Nine Lives : In Search of the Sacred in Modern India

Author(s): William Dalrymple

Nov/Dec 2009 Highlights

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. First published 2009.

$39.99 NZD


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Product Information

General Fields

  • : 9781408801536
  • : Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
  • : Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
  • : November 2008
  • : February 2013
  • : books

Special Fields

  • : William Dalrymple
  • : Paperback
  • : Airport and export ed
  • : 294.0922
  • : very good
  • : 304
  • : Places & peoples: general interest; Religion & beliefs
  • : B&W Inserts