It is by sheer coincidence that a few months after I join the Royal Bank Of Scotland, I come across the seventh book written by the acclaimed Scottish travel-writer, William Dalrymple on my recent trip to Mumbai. It is titled: Nine Lives. Amazon.com has aptly summarized as follows: "Nine people, nine lives. Each one taking a different religious path, each one an unforgettable story. Exquisite and mesmerizing, 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.
Nine Lives is a distillation of twenty-five years of exploring India and writing about its religious traditions, taking you deep into worlds that you would never have imagined even existed." This book is about the lives of nine Indians, a Buddhist monk, a Jain nun, a lady from a middle-class family in Calcutta, a prison warden from Kerala, an illiterate goat herd from Rajasthan, and a devadasi among others, as seen during his Indian travels. The book explores the lives of nine such people, each of whom represent a different religious path in nine chapters. In an interview, the author expresses his fascination of our religious traditions, and in the book explores how it survives as the nation progresses at the same time. 4"It took me a long time to realise that the key to Hinduism is that it doesn't just offer one approach to God but a variety of different paths," Dalrymple says. "I try to present that in the book.
There are so many different forms of Hindu worship, with different iconographies, mythologies and theologies. 4"At one end of the scale there's the story of the Brahmin idol-maker whose son wants to become a computer engineer rather than follow his father in making these incredibly sensuous statues, which he really does believe become gods when he chisels open their eyes. 4"At the other end is the story of the blind minstrel, a Dalit (Untouchable] who like all Bauls not only rejects the idea of worshipping idols but believes that the only god worth discovering lies within your own heart.
The two men would have absolutely nothing in common. 4Critical response, summarized on a popular web-site: The Observer remarking that it "ranks with the very finest travel writing". On publication it went to the number one slot on the Indian non-fiction section best seller list. Hirsh Sawhney, writing in The Guardian, admires the book's 'awareness of the world's innate cosmopolitanism' and 'remarkably diverse array of characters'. He calls Nine Lives a 'compelling and poignant' work, but believes that Nine Lives does not challenge the partitioning of the world into 'anachronistic, seemingly irreconcilable compartments' like the author's other works. Pico Iyer, in Time Magazine, praises the "powerful restraint and clarity" the book brings to "precisely the two subjects — India and faith — that cause most observers to fly off into cosmic vagueness or spleen. The result is a deeply respectful and sympathetic portrait." The distinguished Sanskritist Wendy Doniger also raved about the book in a cover story for the Times Literary Supplement: "Dalrymple vividly evokes the lives of these men and women, with the sharp eye and good writing that we have come to expect of his extraordinary travel books about India. A glorious mixture of journalism, anthropology, history, and history of religions, written in prose worthy of a good novel, not since Kipling has anyone evoked village India so movingly. Dalrymple can conjure up a lush or parched landscape with a single sentence." It is a very well-written book, which explores how faith can overpower everything in your life. It reads really well, and once you start, you do not want to pit it away.
