Nine Lives

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  • Author: William Dalrymple
  • Publisher: Bloomsbury
  • Catalogue: 187910
  • Size: 13x20cm
Nine lives, nine very different religious paths: A Buddhist monk takes up arms to resist the Chinese invasion of Tibet - then spends the rest of his life trying to atone for the violence by hand printing the best prayer flags in India. A Jain nun tests her powers of detachment as she watches her best friend ritually starve to death. A woman leaves her job and middle-class family in Calcutta to find unexpected love and fulfillment living as a Tantric skull feeder in a remote cremation ground. A prison warden from Kerala becomes, for two months of each year, a temple dancer and is worshipped as a deity. An illiterate goat herd from Rajasthan keeps alive an ancient 4,000-line sacred epic that he still knows by heart. A devadasi - or temple prostitute - initially resists her own path into sex work, yet pushes both her daughters into a trade she now regards as a sacred calling.
‘Nine Lives’, William Dalrymple’s first travel literature in over a decade, explores the transformation of traditional forms of religion in South Asia due to the region’s rapid change in recent times. ‘Nine Lives’ is the distillation of twenty five years of travelling in and writing about India and is being enthusiastically described as a ‘Canterbury Tales’ for modern India.