Knowing Dil Das

Dil Das was a poor dalit farmer living near Mussoorie, 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, set out to write the life history of Dil Das as a way of exploring Garhwali peasant culture, he found his friend uninterested in talking about traditional ethnographic subjects. 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 and realized, this time from a completely new perspective, that the narrative made sense for precisely those reasons that had earlier seemed to render it useless—his apparent indifference toward details of his everyday life, his obsession with hunting, and, above all, his celebration of friendship. Knowing Dil Das is an unusual, challenging and often touching examination of identities, of relationships and of the hazards inherent in exploring other worlds.