Age of kali , livre ebook

WILLIAM DALRYMPLE

The Age of Kali
Indian Travels and Encounters

PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
About author
Praise for the Book
Dedication
Introduction
Map
1 The North
The Age of Kali
In the Kingdom of Avadh
The City of Widows
Warrior Queen: The Rajmata of Gwalior
East of Eton
2 In Rajasthan
The Sad Tale of Bahveri Devi
Caste Wars
Sati Mata
3 The New India
Two Bombay Portraits
Finger-Lickin Bad: Bangalore and the Fast-Food Invaders
4 The South
At the Court of the Fish-Eyed Goddess
Under the Char Minar
Parashakti
5 On The Indian Ocean
At Donna Georgina s
Up the Tiger Path
The Sorcerer s Grave
6 Pakistan
Imran Khan: Out for a Duck
On the Frontier
Blood on the Tracks
Benazir Bhutto: Mills & Boon in Karachi
Glossary
Copyright
PENGUIN BOOKS
THE AGE OF KALI
William Dalrymple was born in Scotland. His first book, In Xanadu , written when he was twenty-two, was shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize. In 1989 he moved to Delhi where he lived for six years researching his second book, City of Djinns , which won the 1994 Thomas Cook Travel Book Award and the Sunday Times Young British Writer of the Year Award. He then went on to write From the Holy Mountain (1997) and The Age of Kali (1998).
William Dalrymple is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Asiatic Society. He wrote and presented the television series Stories of the Raj and Indian Journeys , which won the Grierson Award for Best Documentary Series at BAFTA in 2002. He is married to artist Olivia Fraser, and they have three children. They now divide their time between London and Delhi.
White Mughals won the Wolfson Prize for History 2003 and the Scottish Book of the Year Prize, and was shortlisted for the PEN History Award.
Praise for the book
Dalrymple is amazingly gifted Not content with analysis, he is mad enough to interview many of the armed and dangerous people who are hell bent on leading India into the Age of Kali, the era of destruction and darkness. The result is reportage of the highest order Brilliant and persuasively frightening.
-Harry Ritchie, Mail on Sunday
The most admired young travel writer in Britain today is the industrious and preternaturally talented William Dalrymple, without whose presence all prize-lists seem grotesquely naked. With The Age of Kali he has pulled it off again Witty and eagle-eyed, Dalrymple is, above everything, a fine observer and reporter.
-Michael Thompson-Noel, Financial Times Books of the Year
Fascinating Dalrymple hasn t just swanned around South Asia visiting architectural ruins and interviewing relics of the Raj. He has also gone to places that few, if any, tourists will ever see, sometimes at considerable personal risk. Here he reprises some brilliant reportage from these unorthodox journeys and includes a series of penetrating profiles [He] is an acute observer, but just as importantly he is a prism: he transmits, refracts India. He assembles an amazing cast of characters and coaxes them to tell their own stories. Although all his pieces are, in his words, the product of personal experience and direct observation , he refuses to allow his shadow to obscure them The Age of Kali is far from uncritical, but as Dalrymple says it is a work of love . Again and again he summons perfectly modulated prose-comic, tragic, ironic by turns-to evoke his passion. He knows Indian history and culture too well to share the sentimental nostalgia or bleak cynicism of some expatriate Indian writers.
-Katherine Frank, Literary Review
William Dalrymple s meteoric ascent into literary heaven is perhaps unequalled among the thirty-something authors who are his contemporaries this book collects nineteen essays on places and people on or near the subcontinent. Dalrymple supplies exactly what his readers expect of him, plus a little bit extra for the sake of building on good will:all the usual charm and erudition are engaged this is a worthy addition to his output. [He] has superseded Mark Tully as the voice of India He may well be the greatest travel writer of his generation.
-Robert Twigger, Spectator
Racy and sometimes very funny explorations of life in the subcontinent Dalrymple s breadth of knowledge and his skill in sketching character in a few lines of dialogue are as impressive as his skill in obtaining access to political and other dignitaries. No one interested in India could fail to enjoy this book or to learn from it.
-Sir David Goodall, The Tablet
Dalrymple has an admirable knack of inviting confidences wherever he goes, one of the sharpest eyes in the business, and an ear for good writing that makes every page a pleasure.
- Sunday Telegraph
Dalrymple has a bleak vision, yet it is one constantly redeemed by the lightness and grace of his style, by his own humanity and insight, and by the true writer s ability to show rather than merely tell.
-Carl MacDougal, The Herald (Glasgow)
