Introduction to Dilmaya's World

Dilmaya’s World

Alan Macfarlane

My “sister” Dilmaya has been dead for nearly twenty years.

She died suddenly, at the age of forty-two, on 7th April 1995. We heard of her death two days later in England. I wrote in our diary.

Sunday 9th April 1995. [Alan]

The second half of the day suddenly turned very grey when Judy Pettigrew rang from Nepal to say that Dilmaya died two days ago. We were both devastated. Realized she was Nepal – the heart of warmth, grace and kindness. Not just a sister, friend, adviser, tower of strength, loving mother, dancing partner, cook, companion, but so much more. Words cannot convey how close we had come, both of us, to her. Our grief, though, nothing to that of Surje, Premumari and others; suffering. Numb. Unable to weep – though Sarah did so. Many memories, films, experiences of sadness & gladness flashed past our eyes – and all gone. With all the people in the world to choose from – why Dilmaya! Suddenly the world trained of part of its meaning. And our little family in Nepal suddenly much more vulnerable with no epicentre. Everything here suddenly an effort & pointless. Found it hard to concentrate & even my book, which I’ve been reading through, no consolation. Oh, Dilmaya, we miss you – dreadfully.

Monday 10th April [Sarah]

In the background for both of us all day was the aching sadness – the loss of someone very dear to us, & the shock of unfairness that she of all people should die. …

*

How is it that across the vast abyss of space and cultures, between peoples of such different backgrounds, I should feel this?

Dilmaya was a woman – I am a man. I was ten years older. I am hyper-educated, with four degrees including two doctorates, while Dilmaya could not write and hardly attended school. Dilmaya spoke no English.

Dilmaya had never been beyond the local town of Pokhara, and even within Pokhara had not ventured far. She had hardly any knowledge of a wider world and little of politics, while both were part of my life.

Dilmaya had worked enormously hard for almost all of her life in the grinding toil of hill agriculture. I had worked almost entirely with my mind.

Dilmaya had frequently been ill, when I have usually been well. She had lost her mother when she was eight and been rejected by her stepmother and hence had been brought up in an uncle’s house. My parents had not seen much of me after I had been sent home at the age of five from Assam, but they had both lived.

Dilmaya could not drive, work a computer or camera, swim, shoot or use a telephone, all of which were things I had learnt and some of which I spent a lot of time using.

Dilmaya had been desperately poor from her early marriage through to the time when we started to share our lives when she was about 35. I have mostly been well off and not often worried about money.

Dilmaya’s house started as very small and never reached beyond a simple two-room, smoke-filled village home with no running water or electricity. I had always lived surrounded by comfortable furniture, electricity and running water. The only time I had known anything of the deprivation and harshness of her home was at my early boarding schools.

Dilmaya lived in a world of ancestor beliefs, forest spirits, godlings, witches, ghosts and a landscape infused with magical power. I had been brought up in evangelical monotheistic Christianity, with an increasingly distant God. Any residual magic from my childhood receded in my late teens.

My ideas had often come to me through television, films, newspapers and books and I had been trained from eight onwards to analyse, weigh, judge, separate facts and fiction. Dilmaya’s ideas had come entirely through the spoken and sung word, and with no formal training in logic, rhetoric, argument, writing, mathematics, and language.

I had a large library; Dilmaya had no books at all in the house, except those of her children. I went round with the philosophers and poetry and literature of the west ringing in my head and a rough map of human history and geography. Dilmaya had none of this, though she knew the wisdom needed to coax a living from the hard mountain environment and to placate the spirits.

I had many clothes, as much food as I needed, a cupboard of drink and another of medicine. Dilmaya had few, and often worn, clothes, often little food and no medicines.

I had never gone through the shock of pregnancy and childbirth as Dilmaya had done, four times. I had not had a laparoscopy and walked up the high mountain the same day. I had not been eaten alive by leeches, or stung by the lethal mountain nettles. I had not, unlike Dilmaya, suffered from the constant cuts and thorns on normally bare feet, cracked with hard work.

