| Author: |
|
William Dalrymple
|
| Title: |
 |
Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India |
| Moochable copies: |
|
No copies available |
| Amazon suggests: |
|
| Topics: |
|
| Published in: |
|
English |
| Binding: |
|
Hardcover |
| Pages: |
|
284 |
| Date: |
|
2009-10-05 |
| ISBN: |
|
1408800616 |
| Publisher: |
|
Bloomsbury |
| Weight: |
|
1.19 pounds |
| Size: |
|
1.14 x 6.3 x 9.53 inches |
| Edition: |
|
1st |
| Wishlists: |
|
|
| Description: |
|
Product Description
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. A distillation of twenty-five years of exploring India and writing about its religious traditions, Nine Lives is a modern Indian Canterbury Tales.
|
| URL: |
|
http://bookmooch.com/1408800616 |
|
|
