William Dalrymple’s previous book, The Last Mughal, stirred a hornet’s nest. It was Indian historians versus him. At one point, an angry exchange ensued in newspapers and magazines, as Dalrymple’s quotes were taken to suggest that Indian historians were not writing “popular” history (read accessible to those who do not have a bachelor’s in arts in the subject). Dalrymple’s scholarship was enthusiastically welcomed and praised as well as put down and harshly critiqued, and mistakes were pointed out — all in all, the book and the things around it meant an energetic debate about the existence and role of the public intellectual/historian in India. Now, in case sleeves are being rolled up in India’s history departments for his latest book, Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India, they can rest and stay calm. Nine Lives is a search engine with a difference and poses no such burning questions.

There are Jain nuns, Tibetan Buddhists who have made Dharamsala their home, Baul singers from Bengal and a Tantric who lives off cremation grounds and looks for skulls to drink out of even as she fights “anti-superstition” cells that are out to get her and other Tantrics. Most of the stories are very detailed and, as the author promises in the introduction, they are a break from the older narrative where the author dominates the plot. Here, the nine lives and the circumstances under which they opt for a road dedicated to the Supreme Being take centrestage. There is graphic recounting of personal horrors and tragedies and each story is often reflective of other ills that plague the India story — the trauma of prostitution and AIDS through the lives of Devadasis; the Chinese repression of Tibet through the eyes of a Buddhist monk; and even the sadness at the age of the oral tradition passing on in the story of the “singer of the epics” in Rajasthan. Among the better lives focused upon by the author is the dancer of Kannur. The life of a Dalit who performs Theyyam conveys not only the ongoing caste repression (and the fightback), but also the more current political horrors, like the bitter and bloody feuds between the RSS and the Left in the district in north Kerala.

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