by William Dalrymple
This is a fascinating book, in which the author captures nine particularly compelling stories of lives defined by religion in India, generally in unusual or extreme ways. The most intense stories come at the beginning: the Jain nun who ritually starves herself to death while her best friend looks on...
bookshelves: summer-2015, hardback, history, author-love, subcontinent, tbr-busting-2015, one-penny-wonder, paper-read, palate-cleanser, india, nonfiction, published-2009, travel, philosophy, religion, superstitions, mythology, anthropology, nowt-as-queer-as-folk, suicide, lifestyles-deathstyles, d...
This book is absolutely brilliant. Dalrymple takes a socio-cultural and anthological look at some very diverse and non-mainstream forms of religious practice and spiritual pursuit in India. What Dalrymple has done, in a single book, is amazing. If you're interested in learning about how religion mig...
I just finished re-reading this amazing book--here's my original review from 2011: The religions most of us are familiar with have been largely standardized and homogenized, but obviously this wasn’t always so. Like languages before the advent of writing, earlier versions of even the same religion...
I think I have a typical American viewpoint of India - romanticized by folkore and Bollywood with a drop or two of actual knowledge. I was probably hoping this book would give me a little more insight as to how the many changes in our new global society has changed the traditions of an ancient cultu...
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