Nine Lives

From the prize-winning author of White Mughals and City of Djinns, Nine Lives is a distillation of twenty-five years of exploring India and writing about its religious traditions – a modern Indian Canterbury Tales which introduces us to characters and takes us deep into worlds we could never have imagined existed.

A Buddhist monk takes up arms to resist the Chinese invasion of Tibet – then spends years 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 in a skull-filled hut in a remote cremation ground. A prison warden 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 illiterate goat herd from Rajasthan keeps alive an ancient 4000-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 a decade explores how traditional forms of religious life in South Asia have been transformed in the vortex of the region’s rapid change.

Born on March 20th, 1965, William Dalrymple grew up on the shores of Firth of Forth. He made an early mark on the literary scene with his first book In Xanadu. which he wrote when he was all of twenty two. The book won him several awards.

Dalrymple moved to New Delhi to research his next book City of Djinns and there was no looking back. His books reflect a keen interest in India, Pakistan, the Middle East, Mughal rule, the Muslim world and early Eastern Christianity. He is known for both his travel and history writing and all his books have won him awards.

William Dalrymple is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of the Royal Asiatic Society, and is the founder and co-director of the annual Jaipur Literature Festival. Apart from writing books, Dalrymple is also a broadcaster and  a frequent contributor of articles to magazines.

Bibliography:
In Xanadu
City of Djinns
From the Holy Mountain
The Age of Kali
Sufi Soul, The Mystic Music of Islam
Begums, Thugs & White Mughals
White Mughals
The Last Mughal
Nine Lives

http://www.williamdalrymple.uk.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Dalrymple_%28historian%29