Book description
Three brothers from a remote village in the Himalayas are driven by
poverty to become monks. One becomes a famous masked dancer; the second
an accomplished player of the Tibetan temple trumpet; and the third a
great Buddhist scholar. A Jain nun tests her powers of detachment as she
watches her best friend ritually starve herself to death. A woman leaves
her middle class family in Calcutta and her job in a jute factory, only
to find unexpected love and fulfillment living as a tantric in a
skull-filled hut in remote a cremation ground. A prison warder from
Kerala becomes for two months of the year a temple dancer and is
worshipped as an incarnate deity; then, at the end of February each
year, he returns to prison. An idol maker, the thirty-fifth of a long
line of sculptors going back to the legendary Chola bronze makers,
regards creating Gods as one of the holiest callings in India, but has
to reconcile himself to his son who only wants to study computer
engineering. An illiterate goat herd from Rajasthan keeps alive an
ancient 200,000-stanza sacred epic that he, virtually alone, still knows
by heart. A devadasi - or temple prostitute - initially resists her own
initiation into sex work, yet pushes both her daughters into a trade she
regards as a sacred calling.
Nine people, nine lives. Each one taking a different religious path,
each one an unforgettable story. Exquisite and mesmerizing, and told
with an almost biblical simplicity, William Dalrymple's first travel
book in a decade explores how traditional forms of religious life in
South Asia have been transformed in the vortex of the region's rapid
change. Nine Lives
is a distillation of twenty-five years of exploring India and writing
about its religious traditions, taking you deep into worlds that you
would never have imagined even existed.
William Dalrymple was born in Scotland and brought up on the
shores of the Firth of Forth. He wrote the highly acclaimed
bestseller In Xanadu when he was twenty-two. White
Mughals won the Wolfson Prize for History 2003 and the
Scottish Book of the Year Prize. A stage version by Christopher
Hampton has been co-commissioned by the National Theatre and the
Tamasha Theatre Company.
William Dalrymple is a Fellow of the Royal Society of
Literature and of the Royal Asiatic Society. His Radio 4 series on
the history of British spirituality and mysticism, The Long
Search, won the 2002 Sandford St Martin Prize for Religious
Broadcasting.
He is married to the artist Olivia Fraser, and they have three
children. They divide their time between London, Scotland and Delhi.
