers, Mrs Perkins said: “I have to say that some of the comments from the cabinet were quite frightening, such as the suggestion to put bulls in the field.

“What a ridiculous idea.”

Local Sarah Green, 32, said today: “How the council can sit there with straight faces and suggest putting a herd of bulls in a field to stop people having sex in it is almost too ridiculous to contemplate.

Meanwhile, county council leader Dr. Andrew Povey calls the use of bulls as a solution “viable,” unlike other “mad ideas.”

Since other measures aren’t likely, it appears that this Surrey spot will continue to attract sexual thrill-seekers. My advice: do it at night. There’s a school nearby.

[photo by cyberuly via Flickr]

William Dalrymple: Understanding the continent of India

by Don George on

William Dalrymple is one of the West’s pre-eminent India experts. He is the author of seven works of history and travel, including In Xanadu, The Age of Kali, City of Djinns, which won the Young British Writer of the Year Prize and the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award, the best-selling From the Holy Mountain, White Mughals, which won Britain’s most prestigious history prize, the Wolfson, and The Last Moghal, which won the Duff Cooper Prize for History and Biography. He divides his time between New Delhi and London, and is a contributor to The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and The Guardian. His acclaimed new book, Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India, is an eloquent investigation of India’s multi-faceted modern spiritual life through intimate portraits of nine everyday practitioners. He graciously conducted this email interview from his farmhouse south of Delhi.

Don George: How did you first get interested in India?

William Dalrymple: I first encountered India when I arrived, aged 18, on the foggy winter’s night of the 26th January 1984. The airport was surrounded by shrouded men huddled under shawls, and it was surprisingly cold. I knew nothing at all about India and came initially simply because my best friend at the time was interested in discovering it. I had instead wanted to go on an Assyrian archaeological dig in Iraq, but then Saddam Hussein closed the British School of Archaeology and I found myself with nine months to fill, so I bought an air ticket and pitched up. It was a complete revelation.

My childhood had been spent in rural Scotland, on the shores of the Firth of Forth, and of my school friends I was probably the least well travelled. My parents were convinced that they lived in the most beautiful place imaginable and rarely took us on holiday, except on an annual spring visit to a corner of the Scottish Highlands even colder and wetter than home. Perhaps for this reason India had a greater and more overwhelming effect on me than it would have had on other more cosmopolitan teenagers; certainly the country hooked me from the start. I backpacked around for a few months, and hung out in Goa; but I soon found my way back to Delhi and got myself a job at a Mother Teresa’s home in the far north of the city, beyond Old Delhi.

In the afternoons, while the patients were taking their siesta, I used to slip out and explore. I would take a rickshaw into the innards of the Old City and pass through the narrowing funnel of gullies and lanes, alleys and cul de sacs, feeling the houses close in around me. In particular what remained of the Red Fort of the Great Mughals kept drawing me back, and I often used to slip in with a book and spend whole afternoons there, in the shade of some cool pavilion. I quickly grew to be fascinated with the Mughals who had lived there, and began reading voraciously about them. It was the Mughals that drew me into India initially.
DG: You’ve written six books about India. What is the most surprising thing you have learned about India in your research for your books?

WD: I think above all the sheer scale of the place, the variety of different languages, religions and distinct regional cultures. India is really more a continent than a country: Delhi is quite different from Bombay, which itself is quite different from Calcutta or Madras. The snow peaks of the Himalayas, the Tibetan culture of Ladakh, the deserts of Rajasthan, the jungles of Madhya Pradesh or the backwaters of Kerala: these are all worlds apart from each other. The artistic and literary culture of this country lies as rich and thick on the ground as Italy — but here on a continental scale.

DG: What has been the most difficult of your India books and why?

WD: I think probably The Last Mughal, because of the amount of primary manuscript material I had to work through.

In the National Archives in New Delhi I found a remarkable archive of some 20,000 Urdu and Persian documents, the overwhelming majority of which had never been accessed before. These documents were the core source for the book, and have allowed the daily life of the city before and during the great rebellion of 1857 (known to Indians as the First War of Independence and the British as the Great Mutiny) to be resurrected in some detail. ‘The Mutiny Papers’ — as the collection is known — are a great unwieldy mountain of records of the Delhi courts, police, and administration during the siege: chits, pleas, orders, petitions, complaints, receipts, rolls of attendance and lists of casualties, predictions of victory and promises of loyalty, notes from spies of dubious reliability and letters from eloping lovers, all neatly bound in string and boxed up in the cool, hushed air-conditioned vaults of the Indian National Archives.

The Last Mughal is the first account in English to give the Indian version of events of the largest anti-colonial uprising anywhere in the world in the entire course of the nineteenth century.

The reason these accounts have been ignored up to now is probably largely connected to the difficulty of the late Mughal shikastah script in which the documents were written — few middle-class Indians these days know the Urdu script, and fewer still can read Mughal scribal hands. I was very lucky to have the expert assistance of Mahmood Farooqui in decoding and translating the manuscripts. But it was worth the work: The Last Mughal is the first account in English to give the Indian version of events of the largest anti-colonial uprising anywhere in the world in the entire course of the nineteenth century.

What is so strange is that the collection could not have been in a better known or more accessible archive — the National Archives of India lies in a magnificent Lutyens’-period building bang in the centre of India’s capital city. Using the Mutiny Papers and properly harvesting their riches as a source for 1857 for the first time felt at times as strange and exciting — and indeed as unlikely — as going to Paris and discovering, unused on the shelves of the Bibliotheque Nationale, the entire records of the French Revolution.

