William Dalrymple read from Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India at Taj Malabar on Nov 23, 2009

William Dalrymple came to Kochi to read from his most recent book, a selection of personal stories about people engaged in religious pursuit. He called his book a random sampling of traditional forms of religion. Together they form a portrait of an India in transition, of certain traditional forms surviving and even thriving, even as the Silicon Valleys and Cyberabads go up in the urban centres.

Dalrymple spoke about the making of his book before reading four passages

Dalrymple (using translators) engaged in conversation with people over a period of several years from East to West and North to South in India. These people followed a path leading out of their previous ordinary lives, into an extraordinary and extended search. Some like the devotees of Yellamma assume the mantle of a goddess worshipped by believers. Some, like the Thiyyam dancers become the possessed and frenzied indwelling of gods for three months of their life during the festival time. Still others like the Jain nuns endure the ascetic life of monasteries and extended pilgrimages, detaching themselves from pleasures so as to realise the permanent and the indestructible in their souls.

In his travels Dalrymple said he had the most fun with the Bauls of Bengal; but the most affecting episode for him was the tale of the Jain nun who attains to Sallekhana, the final one among all Jain renunciations, that of the body.

Dalrymple takes questions after his readings from 'Nine Lives'

Dalrymple answered questions about the method he used, and how he selected the people to interview. He also responded to those who cast doubt on the value of religion.

Dalrymple read with the intense, yet intimate, feeling of a conversation, much as if we were in the presence of the very people he had lived with and interviewed. He is almost absent from the stories of the nine lives he describes, and lets the engrossing accounts of their lives be told in their own words. Many quotations from the four readings were unforgettably aphoristic in nature.

KumKum has her copy of 'Nine Lives' autographed by Dalrymple

Dalrymple happily signed books for the legion of booklovers when they converged at the end. DC Books arranged for his books to be on sale at a counter; Penguin India organised the snacks and cocktail hour which followed.

A fuller account is here.

Reading Madame Bovary on Oct 30, 2009

Timeless Madame Bovary, deathless Emma, provoked such passionate debate among seven literature lovers in Kochi that Flaubert must have rejoiced from wherever he is. On the central question of the author's attitude to the heroine, no answer will come from the grave. Readers have to work it out for themselves.

Joe, Thommo, Bobby, Indira, Talitha, KumKum, and Amita

Many questions thrown up by the novel were discussed: provincial mores, anti-clericalism, mil-dil relations, romanticism, realism, precision in description, idiotic constancy in love, the arts of seduction, shopaholism, censorship, rebellion, splicing of scenes, reading books, and so on. The debates will continue, but the enjoyment of the writing has not ceased in a hundred and fifty years.

The translation by Eleanor Marx-Aveling (the daughter of Karl Marx) was used by all the readers, except Indira, who favoured Margaret Mauldon's translation. It is inordinately difficult to translate Flaubert's novel, if we consider the prodigious effort he spent to get the language exactly right in the original French. Nabokov offered a thousand emendations to the publisher, when he taught the novel in his course on European literature at Cornell in the fifties.

The next reading will be on Tuesday Nov 24, 2009 at the customary venue and time, 5-30pm, DC Books, Chittoor Road. The entire play, The Importance of Being Earnest, by Oscar Wilde will be read by KRG readers; the casting was decided at this session.

Here is the full account and record of the session on Oct 30, 2009.