Knowing Dil Das : stories of a Himalayan hunter / Joseph S. Alter.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Alter, Joseph S.

Series:

Contemporary ethnography.

Contemporary ethnography

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Das, Dil, -1986.

Das, Dil.

Culture conflict--India--Garhwāl.

Culture conflict.

Ethnology--India--Garhwāl.

Ethnology.

Friendship--India--Garhwāl.

Friendship.

Hunters--India--Garhwāl--Biography.

Hunters.

Garhwāl (India)--Biography.

Garhwāl (India).

Physical Description:

1 online resource (212 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, c2000.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Preface

Part I. Bal Kand / The Book of Childhood

Chapter 1. Dil Das-Enslaved Heart

Chapter 2. Woodstock School: Protestants, Peasants, and Ethics

Chapter 3. A Tiger's Tale

Part II. Aranya Kand / The Forest Book

Chapter 4. Coapman's Fall

Chapter 5. Hearts of Darkness

Chapter 6. Land Masters: Purebred History

Part III. Shram Kand / The Book of Labor

Chapter 7. Dairying: An Untold Story

Chapter 8. Slippage: Out of Work, Through Hunting

Chapter 9. The Terms of Friendship

Part IV. Uttarkhand / Himalaya

Chapter 10. The Heart of the Matter

Chapter 11. A Hybrid History of Encounter

Glossary

Notes

Acknowledgments

Index

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references (p. [185]-186) and index.

Other Format:

Print version: Alter, Joseph S. Knowing Dil Das

ISBN:

1-283-89736-9

0-8122-0475-1

OCLC:

794926019