Nine Lives Read Free Page A

decided to write Nine Lives in a quite different form. Twenty years ago, when my first book, In Xanadu , was published at the height of the eighties, travel writing tended to highlight the narrator: his adventures were the subject; the people he met were sometimes reduced to objects in the background. With Nine Lives I have tried to invert this, and keep the narrator firmly in the shadows, so bringing the lives of the people I have met to the fore and placing their stories firmly centre stage. In some cases, to protect their identities, I have changed the names and muddied the details of some of my characters, at their own request.
    As each of these characters live in the self-contained moral universes of their own religious and ethical systems,  I have tried not to judge, and though my choices and arrangement no doubt reveal something of my views and preferences, I have tried to show rather than tell, and to let the characters speak for themselves. This may leave the book less analytical than some would wish, but by rooting many of the stories in the darker sides of modern Indian life, with each of the characters telling his or her own story, and with only the frame created by the narrator, I have made a conscious effort to try avoid imposing myself on the stories told by my nine characters, and so hope to have escaped many of the clichés about ‘Mystic India’ that blight so much Western writing on Indian religion. For this is not the story of my religious journey, but of that of the nine subjects of this book. And though some of the stories deal with those on the wilder and more exotic fringes of Indian religious life, I have always attempted to humanise rather than exoticise those I have encountered.
          Nine Lives is conceived as a collection of linked non-fiction short stories, with each life representing a different form of devotion, or a different religious path. Each life is intended to act as a keyhole into the way that each specific religious vocation has been caught and transformed in the vortex of India’s metamorphosis during this rapid period of transition, while revealing the extraordinary persistence of faith and ritual in a fast-changing landscape.
      It is, of course, a personal and entirely subjective selection: these are simply the stories of nine people from nine traditions that happen to interest or appeal to me. The book makes no claims to be comprehensive, and there are many traditions which I have completely left out: there are, for example, no Sikhs, Christians, Parsis or Jews in this book, though all have long histories in the soil of South Asia.
        Nor do I deal at any length with the politics or economics of modern Indian religious life, or the mobilization of religion by elements within the Indian state and its political parties.  Although as a young foreign correspondent newly arrived in India in the late eighties I covered in detail the rise of Hindu fundamentalism in India, and reported from the ground on LK Advani’s Rath Yatra, the destruction of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya and the massacres of thousands of Muslims in Gujarat, these are not subjects I discuss here. Equally, I do not investigate the world of gurus and ashrams and TV Godmen, though these are all fascinating subjects, as is the whole story of the slow erosion of Nehruvian secularism in the face of massive revival of middle class religiosity: to give just one very telling statistic, over fifty percent of package tours organized in modern India are to pilgrimage destinations.
         Instead Nine Lives focuses beyond the political sphere and behind the headlines, on the diverse traditional religious systems of South Asia, and particularly the deeply embedded heterodox, syncretic and pluralist religious and philosophical folk traditions which continue to defy the artificial boundaries of modern political identities. It is these which are being eroded as Hinduism’s disparate, overlapping multiplicity of