Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India - Tapa blanda

Praise for White Mughals: 'No brief review can do justice to its manifold excellence This is quite simply a stunning achievement' - Frank McLynn, Independent on Sunday 'William Dalrymple is that rarity: a scholar of history who can really write' - Salman Rushdie 'A gorgeous, spellbinding and important book A tapestry of magnificent set pieces and a moving romance' - Miranda Seymour, Sunday Times 'The most perceptive and sympathetic observer of the Asian scene writing today' - Charles Allen, Literary Review

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 fulfillment 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. A distillation of twenty-five years of exploring India and writing about its religious traditions, "Nine Lives" is a modern Indian Canterbury Tales.