Seeking seekers

Rarely does a travel writer efface himself so thoroughly as to let other voices speak as William Dalrymple does in Nine Lives. The Scottish writer introduces his narrators briefly, and then proceeds to pop his head in only at rare moments. In this, he diverges from the style of his earlier writings, which he describes as having highlighted himself and his own adventures. In this new work, we are presented with the spiritual (and mundane) biographies of nine seekers of truth from a wide range of religious traditions. Of course, out of the vast and intricate paths to truth that are explored in India, nine individuals represent necessarily a limited range, but Dalrymple has included stories  from across Southasia, from Sindh to Lhasa to Tanjore. His seekers come from places, as he puts it, "suspended between tradition and modernity".

In offering a frame for his stories, Dalrymple wonders whether India offers any sort of real spiritual alternative to materialism. After reading these substantial essays, readers would say that India offers every sort, from the sublime to the strange. In the introduction, for instance, Dalrymple describes a shrine formed around an Enfield Bullet motorbike that had originally been put up as a memorial to the bike's owner, who had died in a crash. Now the shrine attracts pilgrims, especially Rajasthani truck drivers, in search of miracles of fertility. Subsequent chapters contain the narratives of a Jain nun, a Keralite theyyam dancer, a Karnatakan devadasi, a Rajasthani singer of epics, a Sufi mystic, a Tibetan monk who spent his early years as a guerrilla fighter and soldier, an idol-maker from Tanjore in Tamil Nadu, a 'curer of skulls' and a blind Baul singer. Yet, throughout these varied narratives, the bike shrine remains an icon of what it means to search for the sacred in India. To any Indian, Dalrymple's subtitle is rich with ironies: There is little need to search for the sacred in India – we trip over it everywhere we go.