"This rich and complex book is often moving, frequently
thought-provoking."--"Journal of the Royal Anthropological
Institute" "This book will become a classic. It has passion,
compelling stories, sober reflection, and an incredibly artful
structure that carries the reader along. Most important, like all
great anthropology, the story speaks to the issue of what
constitutes the human spirit. There is wisdom in this book, and for
that rare gift I am grateful to Dil Das and Joseph Alter."--Paul
Stoller, author of "Sensuous Scholarship" 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. Joseph Alter teaches anthropology at
the University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of "The Wrestler's
Body: Identity and Ideology in North India."
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