Party Time

“It has been a pleasure working on this book—no taking notes or visiting libraries at 9 am. Instead,I hung out with baul singers till late in the night. It didn’t feel like real work. My last two books—The White Mughal and The Last Mughal—involved lots of hard work,” says the author,who launched his latest work in Mumbai on a wind-swept evening at Taj Land’s End yesterday.

As he narrated the tales of extraordinary people leading ordinary lives in remote corners of India,the audience listened in rapt attention. When he took a break,Susheela Raman’s animated rendition of Tamil hymns filled the air. The author’s year-long book promotion tour has artists like Paban Das Baul,Raman accompanying him. “If a book can be a party,then why not?” he says. Nine Lives strings together tales of a Buddhist monk atoning for violence by hand-printing prayer flags; a Jain nun testing her powers of detachment; the life of a jail warden who turns temple dancer for two months in a year; and a woman in Kolkata who quits her job to find fulfillment as a tantric.

The idea for this book was born 16 years ago,when Dalrymple was “corkscrewing” his way up from the banks of the river Bhagirathi. “I always wanted to write about the religion in India. But Nine Lives is not about any ‘ism’,it’s more about the characters—a devadasi or a tantrik or a theyyam dancer,” he says. Since it was their stories,the author thought putting himself in the picture was “quite pointless”. Known for his thorough research,the 44-year-old consciously tried to keep the book slim and the language neat and simple. “I wanted to achieve clarity with this book,” says the Scottish author who now lives in Delhi. This seems to have worked. In India alone,the book has sold nearly 35,000 copies.

Driven by the pleasure of working on such a project as well as its success,Dalrymple seems eager to work on a sequel of Nine Lives even though he has a few other subjects in mind. “The subject of the sequel could be different. Next time,it could be either festivals or pilgrimages,” he says. That means the next book of his Mughal quartet on Aurangzeb will take around five years to be ready.