Nine Lives by William Dalrymple

Summary of Nine Lives

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 middle-class family in Calcutta, and her job in a jute factory, only to find unexpected love and fulfilment living as a Tantric skull feeder in a remote cremation ground. A prison warden from Kerala becomes, for two months of the year, a temple dancer and is worshipped as a deity; then, at the end of February each year, he returns to prison.

An illiterate goat herd from Rajasthan keeps alive an ancient 4,000-line 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 now regards as a sacred calling. Nine people, nine lives. Each one taking a different religious path, each one an unforgettable story. Exquisite and mesmerising, and told with an almost biblical simplicity, William Dalrymple's first travel book in over a decade explores how traditional forms of religious life in South Asia have been transformed in the region's rapid change.

Indiaplaza review

Dalrymple is back with a travelogue after a long time and he has not lost any of his ability to spin an extremely interesting yarn on what most of us consider mundane stuff - be it the life of a Jain sadhu or a story of a tattered quilt donned 'Baul' – the wandering minstrels singing his melancholic tunes. We have met them all – on railway platforms, in buses, on 'yatras' and at temples and 'darghas' and have simply chosen to view them as a part of the landscape.

As in his earlier books, Dalrymple manages to bring out the stories of such people in a very poignant and entertaining manner as he travels all over the country. 'Nine Lives' is a tale of nine people who are carrying on their lives in the path of traditions that are many centuries old despite the onset of a wave of 'modernistic' living and thinking.

The book has a colourful mix of characters - a woman who drinks from the skull of dead people whose children are successful professionals in the US, an 'untouchable' on who's being God is invoked onto every year, an idol maker who is the direct descendant of the Chola temple architects and the very interesting 'Red Fairy', a sufi singer who bravely faces the oncoming of Mujahadeens bent on destroying the sufi 'darghas' considered anti-Islamic.

Though such comments are normally reserved for a racy thriller, The Nine Lives is certainly 'unputdownable'.

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