I had not learnt to carry my own body weight of wood or grain or manure up and down thousands of feet of steep mountain along rocky tracks. I had not steadied and milked large animals or been constantly soaked by monsoon rain. Nor had I carried a small child on my back as I bent over for hours weeding or planting rice.

I had not grasped and cut the hard mountain grasses or grains, or hauled wood from the steep hillsides. On the other hand, Dilmaya had not had her nose broken in rough sports, and never played team games or acted in plays or sung in choirs, or been on a train or plane journey.

I had never scooped up animal manure with my bare hands or pounded rice at three in the morning for several hours each day or ground millet in a stiff quern. I had never watched a year’s work on my fields swept away by a few minutes of hail or a landslide.

I had never, until I went to the village, seen dead human bodies or smelt human flesh burning on a funeral pyre. I had never lived for more than a day or in a world without toilets or toilet papers, where there was no central heating and no window glass to keep out the cold Himalayan winds.

* * *

Short of finding the very remotest of simple hunter-gatherers in an Australian or African desert, it is difficult to think how our worlds could have been further apart – mentally, morally, spiritually, economically, politically, educationally, or in terms of clan, gender, wealth, history or culture. Everything seemed to be at opposite poles.

Yet this is the story of a sister and brother, which is what we became. And it is the story of how we grew together and seemed to leap across those huge ravines to stand together in love and friendship. I came to love her in the wider sense as closely as my dearest family. I came to admire her life and character, her mind and spirit, more than I admired than that of almost all those I have known from far more privileged backgrounds.

What I found, as I have found in other ways with cross-cultural friendships, as well as with certain children, especially my beloved children and grandchildren, is that the anthropological belief that humans are linked by some psychic unity seems true.

Cultures or politics may make us strangers and even enemies. We manufacture differences in order to exploit, oppress and even kill. Yet if we open ourselves to the other and take care to meet and sympathize, then we discover that all the things I have listed – the wealth, health, life experiences and so much else are just on the surface, small waves on a deep ocean.

Within that ocean there is so much in common, humour and a sense of the bizarre and ridiculous, rhythm and the joy of music and sounds, delight in children and in other beauty that suddenly shines out of daily life. There is a shared logic and ability to argue, classify, differentiate, weigh and assess, to discriminate and judge which is not dependent on formal education.

Natural intelligence and indeed wisdom, a sense of fairness, organizing ability, intuition and sensitivity to the feelings of others, all of which Dilmaya had in great measure, have nothing to do with going to school, with travel, with worldly experience or with wealth. Dilmaya was clearly as intelligent, thoughtful and rational in every way as many of my distinguished colleagues at Cambridge University.

* * *

What I am groping towards saying is not only that I liked, even loved, Dilmaya very much. Not only that I deeply respected and admired her extraordinary ability to use her body and the simplest of tools to wrest a living and to provide for and nurture her growing family of four children and a gentle, subdued, husband. But also that I found in the give and take of everyday life, the jokes, the zest, the curiosity, the exchange of information and the desire to share and explore the world together, a basis for a sustained and growing friendship.

Dilmaya was very good companion, a person whom Sarah and I enjoyed spending hundreds of hours with through long days and evenings as she cooked us rice and uncomplainingly added responsibilities for an extra pair of people to the load of her other five close family members.

Sarah my wife not only tolerated our intimate and close relationship but also loved Dilmaya with a slightly different but equal strength as one strong woman respects and loves another in whom she recognizes so much of merit.

Sarah and I deeply trusted Dilmaya. We learnt this trust over the years not only because in all the cross-currents of intimate village life Dilmaya never betrayed us, criticized us or hurt us in any way. She was never angry or exasperated with our mistakes and blunders (that we noticed), she did not use or manipulate our relationship for her or her family’s purposes, though there must have been great temptations to do so. She trusted us to come back, she did not put pressure on us to give, and she protected us against the importunities of others.

