Knowing Dil Das: Stories of a Himalayan Hunter

Contemporary Ethnography

by Joseph S. Alter

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.

216 pages, Paperback

First published October 7, 1999

Reviews

[Vicky · Rating 4 out of 5]

Penny’s professor is the author and the setting is the part of India where she did study abroad. The authors’s description of the personal conflict he felt about telling the story of Dil Das was so interesting. It made me think of my work as a volunteer and mentor. Is it ever “right” to tell someone else’s stories? My answer is that it’s not always about what’s right but what is necessary in the quest for understanding and compassion. What the author did for his friend Dil Das benefits us all.

[Crispin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jointly-biographical/ethnographic/anthropological on the subject of growing up, living, at the junction of, the gaps between, problematically related cultures. Illuminating.

[Hank · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fun read for someone with a Woodstock School background who knows some of the people Dil Das tells stories about (i.e., Doug Pickett and his leopard shoot). Sometimes a tough slog through the anthropological language the narrative bogs down in.

[Laurel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic book!