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From the author of The Last Mughal (A compulsively readable masterpiece The New York Review of Books), an exquisite, mesmerizing book that illuminates the remarkable ways in which traditional forms of religious life in India have been transformed in the vortex of the region’s rapid change a book that distills the author’s twenty five years of travel in India, taking us deep into ways of life that we might otherwise never have known exist.
A Buddhist monk takes up arms to resist the Chinese invasion of Tibet and spends the rest of his life atoning for the violence by hand printing the finest prayer flags in India A Jain nun tests her powers of detachment as she watches her closest friend ritually starve herself to death A woman leaves her middle class life in Calcutta and finds unexpected fulfillment living as a Tantric in an isolated, skull filled cremation ground A prison warder from Kerala is worshipped as an incarnate deity for three months of every year An idol carver, the twenty third in a long line of sculptors, must reconcile himself to his son’s desire to study computer engineering An illiterate goatherd from Rajasthan keeps alive in his memory an ancient four thousand stanza sacred epic A temple prostitute, who initially resisted her own initiation into sex work, pushes both her daughters into a trade she nonetheless regards as a sacred calling.
William Dalrymple chronicles these lives with expansive insight and a spellbinding evocation of circumstance. And while the stories reveal the vigorous resilience of individuals in the face of the relentless onslaught of modernity, they reveal as well the continuity of ancient traditions that endure to this day. A dazzling travelogue of both place and spirit.