Dalrymple has an extraordinary ability to set a scene and conjure an atmosphere An impressive collection of essays characterized by an investigative vigour and a humane but critical eye.
-Colin Cardwell, Scotland on Sunday
The Age of Kali is a panorama of the Indian subcontinent, poised between chaos, westernization and immemorial tradition It is like Dalrymple s previous books, erudite, engaging and entertaining.
-Martin Gayford, Spectator Books of the Year
The early section doesn t read like a foreign assignment for Vanity Fair so much as a premonition of Armageddon. But once the clean, fresh language has washed prejudice from sceptical minds, Dalrymple appears smiling like Richard Hannay from the Hindu Kush. His description of boldly going where no hack in their right mind would consider is Buchan to the bone In addition to the style of prose what appears most admirable is Dalrymple s Edwardian approach to physical danger, like it doesn t exist. He is such an attractive companion you don t want the journey to end.
-Angus Wolfe Murray, Scotsman
The subcontinent has been William Dalrymple s favourite hunting ground and out of its vastness and complexity he has extracted wonderful stories. The five years he spent in Delhi working on his bestselling City of Djinns was also a productive phase in his journalism. This new offering of his collected pieces gives a chance to discover facets of Dalrymple unknown to fans who have marvelled at his phenomenal descriptive powers and his sense of history [in particular] Dalrymple s account of his visit to the Tamil Tigers is one of the most stunning portrayals of a ruthless and efficient guerilla outfit and its death-daring fighters that any journalist has ever managed to piece together. Through it all Dalrymple maintains an undercurrent of humour.
-Binoo K. John, Outlook
Delightful reading the book carries a special flavour rarely encountered in this class. Dalrymple s conquests on the interview circuit would make even the most senior Indian journalist writhe in envy.
-Debraj Mookerjee, Pioneer
William Dalrymple is fast proving himself as one of the travel writing world s star players There are no descriptions [in The Age of Kali ] of the Taj Mahal by moonlight or the more usual India-inspired musings, but instead a series of weighty essays spanning a ten-year period that inform and illuminate. From Bombay s perfumed salons to lawless Bihar, William Dalrymple again makes sense of a baffling country.
-Susan Kurosawa, Australian
Startling and thought-provoking while Dalrymple s view of India is irrevocably bleak, it is also fascinating, crazy, beautiful, wonderful and compelling. The Age of Kali is the book about India that had to be written and must be read.
- Bulletin
By the time I reached the final two chapters, I had come to two conclusions. The first is that I like Dalrymple s writing regardless of content. The second is that I like the content too I found Dalrymple s book warmly sympathetic, and written with humour, patience and maturity.
-Manjula Padmanabhan, Indian Review of Books
A good travel writer compels you to see your own world more clearly. Unclouded by the immediacy of emotion or political affiliation, he presents the world from a non-partisan but sharply observant eye. William Dalrymple has this kind of vision, beside an empirical knowledge of the subcontinent. He has spent ten years, six of them in Delhi, exploring the area. He is no fly-by-night operator, cashing in on the exotica of the East, catering to a credulous Western audience. The essays in this book are perceptive, non-judgmental and highly entertaining his prose is crisp and the many hours of research lightly worn.
-Manohar Shetty, Deccan Herald
To Jock who saw the point long before I did.
Introduction
T he Age of Kali is a collection of peripatetic essays, a distillation of ten years travel around the Indian subcontinent. For six of those years I was based in Delhi working on my second book, City of Djinns , while for the other four I wandered the region, on a more nomadic basis, for a few months each year. My travels took me from the fortresses of the drug barons of the North-West Frontier to the jungle lairs of the Tamil Tigers; from flashy Bombay drinks parties to murderous Bihari blood feuds; from the decaying palaces of Lucknow to the Keralan exorcist temple of the bloodthirsty goddess Parashakti, She who is Seated on a Throne of Five Corpses. All the pieces are the product of personal experience and direct observation.
The book s title is a reference to the concept in ancient Hindu cosmology that time is divided into four great epochs. Each age (or yug ) is named after one of the four throws, from best to worst, in a traditional Indian game of dice; accordingly, each successive age represents a period of increasing moral and social deterioration. The ancient mythological Golden Age, named after the highest throw of the dice, is known as the Krita Yug , or Age of Perfection.