DG: Your latest book Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India, spans an immense diversity of regions and traditions. How did you select and locate your subjects?

WD: Nine Lives is about how South Asia’s diverse sacred traditions are managing to cling on in the new India. Much of course has now been written about the way that India is moving forward and transforming itself at the most incredible rate — the economy will overtake that of the US by 2050 — but so far little has been said about the way these huge earthquakes have affected the great Indian traditions of mysticism, monasticism, music and dance.

Nine Lives explores this process through nine very personal stories — a Sufi, a possession dancer, a Buddhist monk, a Jain nun, a Tantric and so on, each telling their own story, aiming to show how faith and ritual are clinging on in the face of India’s commercial boom. Each life represents a different religious path, and is intended to act as a keyhole into the way that each specific vocation has been caught and transformed in the vortex of rapid change, while revealing the perhaps surprising persistence of faith and ritual. The idea is to find out what it actually means to be a holy man, a mystical musician or a tantric minstrel seeking salvation on the roads of modern India, as the Tata trucks thunder past. I interviewed hundreds of holy men across India and Pakistan for two years and in the end wrote up the nine that I thought were most remarkable and which best illustrated the kind of changes South Asia is currently undergoing.

My travels for the book have led me to meet some extraordinary individuals. In Kannur in northern Kerala, for example, I met Hari Das, a well-builder and part-time prison warden for ten months of the year, who polices the violent running war between the convicts and gangsters of the area’s two rival political parties, the far-right RSS and the hard-left Communist Party of India. But during the theyyam dancing season, between January and March, Hari has a rather different job: Though he comes from an untouchable dalit background, he nevertheless is transformed into an omnipotent deity for two months a year, and as such is worshipped as a God. Then, at the end of March, he goes back to prison.

On another trip, to Bengal, I managed to track down a celebrated tantric at a cremation ground near Birbhum in West Bengal. Tapan Goswami was a feeder of skulls. Twenty years ago he had been interviewed by an American professor of comparative religion, who wrote a scholarly paper on Tapan’s practice of spirit-summoning and spell-casting, using the cured skulls of dead virgins and restless suicides. It sounded rich and intriguing material, albeit of a rather sinister nature, so I spent the best part of a day touring the cremation grounds of Birbhum before finally finding Tapan sitting outside his small Kali temple on the edge of the town, preparing a sacrifice for the goddess.

Tapan confirmed that in his youth he had been an enthusiastic tantric skull-feeder.

It felt a little like wandering into a scene from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. The light was beginning to fade and a funeral pyre was still smoking eerily in front of the temple. Tapan confirmed that in his youth, when the professor had interviewed him, he had indeed been an enthusiastic tantric skull-feeder. Yes, he said, all that had been written about him was true, and yes, he did occasionally still cure skulls, and summon their dead owners, so as to use their power. But sadly, he said, he could not talk to me about the details. Why was that? I asked. Because, he said, his two sons were now celebrated opthamologists in New Jersey. They had firmly forbidden him from giving any more interviews about what he did in case rumours of the family dabbling in Black Magic damaged their profitable East Coast practice. Now he thought he might even give away his skulls, and go and join them in the States.

DG: You live in India now. When did you move there and what prompted your move?

WD: I first came to India nearly twenty-five years ago. I suppose my life cleaves in two around the date of my arrival, January 26, 1984. The first part of my life was orientated towards medieval history, bicycling round churches and going to school in Yorkshire, loving plainchant and medieval abbeys, things like that. The second part of my life has been India, the Islamic world and the inter-face between Islam and Christianity. This is now my third stint in India after that first year in 1984. Olivia and I had a flat in central Delhi in the late 1980s, which we left in 1994 – the year my second book, City of Djinns, about Delhi, appeared. In 2004, with another book, White Mughals – the story of a late-18th-century love affair between an English army officer and an Indian princess – under my belt, we returned to Delhi. We have been at our Jaunapur farm house to the south of the city for five years now. We are here because we love India and it is now the core of our personal and professional lives: Our friends are here, my books are here and my wife’s painting is here.

DG: Sometimes India seems so foreign and daunting to Western travelers. What advice would you offer Westerners who want to get the most out of a visit there?

WD: Keep your sense of humour, don’t be in a hurry and relax into the chaos. It’s a great place, but everything is slow and chaotic. Take it easy, laugh when things go wrong — as they assuredly will — and you’ll soon fall in love with it.

DG: India – in notion and in fact — encompasses so many cultures and geographies, where would you point travelers, or what would you tell travelers, who are in search of quintessentially Indian experiences?

WD: Go the villages and the countryside. It’s not a dangerous or a threatening country so take risks and go off on your own occasionally and explore — a bicycle is the perfect way to see this countryside: Just rent one and pedal off.


DG: Speaking of quintessential India, you will be accompanying a Geographic Expeditions trip to Rajasthan’s Nagaur Sufi Music Festival in February. Can you tell us more about this festival – and why you are so excited about this trip?

WD: Nagaur is an old dynastic centre of the Maharajahs of Jodhpur and after centuries of neglect it has recently been wonderful restored. To celebrate it, a wonderful festival of Sufi music was started a couple of years ago. It’s a simple cocktail: fabulous traditional music in a fabulous remote location. It’s become one of my favourite weeks of the year.

DG: What is the most important life-lesson you have learned from India?

WD: Pluralism: that there are many ways of looking at the world, of envisaging the universe, of living your life, that there are many ways up the mountain, as they put it here. I suppose the first and most important lesson I learned on the road in India is how provisional and provincial are the things I was brought up to imagine were universal.

[Photos: Flickr | jrodmanjr; DanBrady]