Knowing Dil Das: Stories of a Himalayan Hunter (Contemporary Ethnography)

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 Dass 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 Dass 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 Dass 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 Dass 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.