Dil Das was a poor farmer--an untouchable--living near Mussoorie, a
colonial hill station in the Himalayas. As a boy he became acquainted
with a number of American missionary children attending a boarding
school in town and, over the years, developed close friendships with
them and, eventually, with their sons. The basis for these friendships
was a common passion for hunting. This passion and the friendships it
made possible came to dominate Dil Das's life.
When Joseph S. Alter, one of the boys who had hunted with Dil Das,
became an adult and a scholar, he set out to write the life history of
Dil Das as a way of exploring Garhwali peasant culture. But Alter found
his friend uninterested in talking about traditional ethnographic
subjects, such as community life, family, or work. Instead, Dil Das
spoke almost exclusively about hunting with his American
friends--telling endless tales about friendship and hunting that seemed
to have nothing to do with peasant culture.
When Dil Das died in 1986, Alter put the project away. Years later, he
began rereading Dil Das's stories, this time from a completely new
perspective. Instead of looking for information about peasant culture,
he was able to see that Dil Das was talking against culture. From this
viewpoint Dil Das's narrative made sense for precisely those reasons
that had earlier seemed to render it useless--his apparent indifference
toward details of everyday life, his obsession with hunting, and, above
all, his celebration of friendship.
To a degree in fact, but most significantly in Dil Das's memory, hunting
served to merge his and the missionary boys' identities and, thereby, to
supersede and render irrelevant all differences of class, caste, and
nationality. For Dil Das the intimate experience of hunting together
radically decentered the prevailing structure of power and enabled him
to redefine himself outside the framework of normal social
classification.
Thus, Knowing Dil Das is not about peasant culture but about the
limits of culture and history. And it is about the moral ambiguity of
writing and living in a field of power where, despite intimacy, self and
other are unequal.
