William Dalrymple will be launching his new book, Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India, at the Asia Society in New York City on June 18-19. Fifteen performers from India and Pakistan will bring his book to life in a concert / reading.
Performers will include:
The Bauls of Bengal, a group of itinerant mystic minstrels whose beliefs draw on Vaishnavite Hindu and Sufi Muslim thought.
The Shah Jo Raag Fakirs who sing at the shrine of Sufi saint Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai in Sindh, Pakistan.
Susheela Raman offers insight into the Thevaram hymns of Tamil Nadu.
Chandu Pannicker Theyyam Dance Group with a spectacular ritual Theyyam dance from Kerala.
Tickets can be purchased here.
Residents of DC, no need to feel left out! A smaller version of this performance will be staged at the Smithsonian’s Freer Gallery on June 16.
About Nine Lives: From the author of The Last Mughal (“A compulsively readable masterpiece” —The New York Review of Books), an exquisite, mesmerizing book that illuminates the remarkable ways in which traditional forms of religious life in India have been transformed in the vortex of the region’s rapid change—a book that distills the author’s twenty-five years of travel in India, taking us deep into ways of life that we might otherwise never have known exist.
“It is the singular achievement of Dalrymple, in his strikingly chaste and selfless book, to give us the lives and voices of some regular Indian and Pakistani worshippers without judgment, speculation or high-flown abstraction.” —Pico Iyer, Time