* * *

In the many hours of film which I took of her, she comes back to life and many of Dilmaya’s virtues as I appreciated them come out in her role as the subject (or object) of my filmmaking. She is clearly good-looking, perhaps not strikingly beautiful but certainly with a handsome face and a graceful and well-shaped body which moves precisely and rhythmically in work or dance. Her demeanour is full of poise, self-confidence, but never over-bearing or arrogant.

She had just the right sense of self and self-possession without any desire to be the centre of things, neither shrinking nor thrusting. She was very patient, and if things had to be repeated, or she had to make extra efforts for the camera, she never complained or showed that she was stressed or exasperated.

Dilmaya very quickly lost any sense of shyness or embarrassment. She did not act up to or over-act. She was not self-conscious or camera shy. She never asked me not to film something because she felt that it was intrusive or time-wasting, though there must have been occasions when she thought both of these things. She did not show off in front of others, boast or use the filming to elevate her status. Nor did she ever give in to what pressure there must have been through gossip and envy to dampen down the filming.

Dilmaya acted perfectly naturally, explained things clearly to the camera, and was aware of the needs of angle, light and distance in an intuitive way. She basically treated the camera and me as she did her own children. She expanded our worlds and guided us towards a deeper understanding in our growing lives.

Dilmaya alerted me to what needed filming and made sure that I was well placed to film. She smoothed away obstacles, whether fierce dogs, timid or wary subjects, and all this in a dignified and humorous way which established to those around that she approved of what I was doing and valued it, and they should do the same.

* * *

Out of the relatively high gender status of a hill woman, even if from a poorer background; out of the equal gender relations of this society where there are few traces of honour and shame; out of the brother-sister relationship; out of the chemistry of two people who liked each other, I was let into her life, not just the surface, but whatever I wanted to explore.

She trusted me with the intimacies of female life, which in many parts of the world would have been taboo between a woman and an unrelated male member of the society, or even a relative, let alone a stranger. And she described everything in simplified Gurung so that I could understand; intuitively understood questions and expanded them so that they became more interesting.

Dilmaya also generously shared her friends and particularly her children, above all her growing daughter Premkumari, with us. It takes trust to let an unrelated adult male from another culture become very close physically and emotionally to your one and only and most beloved little daughter between the ages of two and twelve, filming, cuddling, playing games, gaining their love and affection and explaining carefully to them what had happened when, every year, we would suddenly disappear for many months.

Through the trust and love of the mother encompassing these feelings in the little child I was able to set up a second rich filming relationship with an equally different and alien-seeming film subject, a young girl growing from infancy to puberty in a remote Himalayan village. So Dilmaya allowed this, as well as encouraging our love for her sons and husband.

All this was achieved while she looked after us physically and stretched her mind and body to the limits in the gruelling efforts of agriculture, which strained every muscle and sent her exhausted to bed night after night. She lived on a low-calorie and vitamin diet and was sometimes unwell and worried about the future of herself and her children. Yet she did not let this dampen her warmth to us.

The real sign of a combination of love and sensitivity, which I have noted to this degree in only a few others, was her ability to anticipate our needs. She did this for us, not only as people living in a strange world whose customs and etiquette we only dimly grasped, but in relation to the film-making, whose purposes she only roughly understood and whose technical details and needs she had little training to grasp.

* * *

So against the apparently superhuman odds, against all the fashionable theories which suggest that only women can study and film women, against the views that cultures are mutually incomprehensible, or that all we study is a projection of ourselves and that the ‘other’ is unknowable, we came to understand each other. Against the view that the colonial arrogance of power stands between the observer and the observed, that linguistic barriers are too great, that we cannot understand an experience which we have not shared, that different mental worlds cannot be mediated, against all these and many other apparently insuperable obstacles, we became close. So I learnt to believe that all these perfectly logical, philosophically irrefutable and downright obvious arguments were wrong.

Dilmaya showed that we can understand up to the limit of our language skills, feel, share and communicate across worlds, that we can enrich each other’s lives. She showed to me that we are all human animals, all filled with potential, with wonder and with as much subtlety, energy and intelligence as each other.